Thursday, August 30, 2012

New Project - Bloomin' Bouquets

Hi Everyone - long time, no post. I decided that the next few posts were going to be about the process of creating the next iOS app that I am working on. This one is for someone else. A friend of a friend (of a friend maybe?). One of the ways that she produces income is to do floral work for weddings. She decided that an app that let her work out the design of the bride's wedding bouquet would be useful, not only to her but to others. Hence, the app.

We talked about it for an hour at Tim Horton's a month ago. At that time, I was working on the opera, stage managing for a group doing a production of The Barber of Seville. She had jotted some ideas down on a piece of paper. Always a good place to start! I told her I wouldn't be able to begin to really work on the project until late in the month of August, which brings us to this point.

I recalled once finding, somehow, a prototyping application for the iPhone and iPad. I would like to think that I saved the link or the name or something, but I did not. Yay! My thought had been that I would use the prototyper and save myself some coding work, as this particular one output xCode files. So I searched a bit and came up with Prototyper from justinmind (I wonder if that is someone's name...justin - mind). It is doing the trick for me for this project. I did, eventually, find the other app that I had seen - but it runs only on iPad (or iPhone) and I couldn't see doing all of my work on the iPad. Not at this point at least. Though the exporting code is a pretty cool thing...

My "client" has not been breathing down my neck, which is nice of her. She has, in fact, come up with ideas for other projects. And she is working on creating some of the images for the app. My goal was to have some sort of something for her by the end of the month. Which is tomorrow. Eeek! I have a good start on it, I think. And it is helping me to clarify my thinking about how to implement the application. First of all, we need three separate databases. One for the flowers, one for the dresses and one for the bouquets being built. That was a surprise to me. Also, I eliminated one screen that I thought was needed because it just didn't make any sense any more. Yippee! We shall see what the 'morrow brings!