Alba

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Inspiration

Well, I have a bad habit of reaching for my phone first thing in the morning. One is to turn off the alarm, but then it's never only about turning off the alarm. It always ends up with half an hour gone scrolling through the notifications I received throughout the night.

I'm a developer, so I thought... why not build something to fix this? Of course, let's build another app blocker. But how can the blocker work in a way that fits seamlessly into this scenario? Well, that means when I'm in bed, the apps have to be blocked. But when I'm out of bed, the apps are opened as usual. But how?

When I really get up and out of bed, I would be going to the kitchen to grab a cup of water. And my fridge is right there. So yeah, that's how I come up with the idea that all I need is to scan a physical stuff that is not within an arm reach from bed, that should be a good validation that I'm truly out of bed.

What it does

It's an app blocker. You set the apps you want to block. You set the time that it should start blocking. Also a time where the apps will be unlocked by itself (in case you forget to scan and already off to work). But the main key feature is to setup a spot you want to scan to unlock the apps.

There's also a sub feature "walk to unlock", in case you just can't get access to your usual spot at all.

How I built it

I made a quick prototype. Just let the AI did its thing. Very unpolished and buggy but the feature is there. I lived with it for a week. And it worked.

So from there, it's only about polishing the app so that it looks good, fixed all the bugs (I hope), and make it pleasant enough for a random user to understand what the app is about.

Challenges I ran into

• New to the whole Family Control API and the edge case of what happens when schedule changes, or device is not available to listen to the callback.
• Not a designer here, so making the app look pleasant enough for a normal user is not trivial for me. I hope the result is not that too bad.
• Designing a good onboarding is always always a tough one.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

That I have another app on the app store. And I get to take part in shipaton. I didn't get to join last year, so it's good to do something again this year.

What I learned

Even with the help of AI, to make something "good enough" still requires a lot of works.

What's next for Alba

Alarm. The alarm that turning it off requires scanning a physical spot.

Built With

• a-lot-of-coffee
• claude
• cmux
• figma
• fork
• helm
• many-late-nights-and-stress
• openai
• revenuecat
• swiftui
• xcode