(The making of Freely)
We all know that in app development the last 1% is what takes the longest. You can see the finish line and yet there are still a lot of things you need to do before crossing it. This project took me and Stella about 5 months to get to this point. It was an amazing journey and we both learned a lot.
I learned that simple projects sometimes are more complex than they appear in the beginning and you need to do more work than initially anticipated.
Making your first app for yourself and not a client is awesome! Stella liked the idea from the beginning and she was on the same page as I was the whole time. We had the same vision for the app. This is not always the case with clients, sometimes they want something that you know how to make better but they just want their shit done. 2 visions collide and make the work a living hell you have to redesign stuff and kill a lot of your great ideas that the client simply did’t want to understand.
Making an app for yourself also means you are the client and you have to make sure everything is the way you wanted it and you get the quality from yourself you expected. The hardest part is to demand from yourself to finish a task on time when in fact you are the one finishing the task. This is something multiple personality disorder would of been helpful with…
Of course we followed the MVP model and decided on the features from the start. That part was done right. There where of course a lot of unforeseen usability improvements we had to add. Those could only be seen when you have something to test. So the closest we were to completing the app we found more and more bugs and usability issues we had to fix. It’s a magic circle.
Ironically I decided to make an app for easy time tracking on freelance projects but while making it I had to turn down a lot of jobs so I can work on my project instead. No regrets whatsoever…
This is it the last 1%, the last push, the hardest one, the one that gives birth to your idea. Give me one last push ! Tests.. Hype… Videos… Screenshots… Bug-fixing…App Sore Submitting… Watching the first results…
EDIT:
The last 1% took us 2 months… Freely is now finally Available on the App Store I used it with a real freelance project and it worked like a charm!