

Show HN: Another weekend project "Quick Conversions" - JoeCortopassi

Had another few hours free to do another simple iOS project, and am curious what you guys think. The basic problem I wanted to solve, was to make a unit conversion app that is as quick and easy to use as possible, while still being simple enough to be picked up randomly and used. Total time for development was roughly ten hours, and it was built completely programmatically (no interface builder or images). Plenty of promo codes to go around, just let me know so I don't have to waste them by letting them expire.<p>https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quick-conversions/id595047250?mt=8
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ctruman
Seems like a clean and nice solution from the screenshots. Were you not able
to find any app on the store that did what you needed? What do you want to
make simpler than say, convertbot? <http://tapbots.com/software/convertbot/>

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JoeCortopassi
I think the biggest advantage an app like this has over something like
ConvertBot (which is very nice), is that you can get any conversion in no more
than 4 steps. Press the category, type in the number, and select the "from"
and "to" from the dials. The screen stays the same, the buttons are big, and
it auto evaluates. Easy to read, and use with one hand.

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ctruman
Agreed, especially if you are using this app a lot, number of steps is more
important than any aesthetic. More apps need to take this into account. I like
it and look forward to seeing if you can find any other ways to simplify the
conversion action.

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JoeCortopassi
Appreciate the kind feedback ctruman, want a promo code so you can play with
it?

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ctruman
Sure, you can email the code to cleetruman [at] gmail

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JoeCortopassi
email gives me an error. Here it is 7NN4YRA9NPKX. If someone snatches it out
from under you, shoot me an email (profile)

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ctruman
nabbed it, awesome thanks! App works great. I admit the number of touches and
simplicity of the UI makes this a nice standalone utility. Its a little hard
to be specific with the UIPickerView, but thats not exactly anything easy to
fix. It would be interesting to see if there was a better UI component for
selecting the units.

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em00guy
I love this kind of app. Take something that exists a million times over and
take it to its natural conclusion. There are a lot of useful apps in the app
store that I will not install because they are not as simple as the obviously
should be. I have two recommendations: First, you should consider adding all
the units to the picker so I dont have to change tabs to measure volume weight
and time. You can detect what type of unit are in view and auto populate the
second picker with appropriate conversions. Second, considering the simplicity
of this app, I would consider using a UI template to polish the look. I dont
know much about iOS templates but the link below looks acceptable. Hope this
helps. Best of luck! <http://www.appdesignvault.com/>

