AKA: How I built an app in two weeks
In early 2016, I up-leveled my interest in iOS app development and completed a Udacity Nanodegree certificate in iOS Development. It was a rigorous but fruitful four-month journey. I recommend the program to all product managers (or future developers) who want to understand modern app development better.
Here, I will tell you how I built the Hungry Baby app. It helps busy parents create easy, nutritious, and varied meal plans for their baby every single week.
This is what it looks like.
Github Repository: https://github.com/qwertyshan/HungryBaby
Now, here are the key resources that I found to be most useful in creating this app. In my own research and creation process, I went down a lot of paths that hit dead ends. In the following list, I am trimming the paths down to the fruitful ones.
Design
Process:
Apple’s WWDC video “Prototyping: Fake It Till You Make It” taught me how to prototype quickly and easily.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2014/223/
Inspiration:
I learned a lot about common design patterns by studying other apps.
Templates:
Keynotopia is fantastic and easy to use! I got the $99 pack and will use it to design all of my future apps.
Icons:
This was the best site for free, high-quality icons. Good icons open up so many design possibilities!
Colors:
I had to learn about colors.
http://www.rocket-design.fr/color-template/
Prototyping:
I created a prototype of my app in Keynote without a single line of code. The results were awesome! All of the screenshots in the following showcase page were made in Keynote. You won’t know it by looking at it.
http://app.shanrao.org/HungryBaby
Build
Backend Processing:
Google’s Firebase is easy and free (for low utilization).
Backend Data:
Valid JSONs can be tricky to create. This site made it easy. Once I had my data in a JSON, I could upload it to Firebase and my backend application was ready!
http://www.jsoneditoronline.org
File Hosting:
I used Firebase to host my static image files.
iOS Libraries:
I learned how to use CocoaPods to install the Firebase plugin. It was tremendously useful (and fairly easy).
https://www.raywenderlich.com/97014/use-cocoapods-with-swift
iOS Coding:
Of course, this was the most time-consuming part: actually writing the code. The following sites helped the most.
- Stack Overflow:
- Stanford – Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift:
- Apple’s WWDC videos:
- iOS Developer Library:
Overall, it took about 80 hours of work (spread over a month) to design and develop the app. It was fun and brought me up to speed with modern mobile design and development techniques.
Purposeful Meander 