Earlier work · Personal · 2012–2013

CountOnIt

A native iOS app for counting the things you mean to do more of, or less of, and charting how it went.

Role: Designer and developer

Two white iPhones either side of the CountOnIt icon, a white plus sign on pink and yellow stripes. One phone shows a stack of bright tally cards, each a large number beside a goal such as "Biking instead of driving". The other shows a chart ready to export.

CountOnIt kept tallies. Cups of coffee, days biked to work, beers a friend owes you. Tap to count up, tap to count down, and export the lot as a chart when you want to see how it went.

I designed it and wrote it in Objective-C. Gestures did the navigating and the editing, so the screen could stay nearly empty. A short tour showed the features once and then got out of the way.

Three iPhone screens: adding a tally with minus and plus buttons and a row of colours to choose from, the list of tallies with one swiped aside to show its actions, and the screen that sells the export. — Fig. 1

An exported chart titled CountOnIt. Goals run down the left, among them "Walks on the beach", "Books read" and "Hi-fives to strangers". Coloured bars run right for counts above zero and left for counts below. — Fig. 1

It started on paper and went through a storyboard before it went near a compiler. The project is on GitHub for anyone who wants to read how I wrote iOS then.

Pencil sketches of the app on paper: a list of counters, a single counter shown large, a settings screen and an edit screen, joined by arrows and margin notes. — Fig. 2

The Xcode storyboard: about a dozen empty phone screens joined by lines, fanning out from a navigation controller to the tally, settings, export and purchase screens. — Fig. 2