iOS6 time management assistant

Original Goal PlanEveryDay is designed as a scheduling app that bridges the gap between traditional planner, calendar, remainder, and to-do list. Our original goal was to implement the app mainly with 4 modules: Create Plans, Calendar, Alarm Clock, and Settings. In order to provide better user experience and simplify the plan generating procedures, we added My Plans and My Thoughts later in the process to give users a more general view of their daily plans and thoughts.

What did we actually complete? For the Create Plans module, we’ve complete several views and used animations to improve the user experience. If we talk about the details, a sliding clock, left-right moving category bar and a priority picker are implemented in this module. Also in the part, we can write our thought every day and select a date by a date picker. Then in the calendar module, even though it’s not completely done, we can actually select a day and review the data taken from the database. For the My Plan and My thought modules, it’s convenient for us to view the details and we can also edit or delete the information a user is holding. In the Alarm Clock module, we can basically set up as many schedules as we want. What is left is the picking song part, we do need some more time to implement this extension.

What Went Right We finished the implementation of basic functions, and the current version of PlanEveryDay is a practical and useable application that allows users to create and manage their daily schedules. In the implementation process, the SQLite database has been properly set up with necessary functions to support the storage and extraction of user data. Many animated controls have been adopted in the app to improve the general design and user experience. In addition to our original project plan, My Plans and My Thoughts modules have also been created in the app.

What Went Wrong Due to time constrains, the current version is not 100% bug free. It requires more time for us to further improve some detailed designs and function implementations. During our development phase, we encountered many technical difficulties in the use of animations, graphics, and auxiliary views. Also, working on a same project separately brought us problems when we were trying to merge changes and modify database functions. These problems sometimes were rather time consuming.

What Were the Biggest Challenges Based on the user-friendly design principle, how to let users type as less as possible is one of our biggest challenges. In most of the time, optimizing the user interface was much more complicated than setting up the steps. Just like in every other application’s development process, we spent a large amount of time on fixing bugs. Due to complexity of the animated controls in the app, the debugging process was even more challenging for us. From a more specific perspective, how to pick songs in the Alarm Clock module and how to apply settings to the application are especially taxing. These two parts might be the most time consuming components in our implementation process.

What Did We Learn From the development experience of PlanEveryDay, we had a better understanding of the user-friendly principle and tried our best to make the modules “wiser” and creative. By using the typical OO programming language Object-C, we became more familiar with the OO programming concepts and structures. Also, this project provided us a great opportunity to learn animations, graphics, and database design and implementation.