OMA: One Month App

What is the One Month App?

We don't have a name, we don't have a UI design, no programming has been written, no server infrastructure has been set up, but somehow by October 24 we plan on launching a brand new web application. One Month App is the brainchild of Clear Function in which we intend to design, develop and launch a web application in one month. The idea was inspired by three factors:

1. We had this great idea for a simple web app.
2. We wanted to get it done quickly.
3. We wanted to document our process.

Clear Function has developed many websites and web apps in the past for ourselves and various clients, but we've never had such a tight deadline. However, we like a challenge and feel that the short time frame and constraints will help it to become a great, simple product. We hope this blog will serve as a great resource for the ins and outs of developing a web application from concept to design to programming to deployment. This should be an exciting and stressful one month ahead and we're excited about its potential.

About the app

The app is going to be a free and simple cash flow management tool for small businesses. It's main purpose will be to simply track the cash flow related to your projects and clients (integrating with the Basecamp project management application's API). We think that cash flow should be quick and easy and often times has nothing to do with accounting, which it is often associated with. When you put on the cash flow hat, you're thinking about the overall health of your business, but also making sure that you've got enough in the bank to pay yourself and employees. It's more about business health, than detailed numbers, charts or graphs. We're developing this app because we want to use it ourselves and we think other people will want to as well.

The rules

The rules are simple. All design and development will be done during the one month time period. All hours of the night and early morning are fair game.

The team

The one month period will officially start on September 24 with blog entries following. We suspect that we'll be posting an entry at least every other day, but probably more. Reader participation will be a big part of this blog as we'll be asking for your opinions and advice on many areas of the design and development of both the application and the promotional website and branding. We're excited about seeing how the app ends up and we hope that you'll stay tuned and help throughout the process. This should be an interesting month.

Update:

I meant to point out in the original post that the time spent between the 3 team members won't be 100% spent on this project. At Clear Function, the majority of our time is spent working on projects for our clients, but we also schedule out time to work on our own projects and ideas. The one month app is not the only Clear Function project we have going on during this month and the majority or our time will still be spent on client work.

Also, our friends over in the DIGG world are enjoying saying that the app we are building could be done in a time span ranging from one day to a couple of weeks. While this could be true, the point of this blog and application is not to get it done in the quickest amount of time possible. The point is to put an appropriate time constraint on building a quality app and to document our process during this time.

Anyway, back to work :)