I had this nagging little idea for an app for a while.
I wanted a simple, visual way to keep memos to myself – a mix of images and text – always readily available, on my phone's home screens.
Previously, the thought of "just building it myself" felt ludicrous, and I figured it would take months of chipping away at it, given that I can squeeze in maybe an hour a week.
In the year though, something shifted. Tools like Cursor are a game-changer. I had started a few personal coding projects, including this one, during a break between jobs, and was surprised by how rapidly I could make progress.
I could focus on the bigger picture, switching between the "Product" hat – defining what I wanted the app to do – and the "Engineer" hat, figuring out how to make it happen.
I could just tell Cursor "fix this build error" or "how do I make this image display correctly?".
I could constantly check the "content preview" in Xcode, or later run it through the simulator, getting immediate feedback. Most of the time, the simple prompts were all it took to push through roadblocks that would have previously taken me hours of Googling and crawling through Stack Overflow. I used Grok to generate a quick, fun app icon!
What started as a casual exploration ended with a working application.Going through the process of fixing, adding, fixing, testing, and finally hitting that "Publish" button on the App Store was quite satisfying!
Now that I’ve done this once, I know I can do it again. In fact, I think I’ll be making a few more things this year :-)
Here's the app, in case you're interested: https://apps.apple.com/in/app/clear-coral/id6741346289?uo=2