Once again, I am on parental leave - meaning I have two hours spare time a day and the largely unsatisfied urge to code something. When your child is old enough (~ 2 months I'd guess) to follow a clear pattern of eating and sleeping every x hours you'll want to make notes to check when he/she last slept/ate in case his/her mood changes. At least in our case we found that this mix of scheduling and on-demand resulted in a super-happy baby (fingers crossed to keep this status).
While making notes 10 times a day is not really satisfying it's a necessity because sleep cylces of say 120 mins and eat cycles of 90 mins start overlapping/interleaving after half a day. In a way that's gonna drive you mad!
So, when our best friends were expecting a baby, I thought, why not pass our distilled parental knowledge on to them, guised as a present: The Baby Timer App...
The app let's you tap buttons on the lower right, whenever your baby eats or wakes up. You can drag them left and right in case you forgot and add a time point late. The timeray evolves to the right over the day and you can always see with a single glance (that's what it's all about) how many minutes your baby is still 'fueled'.
Disclaimer: I am well aware that a baby's no machine, and the app isn't meant to inform you *when the baby needs food* but rather to allow you to check *whether he/she is likely to be hungry* when he/she seems unsatisfied.
When I started out creating the app, I didn't (of course) count my tendency for perfectionism in. But luckily the project's scope was tiny enough project to get it done amongst all the things I had to do over the last months - and still allow me to push it to a level where it now provides a quite enjoyable user experience.
As I was going to make a basically UI-only application I decided to hits two flies with one squatter and acquire some experience with the Unity UI features that were added last year - so I made the whole thing using only Unity.UI which was a very pleasant experience overall. The Unity staff did a really great job with the UI features: with scroll rects, draggables and anchors, things came together perfectly for a large variety of android and ios devices. Just recently, Anna replaced my coder-dummy-UI with real assets and our present is about to be 'shipped'. Once this is done, I'm probably gonna publish it for free on Android and iOS for other parents...
