This post was written by me about two months ago, then I forgot about it. I decided to publish it regardless. This app did not really live up to the plans downloadwise, but I am still happy with it. I plan to write a follow-up and discuss what I learned from it marketing and business-wise!
In the last three-four months, I worked on my first app called EmailMe, while commuting and now it is available on the marketplace for 0.99.
- Download EmailMe from the Marketplace
With this app, I had two goals. I wanted to make something that would fit my needs and would use daily and I wanted to make something really polished and nice looking. I think I achieved both of these goals. I like how the app looks and I use it every day.
EmailMe is a simple app that lets you create messages and send them to yourself.
Why would anyone send messages to themselves? Isn’t it just a little bit weird? Let me explain.
I switched from Android about a year ago when I received my beloved Lumia 800. On the Android phone I had several apps I relied on like the Kindle app, Audible or Google Listen. I had a Kindle client on Windows Phone 7 on day one and the phone is very great at doing podcast. Audible app now is finally available as well.
I also was a big user of the EEBA can help website. It is a financial website that let’s you to implement a budget system and enter your spendings. It has a great iPhone and Android client that syncs flawlessly with the website. When I contacted them and asked them if there is a client for Windows Phone 7 they politely told me that they do not have one and not planning to create one in the near future.
So I started to send email messages to myself to record what I spent money on the day nad entered these records in the evening into the EEBA site. Creating 5-10 email messages on the phone was kind of repetitive and clumsy. Over and over I had to enter the first few letters of my email. Provide a subject line and hit the send button.
So I envisioned an app that would be helping me to send an email where I do not need to enter email addresses over and over and I do not need to fill the subject line.
The app would fast to start, I would type in my message and hit send. No more worries about addresses and subject lines. The message would act as the subject line – truncated over a certain length – and the message as well.
I put together a quick and dirty prototype and started using it. While using, I ironed out the bugs and starting to add features that I have missed.
Since then I gave up EEBA and switched to use YNAB which is awesome! Unfortunately no client for the wp7 platform yet. But I use my app every day to post my spending records and notes. This workflow where I use my inbox as a container for action items works for me very well as I clean out my inbox every day. Spending records are going to YNAB and notes or todos are going to todo application.
I also spent a lot of time polishing the app. I added handling multiple email addresses. History for previous messages. I made sure that the app looks nice, bright and clean. The text is well readable even to me! 🙂
I also added a feature where I can learn how much I used the phone. How many messages I sent and the total time! The feature did not make too much sense, but I enjoyed implementing it.
All in all, it was a very enjoyable and fun time to implement the app and I learned a lot about the technology! It was a nice first step… now on to the next app!