Hunky Doray

It’s happened again. Sigh. While I’ve been thinking, hacking, restarting, rethinking and generally faffing about, this crowd have come out with a version of an application that’s been sitting in my ‘get this thing finished’ box for a few weeks now.

The app is simply a kind of alarm clock that wakes you up at a specified place rather than a specified time. It uses the location services provided by the iPhone to allow the user to set an alarm to go off when they get within a certain radius of some place. I hate the name, but it’s a cool idea.

I had that idea a couple of weeks ago.

The idea came to me when I fell asleep on the train and almost missed my station. I rushed home (I woke up pretty quickly !!) and started coding. I had something kinda working that evening. It certainly wasn’t pretty, but you could add new alarms, enable and disable them. I had integrated this MapView component allowing you to tap on a map to choose your location. I was planning to add search as well.

Why, then, am I writing about iNap instead of my own app? Because I simply got lazy. Or bored. Probably both. And there was just a little doubt in my mind about whether it was good enough to release to anyone. The upshot being, I missed the boat (or the station). Again.

There was an article a while ago about the value of ideas. And when I say value, the article basically said that ideas are worthless. An idea has no value until it is realised. This is no Platonic ideal we’re living in. Only the concrete has value. There is no need for me to reiterate, but this is a blog, what else is it for? If you have an idea, get your head down and realise it. If you can’t do it, find someone who can. Just get the idea from you head and into a code editor window. Then get it out there. Don’t write about it. Don’t spend time thinking too much about it. Don’t ever think you’re the only person who has thought of it.

In the words of Nike, goddess of victory, Just Do It.