DEV Community: Timothy Broome

First Vertical - log a time period against a user - iPhone app to Supabase - WIP

Timothy Broome — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 23:32:40 +0000

It could be a contentious view; but before every view and pixel are designed I like to establish some real tangible functionality first. I find it really helps the design process to have usable functionality in your hand that you can interact with and consider.

I don't advise spending a lot of time on this initial scaffolding version; produce the minimum that provides some kind of useful functionality.

Ultimately and pragmatically it's better to finish some primitive but useful screens, then a design masterpiece that's never implemented. In a real-world project continuous delivery gives assurance and peace of mind to stakeholders.

Create Universal Swift Ui App

Create Supabase Project and setup the iOS Supabase client

Scaffold initial screens and basic navigation

Login
Log time
Time list

Setup basic log-in, log-out screens

Create time-log screen

Create time-list screen

Useful resources

Swift Programming Language Reference

Supabase - Swift Database & Auth

Tech choices and why - WIP

Timothy Broome — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 23:27:34 +0000

High-level vision, vision board and requirements - WIP

Timothy Broome — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 23:22:55 +0000

High Level Vision

As described in my intro-post; I want to create an app that allows me to log productive time and then allow the exploration of cross-sections of that data. Data should be visualised in a mixture of numerical totals as well as graphics to efficiently provide a range of perspectives in one view.

Important metrics are:

productive time
planning time
tasks attempted (started)
tasks completed

Useful additional context:

Task size
Task complexity
Task readiness (can be executed)

To achieve this a level of task-management will be needed to log time against tasks. However the ui should me nimble and easy to navigate. I do not want to re-create Jira or monday.com. A task should be quick to add and have the minimal information. Additional resources should be provided through links; for example; a work Jira task, an image, a website etc.

Vision Board

When designing and to communicate a vision to others; I find it helpful to create a vision/mood-board of related UIs/apps/experiences etc. These can be labeled to add flavour

Enticing data visualisation views from Strava and Smashrun. This new app should attempt to re-create this experience but for productivity

Requirements

When embarking on a project it's important to formalise requirements at the start. There's often alot of excited discussion between stakeholders, designers, engineers. But its amazing how peoples minds-eyes can differ when it feels like there's a common understanding and consensus.

Even as a one-man project; once embarked on all the technical details needed to build a project; the context and relative importance of requirements can be lost. Requirements are the way-points/the map to guide engineers and stakeholders through a project, and ultimately provides the finish-line to aim for..

Strava for Productivity - weekend end-to-end project

Timothy Broome — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 22:28:04 +0000

Ode to running and data
Running makes me tick. I'm not a pro by any means. But with a relatively sedentary job; a dash into the fresh air gets my blood pumping; adds some good feelings to it; it also opens my mind to fresh ideas. What I enjoy as much as running itself is data. I love looking at Strava, Smashrun, Garmin Connect to study km splits, compare to previous runs on a just completed route. Look at trends, look at cumulative totals for the past week, 90 days, year. View graphs. I really enjoy this ritual. Ultimately it motivates me to keep running; to continue a trend, improve a trend, aim for a target etc.

An idea
An idea i've had for a while is; if this is so effective for running can it also be for other areas of life; i.e. productivity. If viewing some trend graphs can motivate me to getting an extra hours work done or complete some hideous admin task I keep pushing aside; i'll be all the richer for it.

Self-growth goals
Although I could possibly knock this out pretty quickly as a web app; i've wanted to do something substantial in iOS. I'll try and write this blog directly as I do this; in order to document the way I work. At the very least this will be useful to me. I hope I can help others passing by too.

Steps
I'll break the process down into a number of steps; which will be sub-blog posts when completed. These will be added to whilst things evolve. Here goes!