As important a question as asking yourself what your project is, ensure you ask yourself what is it not?
(see part 2, where to start, here)
You can learn a lot from this, it’s important to not be a monster app. Consider your scope, your market, monetizatioon and how they fit together.
I’ve made this mistake before. If you look to do everything you run a very real risk of:
a) making a horribly bland app with no real niche or reason to exist.
b) missing the point of what you were making in the first place.
c) being too hard to use due to too many choices and options.
Scope can increase, and even decrease, after release. But remember that it is easier to ADD features than remove them.
So, what can our initial idea tell us that Avo, the working name for this app, is not?
Well, it’s a markdown editor. It is NOT a RichEdit(Notepad) app. It will likely look like one though. There are a lot of really good apps on the market for this and I am not aiming at that.
It is lightweight; so it isn’t going to be expensive. This is what wide vs tall means.
Anyone play Civilization? I love it. Wide vs Tall is a standard definition of how to build your empire in the classic strategy game. You can either make fewer cities but spend a lot of time and effort making them mega-power houses (Tall) , or you can spread fast, creating an empire of smaller, but far more numerous, cities.
So, this app needs to be fast, easy, have low overhead and seriously low financial barrier to entry.
Easy Writer has no ads. This is a decision I refuse to change as it completely opposes that app’s defining element; low distraction for productivity. That means however that costs have to be weighed differently.
Avo on the other hand, makes a lot of sense to make free with ads, and a relatively low priced option to remove them. As it uses local storage, there is no ongoing cloud or other costs for me, so this means I can offer the same to my wonderful customers.
So there is the first thing missing from my drawing outline. Monetization.
Beyond that, it looks reasonable as a concept. So I’m going to go ahead and try to flesh out the basic app next. Not as an MVP (we’ll get to that later) but as a semi-functional-appearing mock up.
So there it is; the ad control and a tab control along the top for multiple files open at a time. I also added some quick buttons in the bottom right to get functionality up and running. That will long term migrate (I suspect) to a top ‘ribbon’or similar but I didn’t want to get hung up on that design just yet.
Even this quick throw together tells me more about the concept; how do I make it markdown friendly? A side bar with hints perhaps? or buttons to insert the tags? Also, how o I make it clearly not a RichText editor?
Hmmmm…