The Next App Project (Premium)

After creating four different versions of .NETpad, and documenting three of them, it’s time to move on to something different. Something mobile. Something that could easily be ported to the web and other platforms too.

And I think I have a reasonably good idea, though it’s a lot more complex than it may first appear: An app that my wife (or anyone else) can use to keep track of cocktail recipes. She experiments with cocktails a lot, but she’s been documenting her work using handwritten notes on paper. When I asked her why she wasn’t doing this digitally, she said she had started transcribing them into a Word document.

Hm.

Naturally, my mind turned to the possibility of creating an app, which I think of as Cocktail Buddy for some reason. (Final name TBD.) And yes, I know there are plenty of apps like this out in the world already. As with .NETpad, the goal here isn’t so much to create something unique and original as it is to learn more about software development. And if you really think through what would be required for this app to make any sense at all, regardless of how one made it, there is a lot to do. And a lot to learn. Maybe too much.

This app will also be quite different from .NETpad, which is desirable. Where .NETpad was built from the UI out, so to speak, Cocktail Buddy needs infrastructure as well as a UI. In fact, if this is done correctly, the UI can and should evolve over time independently of everything that’s happening on the backend. And that UI could be minimal in the early stages, just enough to ensure that the app is working. (It could even start as a command-line app, though I didn’t go in that direction.)

The app will need a database or some similar way of storing the cocktail recipes. Ideally, it will be either cloud-hosted or cloud syncable so that the user could access their work from any device. The database itself would need to accommodate some number of ingredients and instruction steps for each cocktail. One or more images. Links to alternative versions of each cocktail with subtle changes. It kind of goes on and on and the needs will grow as the app evolves and because of feedback.

If you think about this as a mobile app, and I do, there are mobile app design issues to consider. I think the simplest version of this app would consist of three screens:

Main screen. A filterable list of all the cocktails.
Cocktail screen. A screen for detailing a single cocktail with the ingredients and steps.
Input/edit screen. A screen for adding a new cocktail or editing an existing cocktail.

But there are so many different ways to present this. And there are additional features. Creating a new cocktail. Editing an existing cocktail, and so on. And more will come up as it evolves.

I feel like Xamarin Forms is the likely choice for my first pass at this. But I got started by prototyping some basic layout ideas in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Universal Windows Platfo...