I released a small app called Intimacy a short time ago. It took me a whole 8 hours to complete, including design, development, and the submission process.

Why?

I haven’t released anything under my name for a long time. That’s not because I haven’t been building, but I have that problem of doing 80% of a project and then stopping. So instead, I decided to build something small - something that would take me a single day (just about) to complete. I, along with a bunch of other people, had read the New York Times article about falling in love with anyone. The idea is that by sharing the answers to 36 questions with a partner, you become more vulnerable with them, thereby possibly increasing intimacy. I figured it’d make a cool, but very small, app.

I made it to be a timed challenge: I started making Diving Buddy almost two years ago, and looking at the code makes me cry a little on the inside. Sure, it works, but it’s overly-complicated and a chore to read. So I set myself a target of making Intimacy code-complete in a day.

How does the 8 hours break down?

It took me about 5 hours to write all the code for Intimacy. I knew what I wanted to do; I Googled websites for pastel-based colour schemes, picked a colour scheme that seemed appropriate, and got to work. Other than the 36 (37 with the eye-staring) questions, I added a few little extras: social network sharing, listing my other apps in Settings, links and short descriptions behind the idea, and timers for the timer questions. The app is fully auto-layouted, meaning it happily works on both iPhone and iPad, in portrait and landscape. There is one thing it doesn’t do with regards to layout, and that’s dynamic text. Perhaps I’ll do it in an update!

Approximately 90 minutes was spent on the icon. I admit, design isn’t my strong suit, and I actually asked a colleague, Bauke, for ideas on this. In under a minute he had sketched out an icon that later became the official Intimacy icon. I think it’s absolutely brilliant: it’s two question marks facing each other in the shape of a heart. Despite Bauke sketching out the idea in under a minute, it still took me an age to draw it out all out. I, of course, used App Icon Template to output all the necessary icon sizes.

The remaining time was spent creating the provisioning profiles, writing descriptions, creating screenshots, and submitting to the store.

Other stuff

I had wanted to get the app out for Valentines Day, but unfortunately I ran into some submission problems. I got rejected for not having the correct age rating - that was my fault, apparently dating apps need to have a mature rating. Makes sense I suppose!