Just Notecards

The First Bad App

In the early days of smart phones, every app was bad. They didn't have authentication. They didn't have dark mode. They didn't have chat or discover friends or troubleshooting pages. They did one thing, and that was beautiful. They were simple.

Apple's new Vision Pro offered a generational opportunity to make a bad app. Something that has low aspirations and singular focus. So I made the first bad app for Apple Vision Pro and released it in their launch day store.

An Unrevolutionary App

Just Notecards is exactly what it sounds like. Type on a notecard, drag it around, connect it to other notecards.

The persistent storage is Apple's own CoreData, syncing with their hosted database. Since it's just notecards and just Apple Vision, I didn't need the full flexibility of a hosted API and some relational cloud database.

A happy coindicence was using CoreData's share features to quickly add collaborative features.

But soon things were clicking. The interface was kept clean - transparent background with little hierarchy (many boards each have many notecards). You could change the notecards' color in the first iteration, but this was dropped for the final product.