{"id":3968,"date":"2016-10-19T23:41:19","date_gmt":"2016-10-19T22:41:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marvel7077.wpengine.com\/?p=3968"},"modified":"2016-10-23T21:58:18","modified_gmt":"2016-10-23T20:58:18","slug":"designer-learned-to-code-and-released-an-app-in-4-months","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marvelapp.com\/blog\/designer-learned-to-code-and-released-an-app-in-4-months\/","title":{"rendered":"How I, a designer, learned to code and released an app in 4 months"},"content":{"rendered":"

Okay, I\u2019ll be honest with you right away. The title is a little misleading. I started learning Swift 4 months ago and I knew some<\/em> coding before that. But I have never created a native app for any platform. Thinking about it now, I had no idea what I was up against\u2026<\/p>\n

For you to understand the how<\/em> I did it, first I must tell you the why<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/div>
<\/svg><\/div>

\"Thinking about it now, I had no idea what I was up against\u2026\"<\/p><\/span><\/blockquote>\n

Traveling back in time<\/h2>\n

I always loved computers. My father bought our first machine when I was around 8 years old, and I became hooked in a second. It had a blurry CRT screen and it was running DOS, but it did what you wanted it to do. That thing was pure magic for God\u2019s sake! Of course I mostly played games on it but I fell in love with the whole environment. I learned about how a PC worked, turned all the knobs and switches in the programs and became the guy others came to for tech-advice.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to 1999. It was the time of 56k dial up modems and ADSL lines. I was still into computers as the Internet started gaining popularity in Hungary. I spent most of my afternoons in the school\u2019s IT room visiting Geocities pages. It was the beautiful era of based websites with the dancing baby animgif<\/a> and I wanted a part of it.<\/p>\n

I started learning HTML and created my first website. And since it was \u201999 I appropriately named it Zolee Site Millenium<\/em>. It ran on our school server and was only accessible via a Frankensteinian URL, something like www.kkt.piar.school.gov.hu\/~hosszu2 (notice the nice tilde character in there). But I was online, I conquered a little bit of the new promise land called the World Wide Web. It felt amazing.<\/p>\n

<\/div>
<\/svg><\/div>

\"I conquered a little bit of the new promise land called the World Wide Web. It felt amazing.\"<\/p><\/span><\/blockquote>\n

My love for gaming stuck with me in the following years: I was playing a lot of Counter-Strike. As it became the most popular game, I always had a chance to create a website for my current team. I loved designing and building pages, but after a while started focusing my efforts on the visuals and usability. The latest trends of web development passed right by me as I learned more and more about pixels and user-experience.<\/p>\n

Today I work as a full-time UI designer at a Hungarian agency. I have no experience with the current top frameworks like Node, Angular<\/em> or Bootstrap<\/em>. And I\u2019m okay with that.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ve been keeping an eye on HTML, CSS and JavaScript goodies, because I always work on personal projects on the side.<\/p>\n

The idea for GAget<\/h2>\n

In 2011 my website<\/a> got a huge facelift. The layout got featured on DeviantArt<\/a> and I felt excited about new users checking it out every day. But I also was really frustrated. Not because of the number visitors, but because there was no quick<\/em> way for me to check them. There were two options. I either had to keep fiddling with Google Analytics, or I needed to find a simple app to do the trick for me. That\u2019s what OS X Dashboard widgets are for, I thought, so I started looking around.<\/p>\n

But the solutions out there were either too nerdy<\/a> and ugly or just didn\u2019t give me enough data<\/a>. So being a designer, I drew up a mockup of what the best solution for me could be and posted the design on Dribbble<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"my-initial-solution\"<\/p>\n

A couple of dozen likes made me dig into the topic a bit more. I found out that widgets were essentially HTML + JavaScript apps, so I started taking it a little more seriously. I mean, these were the two languages I was most familiar with.<\/p>\n

The working prototype was running on my Dashboard in a couple of days. I named it GAget<\/strong> [pronounced the same way as gadget<\/em>] as an acronym for G<\/strong>oogle A<\/strong>nalytics widget<\/strong>. A silly name, but it stuck. <\/p>\n

The widget was released about 2 weeks later, in August of 2011.<\/p>\n

\"bookmarks\"

I stopped updating the bookmarks featuring GAget after a while\u2026<\/p><\/div>\n

The amount of feedback was stunning: MacStories<\/a>, SwissMiss<\/a> and tons of smaller blogs featured GAget. I even had my name printed in the Hungarian version of PC World magazine.<\/p>\n

I knew I had to keep working on it.<\/p>\n

What to do next?<\/h3>\n

Today the widget has over 84 thousand downloads and it is being used by thousands weekly. With a friend of mine we even created an iPhone version<\/a>. So when Apple released Yosemite and discontinued the development of Dashcode<\/a>, GAget\u2019s future started looking pretty grim.<\/p>\n

But as one hand took something away, the other gave something back: Apple opened up the Notification Center for developers to display widgets there. Hope! Maybe the success story of my small widget could continue!<\/p>\n

\"instagram-post\"

My Instagram post (https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/p\/sFlLgnpa7H\/) about the new design.<\/p><\/div><\/center><\/p>\n

I started reading Apple\u2019s documentation on Today extensions<\/em> (this is what they call widgets). But it was all native Objective-C code. Ugh! Dealing with a compiler, memory leaks and multi-threaded processes was not what I wanted to do. It sounds scary if you\u2019ve never done it before. But I made up my mind, GAget needed to become a native widget!<\/p>\n

<\/div>
<\/svg><\/div>

\"My biggest problem was that I had no idea where to start.\"<\/p><\/span><\/blockquote>\n

The Objective-Struggle<\/h3>\n

I purchased a book<\/a> about iPhone development in Objective-C, but gave up after a couple of sections. To be honest, for someone familiar with front-end languages and a bit of PHP, Objective-C looked way too complex. Look at this code:<\/p>\n