I know I said a few months back that investing too much time in developing Apple Watch apps might not be the best thing for an indie with limited resources, given that we can’t charge for this extra functionality. However, once I saw what my Bombing Brain teammate Tim had done for our app Teleprompt+ on Apple Watch in just a few days, I figured I’d give it a try with Fin, just to get started. Maybe I’d have something that I could ship by summer, right?…

About six months ago, I started using Fin to time my Chemex coffee brewing in the morning. Not exactly what I had in mind when I made the app, but it actually worked well for that initial 30-seconds of letting the beans “open up” with just a little water before pouring in the rest over the remainder of the 4 minutes.[1] But here’s the thing: I wanted the first warning to go off at exactly 3 minutes, 30 seconds, so that my screen would change color when I…

We all know that old expression: “A Picture is worth a thousand words.” Well, that’s an average, I think. While submitting my 1.2 version of Fin last week, I made a last-minute decision to make a major change to my screenshot strategy. For those who may not know, Apple allows up to five screenshots for each app on the App Store. Officially, these are supposed to be actual screenshots from the app. Just pictures of what is on the screen itself. No extra text, no pictures of the…

When I wrote my ten-part series on making your own app marketing videos, one of the first things I recommended was avoiding live footage. Take shots from the iOS Simulator, place them on top of still frames of iPhones and iPads, and animate them in Final Cut. Super easy to get professional looking results. Live footage is very difficult to get right on a budget. Without professional lighting rigs and a good bit of expertise about how to shoot properly, the results could be devastatingly amateurish. But there are some…

The reception for Fin has been great, and I couldn’t be more pleased that people are out there using it for their talks, podcasts, etc. I have lots of plans for improvements over the coming months, and as always, your feedback has been invaluable in helping me shape those plans. Today I’m announcing version 1.1 of Fin is available. There were two important additions for this version. The first is local notifications. Fin has always had the ability to keep track of its timer, even when you…