My app idea – a place to collect things that inspire, that can be found searching their tags, location, or type. I understand that people can and do use any number of other apps for this – Twitter favourites, for example, this is just supposed to be a purely happy and motivating place on our most intimate device – the phone.
This has probably done elsewhere (I haven’t looked) but fulfils certain requirements that make it (I think) a good first project.
Why This Project
- Tapping into share intent. I like the idea of an app being an expansion pack for other apps – something that is possible on Android, but not so much on iOS. I want to build the kind of app that I could only build on Android.
- Visually minimal, content is king. I care a lot about how things look, but have pretty minimal UX skills myself. Therefore, less UX the better.
Components to Figure Out
- Storage. Inspirations need to be stored (offline experience – do not plan on starting with a server) and searchable by tags (although ideally free text search on associated notes, too).
- Subscribe. This is the initial way in for data, subscribe to the share intent and find ways to extract different kind of content – images, text (snippets, web pages, emails), people, places. Are there other intents that I want to subscribe to? Also need to be able to create something without an intent – just a note to self, or comment in conversation.
- Sync. I’m not initially aiming to have a server and sync across devices (nice add on, though, if this project keeps interesting me), but I don’t want all data to be lost when the user gets a new phone. I think I can use the standard backup for this, but I am not sure – need to investigate.
- Display. Obvious – if the user can’t see it, whatever data is there doesn’t matter. I want users to be able to look for tags, or just a random “I feel low, inspire me!”.