1.0

I’m very happy to announce that Mind Vault 1.0 has been released and is now available on the App Store. I’m very excited for people to try it out and get memorizing.

The path to today has been long and winding. About 9 months ago I wanted to memorize something and looked in the App Store for iPhone apps to help me. Fortunately I didn’t find anything that met my needs. I didn’t want to memorize pre-canned content, I wanted to memorize anything I could think of. I had been looking for an opportunity to be involved in an iPhone app so I decided this was a good chance. So it began.

My training and experience is in design and some front end development, so buidling native software from scratch was a daunting proposition. Luckily, there are many resources for beginning developers. Three books were indespensable for me, Programming in Objective-C by Stephen Kochan, Objective-C Programming by Aaron Hillegass and iOS Programming by Joe Conway and Aaron Hillegass. These gave me a good foundation as I dove into the world of Cocoa. As the project progressed the most constant resource for me in learning how to develop for iOS was—no surpise—Stack Overflow. When these books and Apple’s documentation helping on a specific question or problem I could find the answer, directly or indirectly, on Stack Overflow. I can’t recommend it enough to people learning a new programming language, or a first one. Learning to program has been a frustrating and satisfying experience the entire time. A few of Apples’s recent development improvements have been a huge help to me as a new developer. Storyboards make setting up views fairly simple and I feel like I dodged a memory management bullet with ARC. It feels good to learn a new skill, especially when there are tangible results for it.

Once the structure of Mind Vault was all up I started styling to match my designs. Things evolved as I went and implementing almost everything came down to another new Apple technology, UIAppearance. The design came together in the last month or two and now that there’s a good base I’m eager to begin iterating and improving on it.

I have several features in mind for future implementation, including an iPad version. I am excited to keep working on Mind Vault and eager to hear what people thing of it.