App rating in Google Play search

It was interesting to see how Google displays results for apps in Google Play. "Quiky" was unique app name throughout the whole store.

When the app was brand new and had no rating, the search for "quiky" showed the app around 10th position in the results. The rest were apps, where the word "quirky" appeared, plus apps featuring Nesquik's bunny Quik/Quick/Quiky.

When I gave it 5 stars (it's lame to rate own apps, I know, but this was for scientific reasons! :) the app skipped to about 3th or 4th position.

I asked my brother for another 5 stars (no loser alert, still scientific! :) and since then it stays at the first position.

Quiky Logo

I have to admit, I like creating logos. So when I decided Quiky will be independent app, I knew I'm going to make a nice logo.

My first though was a W of some kind - as "Wiki" (even the name starts with Q, but I already have this for QetriX). I tried several fonts and learned I like all four lines of the same length. Also I decided to have each line in different color.

Colors were quite obvious - red, yellow, green and blue. In this order, because of a rainbow. Shades were derived from QetriX logo's blue, using only hexa numbers 3, 6, 9 and C. And because it was quite faint, especially as a favicon, I added a gray outline.

Last trim was to angle ends of the first and last line (originally it was horizontal), resembling four leaning books (with some unevenness on intersections :)

Quiky for iPhone

Unexpected happened! :-) After my success with Java, Android and WPF I pushed even harder.

When I try Objective-C for the first time, I failed rather quickly. The syntax was incomprehensible for me. A lot of square brackets, strange flow (segues) between pages, tons of new methos. Total mess.

So yet again kinda knew what I'm going to expect, so I was able to brace myself. I started with a Storyboard, which went nicely. I watched some YouTube howtos and created a UITableView. Then I discovered prepareForSegue method to do stuff between screens. I had very rough Quiky app without pretty much having a sense what I'm doing. Strange was it somehow worked.

Working with header files and pointers was a nice throwback to my beginnings with Borland C++ back in the late 90's.

I learned little more about basic stuff, like properties, interfaces, built-in methods and after 3 days I started to grab the basic concept. It wasn't that different from C#, PHP or Java after all - just different syntax, but the same approach.

Simply do [someObj something:param] instead of someObj.something(param). Only string concatenation takes much more space, because instead of str1 + str2 I have to do [str1 stringByAppendingString:str2];

My biggest issue was I quite often edited a wrong .m file. What a loser! :)

Anyway, Quiky for iPhone is approaching nicely, I think I may be able to release it in the beginning of May 2014, hopefully with Quiky for Android. Apple app review takes a week or two, so it gives me some time to work on Android, which takes just a couple of hours to publish.

Quiky v2

It looks I made the roadmap just fine. Second release is ready and there's still a day to go. Well, there's nothing to wait for, more time for v3 :)