Now that I’ve finished my midterm project for Mobile Application Development, I can look back on a few things. Here is a link to the final project folder up on Github!

For this milestone, here are a few guiding questions to reflect on:

Reflect on your process both from the creative side as well as from the tactical side for this app. What went well? What didn’t go so well? What would you do differently next time?

What went well?

• I learned a lot about project flow in Xcode, and the app design process. I had a good plan for what I wanted the final functionality to be and I successfully made that happen for the Grateful app.
• I got my two app views communicating with each other, and I successfully implemented my custom table view!
• With regards to design choices, I did everything intentionally which made me feel better about the app as a whole.

What didn’t go so well?

• Despite the previous bullet point, based on feedback I do think the visual design of my app could have been more refined, which I will take into consideration next time.
• Also, the picker views were hard for me, and even though I used a youtube tutorial to help me with the calendar one (cited in my code where I used the tips from the video), I still struggled to make it work as smoothly as possible.
• Since I chose to use text views (for their multiline abilities) I ran into a few unforeseen errors. There were a few inconvenient differences between text fields and text views that I had to work around.

What will I do differently next time?

• Next time, I want to have it done sooner before the deadline so I can have a few friends try it out on the simulator and give me feedback. My app’s function and flow made sense to me, but it is always extremely valuable to get feedback from others to iteratively revise the design.
• I think can do a better job of designing an app to do one task and to do that specific task well. Originally I was trying to accomplish too much with my app, which I did simplify down along the way, but I want to have an even more refined project concept in the future.
• For this project, I designed it initially on an iPhone SE for the small screen size and then made sure it worked on an XR. But since more people have iPhone XR’s than SE’s, I think I will design it originally on an XR and then budget the time for more intentional auto layout constraints.