Good ideas are worth sharing, right? I've decided to work on Growing Pains for the BYU mobile app competition and for the semester project in my iOS class. Growing Pains is a journal-like app for parents to record memories of their children in a personal way. They can address the posts directly to their child, as in writing letters to their child that they can read one day in the future, or they can simply collect photos and experiences in one central location that provides data backup and a simple interface for uploading photos a and quick excerpt about those photos.
The goal of the app from a business perspective is to partner with a local publisher and offer the ability for the user to order a collection of their photos at the ease of a click. They can order this book and have it shipped to their house, all with very little work on their side. With this in mind the app will 1) require all images to be cropped to square dimensions for ease of displaying and 2) collect small pieces of information about photos at the time of upload. These two features are extremely important because they will allow us to easily create a book/journal of photos without hours of editing work by the user, which is the main problem with many services that exist for the purpose of turning digital photos into printed books today.
As far as the app development progress, right now we've put a lot of effort into the design of the app, and have 5 of the main screens' designs drawn out. I've started an Xcode project, but it currently just contains a couple screens and some basic UI elements. I'd like to begin working on the backend ASAP, and at the same time begin adding UI features and workflow to the storyboard, but with the bulk of the work in implementing the APIs in iOS to come after the backend is in place.
So that's where it's at. I'll query my family and friends for feedback as things progress a bit more, but if you have any opinions on things so far feel free to let me know. I welcome it.