Meet Scribblet

On September 24, I got an idea for a widget-making app.

8 days later, I released Scribblet, an app for turning doodles into widgets. It actually took a little longer than I anticipated; I decided at the last minute to curate some background images from Unsplash to include in the app and then quickly realized I would have to learn how to implement in-app-purchases all over again because I’d forgotten everything I’d learned from Snapthread… so in the end, I just went with RevenueCat, which I’m already using with YarnBuddy. I also forgot how long it takes to assemble screenshots (especially since I had to actually create some drawings of my own) and oh, yeah, make an icon.

That icon took approximately six minutes in Affinity Designer.

The app is written in SwiftUI, with a UIViewRepresentable wrapper around PKCanvasView. As of this moment (I’m writing on Sunday night), I’m about to submit an update (1.1) that allows you to import and export widgets. Building that feature gave me the opportunity to learn about creating custom file types and using the new fileImporter/fileExporter modifiers in SwiftUI—pretty slick!

Scribblet is FREE. “So what’s it good for?” you might ask. Having fun, of course! Doodle over images of your pets, play an awkward game of tic-tac-toe with yourself, draw your very own “Super S,” doodle a quick napkin-style design that you want to keep at the forefront of your mind, jot down a quote in your own handwriting, let your kids draw something…whatever you feel like. Just add a Scribblet widget to your home screen, long-press it, and select “Edit Widget” to choose which drawing (of the same size) you’d like to display.

For an optional $1.99 in-app purchase, you can add a background image to draw over. Choose one of your own or select from one of the 30 I picked out.

If you’re artsy, you can use Scribblet to improve your #ios14homescreen aesthetic. If not, it can help you sow absolute chaos amongst your app icons. I’m serious, just make it a real hot mess. Janky af.

Also, tweet me your doodles. I already love them.

Scribblet! Download it today!

Introducing YarnBuddy

YarnBuddy, my new app for knitters and crocheters, is now available on the App Store! I’ll go ahead and get down to the deets.

Features

YarnBuddy is a project tracker and a row counter. That means its primary job is to help you keep track of all the knitting or crochet projects you’re working on (or have worked on in the past) as well as where exactly you left off on each one. Its secondary job is to help you keep an inventory of all the yarn you’ve acquired (there’s always so. much. yarn. ?).

Projects can either be “in progress” or “finished,” or you can optionally move them to the “Archived” section if you don’t want to see them in your main list.

You can import patterns from the document picker, your photo library, or a web page. I’m hoping to add the ability to import PDFs from your Ravelry library in a future release; however, I don’t really have any experience working with web APIs and OAuth, so it may take awhile for me to figure it out!

My favorite feature of YarnBuddy is the little drawer/sheet for row counters that appears at the bottom of a project’s detail view as well as its pattern view. You can add as many counters as you want, link them together, set them to repeat a range, change their color, and more. You can also expand a single counter to fill up the entire screen.

YarnBuddy allows you to add up to 10 projects and unlimited yarn for free. YarnBuddy Pro is an optional subscription that adds the ability to create unlimited projects, add tags and due date reminders, create notes with rich links for projects or yarn, add row alerts, and change the app’s icon. There is also a one-time purchase option with no expiration.

Development

YarnBuddy was built using Core Data and is almost purely SwiftUI, with the exception of a few wrapped views: UISearchBar, UITextView, UICollectionView, and UITextField (because I needed to add an accessory view with a “Done” button to dismiss the numberPad keyboard). I also had to wrap the system pickers for documents and images.

Using an app-wide gradient in the navigation bar required fiddling with the UIAppearance APIs which are also foreign to SwiftUI.

Overall, creating a new project using SwiftUI was a blast, and I highly recommend it. However, I can’t imagine completely rewriting a UIKit app in SwiftUI. The two frameworks require such drastically different mental models for data flow that I get a headache just thinking about it!

YarnBuddy on iPadOS 13

What’s Next

I’m already working on a big update for iOS 14 that will include a modern iPad UI, a watch app, and a widget (at least, that’s the plan!). I also have an enormous list of feature ideas that may or may not make it into the next release, from data export and time tracking to ways to share your progress on social media. Finally, I’m going to think long and hard about clicking that “Mac” checkbox in Xcode. If everything else is shaping up well for the fall, I would absolutely love to bring YarnBuddy to the Mac.

Well, I think that covers everything for now. If you’re in my target audience and have feature requests/suggestions, I’d love to hear ‘em!

SnapThread Now Available

SnapThread icon

My new app, SnapThread, is now available on the App Store! SnapThread is a simple, no-frills utility for merging portrait videos from apps like Snapchat and Instagram Stories.

I am hoping to add support for Live Photos in the next version. In the future, I may also add the ability to include a title for a few seconds at the beginning of the video, or add a single background music track. However, I don’t want to complicate the app too much, so those features aren’t guaranteed to make the cut.

Let me know if you run into any trouble (errors and such) using the app, and if you like it, please consider leaving a rating or review. Thanks!

Please, Don’t Write About My App

Please, don’t write about my app. It’s not that good. In fact, it probably crashes sometimes. Also, I don’t really know what I’m doing.

Please, don’t tell your friends about my app. They probably won’t like it. I mean, the art assets aren’t good enough. It’s too simple. And it only really appeals to a tiny niche anyway.

Thus goes my inner monologue every time I prepare to ship an app. It’s not because I’m humble: trust me, I’m not. It’s just…fear of failure, I guess?

For indie developers, marketing is especially important. You gotta get the word out about your stuff. You gotta build your audience, refine your #brand, hack all dat growth, and so on and so forth. It feels gross. It isn’t, though—at least not for the most part. I struggle with it though, as I’m sure many of you do as well.

Look, my app isn’t special. It’s not Apple Design Award material. Does that mean it shouldn’t exist? No, it doesn’t mean that at all. I created something that’s useful to me, and now I’m going to share it with others. If they don’t find it useful, that’s fine. But if I want to give it its best chance at success, it’s still my job to tell its story.

But if you do…

Look, if you’re going to write about my app, say this: it’s a simple utility for merging short, portrait videos. It’s called SnapThread. It’s currently waiting for review.

It’s for parents who have a bajillion Snapchat videos of their kids with Marilyn Monroe hair or with a hot dog dancing on their head or what-have-you and all they want to do is create a sweet supercut of them all. No fancy filters or overlays or stickers or cropping. No dumb letter-boxing that forces it into landscape. Just stitch ’em all together and get on with your day.

It’s for travelers who have 30 Instagram Stories videos from their trip to Disney World spread over several days, and want to mash them all into one movie.

It was created by a mom who wanted to visualize how her son has grown.

SnapThread does what it says on the tin: it let’s you select portrait videos from your photo library that are 15 seconds or less, re-arrange them to your liking, merge them together, and save them to your photo library. Sometimes it takes a long time. Sometimes the videos have to be downloaded from iCloud. Sometimes their rotation has to be fixed before the merge can finish.

This isn’t an app for your home screen. This is an app you throw in your “Photo/Video Editing” folder and use once in awhile when you need it. It’s like “Clips,” but simpler.

SnapThread will be out soon. In the meantime, you can check out this page about it (the App Store link doesn’t work yet obviously).

Tell your friends! Or don’t, maybe. I don’t know.