The app I’ve been working on

The app I’ve been working on over the last few months is called Retrospective Timelines. I’m still trying to learn how to talk (and write) about the app in a way that makes sense and appeals to customers, but for now I’ll just write a bit about what it is and what it does. This will be a rambling post…

Retrospective Timelines is an app can track lists (Timelines) of personal milestones and important events. The main purpose of the app is to put these milestones and events into context. How long has it been since X Event? How long was I working on Project Y? What was happening in my life when I worked at Company Z?

An event can be a single point in time or a date range with a start date and end date. For example:

• Jul 27, 2019: Decided to work with SwiftUI
• June 25, 2015 – August 29, 2019: Employed at Company Z

I’ve been tracking this data for years in various spreadsheets and apps. I’ve never found one app that can hold all of it in a way that makes sense to me. Some examples of the type of data I want to track

• Personal milestone – big picture things in my life such as my sobriety date
• Addresses – when did I live at each address
• Employers – when did I work for each company
• Devices – when did I get a computer and how long did I keep using it

I’m still working on some views that will visualize this data. I’m going to start by making a graphical view for single timelines, but down the road I want to introduce the ability to combine timelines to cross reference data.

Database stuff

I’m using Core Data and CloudKit to build the backend of the app. It’s important to me that this data syncs to all of my iOS devices. The schema is simple, at least for now.

• Timelines are lists that can have a name, icon, color, and multiple related Events.
• Events are child records of a timeline and contain data such as event name, start date, optional end date, notes, etc.

User interface stuff

I started this project in UIKit and got pretty far before I decided to switch to SwiftUI instead. While SwiftUI is still new and buggy, there are just some things in UIKit that drive me nuts. I hope I never have to work with auto layout again.

For now the app is mostly using stock iOS controls with some styling added. I have a lot of work to do on each of the screens below, but this should give you an idea of what the app looks like for now.

Timeline views

The top of the navigation stack starts with Timeline List View. You can add, edit, reorder, and delete timelines. The four rows in the first section don’t do anything yet.

Event list and editing

I’m not really happy with the way that Events look right now, but I have data entry screens ready and working.

Event detail view

I’d like to replace this view with something more graphic. Perhaps some sort of card generated using the Timeline icon and color. The app calculates the time since a date in a readable format. For events with a date range it also calculates the curation of the range. Below you can see that I owned a MacBook Pro with an awful keyboard for 1 year, 10 months, and 7 days.