Isn’t my app good enough?
We had a look at our apps on iOS, iPadOS en macOS and asked ourself, what can we do to improve these apps. As a developer you often think we have to add new magical features. I don’t want to fool you, but the aim to improve apps, is to get more sales. And there is nothing wrong with that.
So what brings more sales? Marketing of course, but that can cost a lot of money, and if it doesn’t work, the marketing person will probably say the app was the problem… So whichever way you turn, you better make sure your apps are as good as you can possibly make them!
So how do we do that? Make sure the app is useful. Make sure there are no or no critical bugs (there are always bugs). Make sure the apps are stable, a joy to use. And that the app is distinguishable from other apps, in one or several ways.
How do we do that?
We take one app, which is not to complicated, and we are going to improve it to be the best possible app for that kind of application. We will push it to the limit of what is possible. We will make the app as discoverable as possible, as easy as possible, as clean and simple as possible… We will also make sure it can be used by as many people as possible, including impaired people.
For this, we selected our Calendar Converter app Calndars. The app basically allows you to select a date and see what the date is in another calendar. For example take a date of the Gregorian Calendar and see what that date is in the Hebrew Calendar. The app is already localised to support 35 languages, so adding extra languages is not the first item on the list. If you look at the app, you see it is useful, not difficult to use. But what can be improved.
Widgets
Widgets were introduced in iOS14 (2020), and are tiles that are places on your Home Screen. You have several widget sizes: small, medium, large and extra large. The tiles display information from the app. This can be static or dynamic information. In our case, you have several Calendars to convert from, and there isn’t enough room to show them all. So you need a way to tell the app which Calendars you want to see in the widgets. The order in which you want to see the Calendars can also be important for you.
For this we added a favorites section to Calndars, so you can define which Calendars are your favourites. On top of that, you can define if you want a favourite calendar to be in the widget or not (tap the 4 squares). We also added drag and drop to reorder the Calendars, so you can set the order of the Calendars. You can set a maximum of 3 calendars to a widget, but you can also choose just 2 Calendars.
An app doesn’t need to add all the different sizes for the widgets. But each size should provide something extra to the user. We decided to us the small size to show the date of today. Medium for today and tomorrow. Large for today, tomorrow, in 2 days and in 3 days.
Quick Actions
Quick actions appear when you tap-hold an app icon. Every app will show the move and delete quick action, but we can add extra quick actions to it. For Calndars, we decide to add quick actions to get the date of today. With widgets, we already set the favourite calendars, and calendars to be shown in the widgets. These calendars now also have a quick actions. Tapping the quick action, will open the app, get the date and copy it to the clipboard.
The app icon is important
We also looked at the app icon, and decided to change it completely. The previous icon represented circles, like the movement of the sun and the moon. We liked it because it made us think of a Victor Vasarely drawing. This maybe beautiful, but doesn’t provide a lot of information or context to the user. In the new icon, the user clearly recognizes the standard calendar icon. In this case, 2 calendars, indicating there are different calendars. We used 2 different fonts for the date (number), using and older serif font and a more modern sans serif font. This tell your the calendars are not the same, indicating a conversion. We believe this matches better with the functionality of the app.
Making the best possible App – Part 2: App Intents, Shortcuts and accessibility
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