At the start of the fall I decided I wanted to step into the realm of application development. At frist I really didn't know what I wanted to build or how but now I seem to have a much easier time coming up with ideas. All my ideas seem to be based around problems I have in my daily life. My first 'app', Buggie, (more like interface) was in response to my problems with the FogBugz interface. And from that I came up with the ideas that will hopefully soon turn into my own bug tracking application.
Next problem I have had lately is keeping track of hours. At SNM we used Harvest for a while but most of our work is fixed rate so we dropped it down to a lower level account and I no longer have access to it. So I started first trying to just keep track of my hours using pen and paper with an excel sheet, that failed pretty hard most of the time and just made it way too much of a hassle. I then tried to use some of the Mac apps out there that would just track my time, but that too ended being too simple. I'm normally working on more then one project at a time and with the really simple free time tracking apps there rarely was a way to keep track of this easily. Finally I tried some of the more commercial apps such as On The Job 3. But that seemed like over kill and I really don't think I need to spend $40.00 to keep track of my time and billing. So I decided I'm just going to build a web application that lets me make projects, keep track of line items for each project with either a flat rate or hourly rate and a timer. Also to keep track of a history of my projects and the invoices. For now I'm just going to stick with the bare minimum features and make it for my self only. Perhaps if it turns out that it works well for me I'll open it up and see what others think.
The next idea I had was in response to school. To be honest I normally don't try that hard in my general education classes, but the one time I do have to spend time and effort on them is for the tests. Most classes either give me a study guy or a general idea of what I have to study. On top of that I normally know a few people in each class that I talk to about the test and trade tips and ideas on how to study. I figured it would be nice to create some type of app that let us create study guides and share time. So I'm going to build a simple app that will let you make flash cards, just a really simple question and answer. Its not even going to check if you got the question right (for now). I did this in command line python for my last test and it actually worked really well for me. But the advantage of moving out of a command line tool is we could start creating a database of flash cards / study guides that could be shared easily. One of the other parts of most tests is essay questions. So I also decided to add an essay section to each guide that let you type out the question and just a short explanation on how to answer it.
Who knows if either of these apps are going to even work for my self let alone other people but I think it will be a good starting point for me personally.
