HomeBell - Homeschool Planner

Inspiration

My wife and I have two beautiful kids and one day I was looking over my wife's shoulder at her homeschool planner and something bothered me. All the dates were marked through one or two times each with new dates written above. I asked here what was going on and she said that the kids got sick so she had to shift everything down a day and it kinda messed everything up. I knew I had to create a solution that would allow for one tap reflowing of her schedule.

What it does

HomeBell is a fully functional multi student home school planner. It auto generates sequential lessons based on supplied templates, adjusting for day of week. It presents lesson plans for each student each day including which materials are needed. It is fully offline with no account, but provides iCloud sync so you can use your iPad or iPhone. Behind a lifetime unlock, it provides year end printable reports, a home screen widget, and unlimited students.

How we built it

I built it fully in SwiftUI with the help of Claude Code. My process starts by chatting with Claude about my idea from my phone, then drafting a plan when I am happy. Then I hand it over to Claude Code on my laptop to get it started.

Challenges we ran into

Since I built this with my wife in mind I took a completely different approach than normal making sure it was fully offline and rock solid. With this in mind, I decided to write it natively instead of with React Native which I am more comfortable with. This presented some learning challenges, but Claude was able to help me through.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud that my wife approves of the app. I am proud that since the app is fully offline and doesn't require any maintenance I can offer lifetime unlocks. I am proud that families can use it completely free for one child. I am proud that I got a paid unlock on the first day that I posted about it on LinkedIn.

What we learned

I learned that developing for both iPhone and iPad requires extra attention to layout constraints. I also learned how to build home screen widgets, iCloud sync, and printables.

What's next for HomeBell - Homeschool Planner

HomeBell is continuing to get new features including date in time adjustments and notifications if lessons are missed.

Built With

• apple-icloud
• cloudkit
• revenuecat
• swift
• swiftdata
• swiftui
• widgetkit