Not too long ago I made the decision to switch careers from cross-platform mobile development (React Native) to native iOS development (Swift). I will talk about why in a future post (if I ever get around to writing it).
As I love learning new stuff by building things, one of the things I did to learn Swift and SwiftUI was to build an app.
After joining Practice at the end of 2021, where my colleagues are mostly located in North America, I now have most of my video calls for work when it's dark outside. Due to bad lighting in my office, I made a quick web app to fix this.
I realized this would make for a perfect first app built in Swift, and a few days later of tinkering with SwiftUI (which I absolutely love, btw), Tiny Softbox was born.
It's a very simple app, but it works very well for its purpose. And other than helping with lighting during video calls, the app can also be used for a bunch of other use cases, from photography to reading.
After experimenting with free apps before (Tiny Weather), I decided to make Tiny Softbox a paid app—mostly due to my curiosity for learning about the differences between publishing free vs. paid apps. I priced it at $2/€2, which I thought was a reasonable price considering that you get it for both macOS and iOS with a single purchase.
It's currently available for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, but I'm considering making an Apple TV app as well.
For the launch of Tiny Softbox, I tweeted about it and launched it on Product Hunt the day after that. The engagement was not amazing, but the feedback I got was very positive, and from the App Store impressions and sales it seems to be off to a great start.
I love building tiny (but useful) apps like this and hope to find time to build many more. I have a long list of ideas. 🙂
This post was originally published on my website at alexandersandberg.com.
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