When I released x2y 1.0 last year there were only two major features it didn’t have that really bothered me. The first was full iPad support, which I managed to add in version 1.2. The second was the ability to customize your Common Aspects list. That is being added today in version 1.4.
Michael Simmons says you should “plan your 2.0 but ship your 1.0.” And that’s pretty much what I did. While the last thing I wanted for x2y was for it to be one of those “my first app” apps, something coddled together by a newbie just as an experiement while learning Objective-C for the first time, the reality is that x2y was my first app. It was put together by someone who was learning Objective-C for the first time. If I wanted to ship it, I needed to make hard decisions and leave out the things I either didn’t yet know how to do or that would be too much work to get done in a reasonable time frame. As long as I went back and added those things I envisioned in later versions, I knew that the app would fulfill its promise of being best in class at what it does. I had no intentions of abandoning my first app at 1.0.
Adding iPad support would have been possible in 1.0, but not the way I wanted to do it. Adding the ability to add, remove, and reorder, the Common Aspects would likewise have been something possible for me to do in 1.0, but I’m glad I waited. Between 1.0 and 1.4, I implemented a lot of back-end changes that made storing that custom list easier and more stable.[1] (Lesson: sometimes a feature, even an important one, is best left out of the app until it can be implemeneted properly.)
At this point, I’m comfortable claiming that I’ve spent more time working on an aspect ratio calculator for iOS than anyone else on earth. And I hope it shows. Along the way, I’ve learned a lot and made myself more valuable to my cohorts at Bombing Brain. I’ve also become a better designer, more sympathetic to the needs of the developers with whom I collaborate. Add to that the customers who have found the app as useful as I do, and I think overall, the project has been a great success.
This is not to say that I’m all finished with x2y, though. There are other things I will certainly add to it. And I think the next update will take a step back and try to optimize some more. But with version 1.4, x2y has finally become the app I originally envisioned. And that makes me very happy, indeed.
- Special thanks to Tim Cochrane, god of code and all around nice guy, who helped me out with understanding how tableview editing works in iOS. He certainly gave me a push in the right direction when I started implementing this feature. ↩
