Better Day is a native Apple Watch app and complication. It’s a perpetual calendar for the Apple Watch that blows the standard Apple Watch calendar out of the water. Better Day is localized in more than twenty languages, and is available on the App Store for $1.99 (or your local equivalent).
Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to work on dozens of iOS, tvOS and macOS apps. Some of them were for others; others were mine and mine alone.
In the former category, I was the sole developer behind Food & Wine Magazine’s first cocktail guide app in 2012, and in 2017 I was part of the small team at Podop that launched Steven Soderbergh’s Mosaic, an interactive film experience that The Daily Beast called “the most innovative TV series maybe ever”.
I also developed and launched several solo apps over the years, but today only one of these remains on the App Store: Better Day, a highly cuztomizable date complication for the Apple Watch. I had a habit of writing up these projects as I went, though, so my back catalog of a half-dozen solo projects — some dating to the earliest days of the App Store — is presented here for posterity.
As of this moment, I am mostly engaged with mobile app development as a consultant, as my day-to-day focus has shifted to product design and embedded systems engineering. Still I have a deep knowledge of and affection for iOS, tvOS and macOS, and I welcome the opportunity to bring my years of experience on these platforms to clients who have interesting work.
Dictapad
Dictapad was a universal iOS app that aided in the transcription of long audio files. It was a snappy text editor with an integrated audio player that offered keyboard shortcuts to adjust playback rate, scrub back and forth and insert timestamps automatically.
Bushwick Open Studios
The Bushwick Open Studios app was an annual event program for the three-day summer arts festival held in Brooklyn. It was comprised of both a Flask backend for serving schedule data, and a native iPhone client for viewing the schedules and events. The festival garnered over 10,000 visitors every summer, and the app averaged 3,000 downloads each year in the weekend it was available.
SmokeBreak
SmokeBreak was an iPhone, iPod Touch and Android app for helping smokers track and control their smoking habit or help them quit. It was designed to be non-judgmental and fun.
TweetSheet
TweetSheet was an app for downloading your Twitter history to your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, and letting you search your past. It existed in both a paid “Pro” version and a free “Lite” version.
yfduploader
Your Flowing Data Uploader was a free iOS app that functioned as a simple front-end for Your Flowing Data, a very cool self-surveillance application by Nathan Yau. His application allowed users to log data points about themselves by sending a DM to the @yfd account on Twitter, which was at the time new and cool.