I recently had the realization that I have never shipped a side project mac app.
I have been a macOS developer for many years now. I have worked on apps and tools at various companies, and shipped their software that way. But I have never actually shipped a side-project macOS app of my own!
Long ago, I did do a couple small apps for iOS. However, iOS is not currently, nor has ever been, a passion area for me. I have also created on libraries and tools, such as bag notation, which is a command line tool, and maintaining my simple xcode editor extension. Neither of these is a real app that people can actually use.
Every year, I do a simple retrospective and planning, where I consider the goals I had for the previous year and think of some new goals I’d like to work toward in the upcoming one. Normally I do this in late december, but this time I have a new goal queued up already:
Make a mac app, that does …something… and publish it on the mac app store.
What this could app this be? I don’t know. At one point I was considering a companion app for bag notation, but ran out of time. Or perhaps a developer tool, building on the wrapper for my xcode editor extension. Maybe even something completely different! I am still on the lookout for ideas. I think what makes a good idea twofold: something I’d at least like to use myself (especially helpful for motivation), and something that others also might find useful.
There isn’t much more to say about this right now, other than I hope this will be a topic for more blog posts in the coming year as I narrow down some ideas and build it.