Nothing Was Delivered

I must enjoy sabotaging myself. That is the only logical explanation for the number of times that I have gone back to the drawing board on this app. 

The basic shape of the app seemed simple when I first started working on it. Now it’s after midnight and I decided to re-write another big portion of the UI, but it’s too late to do that tonight, so I’m writing this post instead, with the expectation that by the time I’m finished I’ll have a good idea of what needs to be done. All I’m sure of right now is that the current design is not working. 

The app is basically a simple travel budget. You’ve got several budget items (“Vacation”, “Food”, etc) each with an allocated budget. Initially the plan was to support multiple budgets, but that didn’t make sense. You’re only ever on one vacation at a time. So we lost the budget picker. But lets say you’ve finished your trip and liked using this system. When it’s time to travel again, how do you reset things? Maybe you want to copy this budget and reuse it. Maybe the trip is different enough to require you starting from scratch. Either way there has to be some way to start a new budget. Now the idea of multiple budgets doesn’t seem so crazy. But how do manage those? Originally I had a hierarchy of UITableView subclasses, but the user shouldn’t have to navigate through that every time they’re using the app. 

So we want the app to take you to the current budget by default, but there should still be some way to manage multiple budgets. What does that look like? I’ll let you know once I have a clue myself.