Writing a Throwaway App

I wrote a simple app for the iPhone while I was preparing to deploy called Doing Time. These are some notes and experiences during the process.

Writing a Throwaway App

There is an Excel Workbook called the Deployment Donut that some enterprising Soldier or Marine wrote, both to count the time until he returned home, and so his wife could also count that time. It has evolved into a complex calculator of military benefits as well as a visual reminder of time past and of future anticipation.

I looked for an app that would provide that visual sense of time remaining on my iPhone, and finding none, decided to write just such an app. It turned out to be a relatively simple little tool to write, the most complex bits being a small oddity in the user interface and getting the number of days correct (I still think I have an edge case where I am not getting that calculation correct). In any event, I eventually published the app, originally aiming to have it available the day I deployed. Instead, I pulled it from the review queue at Apple at the last moment to add three lines of code to improve the responsiveness of the app, and it was published just before Valentine’s day. I hope that the timing was appreciated by Chrysta, but I’m not entirely sure that it was.

I did not advertise the app for a couple of weeks–as I write this, I still don’t have internet connectivity for my MacBook–and remain hesitant to advertise it. None-the-less, it was immediately downloaded about 30 times after publication, and received a single review.

A negative one. It hurt.

Now I am testing version 1.1 of the little throw-away app that I expected never to touch again, and planning on a version 2.0 to follow a couple of months after that.

I guess throw away apps need to be perfect the first time, or they just can’t be thrown away.

Doing Time is published by Alexandria Software