Just Draw - Drawing App for iPad

Just Draw is the latest mobile app I launched on the Apple App Store. Currently it's only compatible with the iPad. Future versions might extend support to iPhone and iTouch depending on demand.

Just Draw is a nice simple app that allows iPad users to use their fingers to draw then save or share their drawings via Facebook, Twitter, or email. The app is useful if you want to jot down ideas while thinking then come back to them later. It's also good for quickly mocking up designs of anything. If you ever wanted to quickly write or draw something on a picture and then send it to a friend, Just Draw is the app you've been looking for.

Perhaps one of the unique features of Just Draw is the "replay" feature. You can have the app trace every move you make by hitting the replay button. So you can take your time and draw something creative then hit replay and watch the app animate your drawing by repeating everything you did.

The cool thing about this app is that it is built on top of OpenGL which gives it the smooth performance. Just Draw supports multi-touch drawing. So you and your friends can draw at the same time! The app makes use of a few API's such as Facebook and TwitPhoto.

Since this is the first release, there are many nice features that can be added to Just Draw. I am open to any ideas or suggestions on what users want to add to the app. Have fun with the app and I look forward to hearing your feedback and comments.

Here are some screenshots from Just Draw:

iPhone Project Management with TA Project

I just finished developing an iPhone App called TA Project that's on the Apple App Store now. The mobile application allows a user to create tasks or to do lists for a project. It can be simply used for task management. But it can also be used for more complex budget and schedule tracking. TA Project can also compute project management metrics such as the Schedule Performance Index (SPI) and the Cost Performance Index (CPI).

You can also graph your estimate and actual cost to visually compare your performance to what you have estimated. The graph is useful to foresee whether your actual cost is going to exceed your estimate or not. Another feature of TA Project is allowing the user to post the status of a project on Twitter. One of the tabs for each project is a Twitter tab that allows reading previous posts and posting new Tweets.

I was the only developer working on the project. I used CorePlot for graphing. Overall the most complex pieces of the project were handling task dependencies, graph formatting, and making the application robust. Making the application robust includes memory management and handling network events. Integrating with Twitter was fairly simple. The app uses CoreData for data storage which uses SQLite underneath.

Xcode and CoreData make using SQLite very convenient. After getting the data model down in Xcode, most of the data pluming is done for you under the hood. This project presented some data challenges because almost every single action the user makes has to be retained.

Below are some screenshots from the app.

Home page screen. This screen shows the list of projects.





The Tasks tab. After selecting a project you come to this tab which shows the tasks for the selected project.





The Performance tab. The Performance tab shows the CPI and SPI metrics in addition to the estimate and actual cost graphs.

Flipping the phone shows the graph in landscape mode.





The Twitter tab. This tab allows the user to read posts and update the status of the project on Twitter.