Aphora

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  Collect and organize writing snippets

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  Annotate snippets with your rating, notes, and tags

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  Filter and sort your collected snippets

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  See snippet details from list, or via random shuffle

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  app icon

Inspiration

Collecting favorite passages. Organizing story ideas. Tracking a daily writing habit.

With many aspects of writing life still missing software tools, most writers rely on scattered docs, spreadsheets, and notebooks to varying levels of success.

As a mobile developer by day and fiction writer by night, I built Aphora to tackle the “Collecting favorite passages” aspect.

The name “Aphora” is derived from “aphorism": a concise, terse, laconic, or memorable expression of a general truth or principle. With this app, users can save memorable expressions – the rest of the definition is optional!

What it does

Aphora is a sleek, delightful app with these features:

• Add writing snippets alongside your own notes, tags, and rating
• Browse, search, filter, and sort your snippets collection
• Tap the "random" button to rediscover a random snippet
• Organize your sources and tags
• 3 snippets included for inspiration on first install

How we built it

Android MVVM stack:

• Jetpack Compose
• Hilt
• Navigation3
• Room database

80% hand-written code, 20% Claude Opus

Challenges we ran into

This was my first app with Google Admob and RevenueCat integrations. Setting those up and testing them required the most research.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a solo dev with some interest and experience in UX design, I spent a good chunk of time designing and developing the theming, assets, and animations. I found some great existing assets (shoutout to Doodle icons) and created some of my own.

What we learned

How Google Admob and RevenueCat work

What's next for Aphora

For Aphora, a few features I plan to add are:

• Provide a few databases of existing snippets that users could add
• Support CSV imports, for users with existing collections to bulk add them
• OCR to quickly add a passage without needing to hand-type it

I’d also like to build other tools for writers beyond Aphora; I've already started on an app for tracking writing habits, inspired by the NanoWrimo (RIP) web app.

Built With

• android
• compose
• kotlin