I have been interested for a long time in mobile app development. After having toyed with a few “hello world” sized applications I was looking for a full sized project. I was however, looking for one that I was able to complete. I wanted to get to a point where I can actually release a minimum viable product.
tl;dr
- Find a problem you care about, ideally a problem you have.
- Identify the minimum you can do to solve this problem.
- Do JUST that and seek feedback. Please grab a copy of WindCast from the Play store and let me know what you think!
Solve a problem you care about
I started to look for a problem or task in my daily life that I could solve. I found myself annoyed when trying to find out what the direction and strength of the wind has been over the past few hours. While there are websites available for this (at least in Australia), they take real time data collected at weather stations around the country and show it in graph or tabular form. These are great from a computer, but the current offerings have some issues:
- Often hard to use on a mobile platform
- Have limited locations available
- Time consuming to browse to the location you care about.
As a surfer it is often a point of interest to find out what the wind is doing, or has been doing over the last few hours at your local break. It would be relevant for some other activities too:
- Surfing
- Kite/Wind Surfing
- Sailing
- Fishing
- Wind power generation? Ok, I might be reaching a bit.
This seemed like a problem I could solve, and there is plenty of room for new features. I came up with WindCast.
Quick! Limit scope!
As soon as I started thinking about this, wonderful thoughts of possible features started flowing in. This is great I thought! After a few weeks of working on WindCast during small pockets of time between work, family, and other hobbies, I realised I needed to narrow the scope if I was ever to release it.
So we want to narrow in on the minimum viable for release. I also didn’t want to lose all the “great ideas” I was having. What if something became absolutely vital to release? In order to track work I won’t do (at least right now) and work I need to do to release the application I set up a Trello board. This allowed me to to prioritise work, and have a clear map of what needed to be done. It is also light weight, and does not require any “process”.
Get it out there, seek feedback
I managed to finish off Windcast and released it to the Google Play store. I initially tried to run an alpha / beta, this has not resulted in much (any?) feedback, perhaps they are happy. I have now released this to the public and hope to gain some more feedback.
Since this was really a learning exercise for me, I have happily released this free of charge and free of ads. Please grab a copy of WindCast from the Play store and let me know what you think.