John Brewer's Blog

So I’ve been wanting to get into iPhone development more seriously than I have in the past, and I decided I needed a challenge.  For a long time I’ve been wanting to emulate Jonathan Coulton’s famous Thing a Week, only with software.  For those of you not familiar with Jonathan Coulton, for the year between August 2005 and August 2006, he released a song every week.  Not all of them were great, but several hits emerged, most notably “Code Monkey” and “re: Your Brains“.  And Jonathan Coulton established himself as a professional musician — that is one who makes a living off of singing and songwriting.

Of course, software is a little different than music.  Songs have no beta testing and  no maintenance.  Given the additional vagaries of software development, an entire year sounded like too much.

But summer’s coming up.  And surely I can do this for 90 days, right?

So I’m happy to announce my latest project: an app a week all summer long.  Let me explain:

1. I’ll release an app a week every Friday starting this Friday, June 24th, until Friday, September 23rd.

2. Release in this case means, “submit to the Apple app store, and create a page and a blog entry about the app on jera.com.”  When (and indeed, whether) you can purchase the app is up to Apple’s approval process.  Typically, they approve most apps in 7 days or less, so hopefully by the following Friday you’ll be able to access the app.  (I’ll make a brief follow-up post in the blog when the app passes or fails the review process.)

3. I’ll take two weeks of vacation off the weeks of July 4th and 11th.  That means no apps on Friday July 8th or 15th.

4. An app means either a brand new app, or the addition of an “apps worth” of significant functionality to an existing app, like WikiPad or Suggestifier.

5. Most apps will be iOS apps, but I reserve the right to release apps for other platforms from time to time.

If you do the math, that means I’m committing to 12 apps in 14 weeks.  Can I do it?  Stay tuned.

“There: now it’s real because it’s on the internet.”

This entry was posted on Monday, June 20th, 2011 at 4:56 pm and is filed under app-a-week. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.