October started with a new app release on October 1st, and the rest of app dev work during the month went towards a new app that’s being released today(November 4th)!
The first couple of days went towards promoting and enjoying the release of Word Owl’s Word Search: Halloween Edition.
Then….because I’m a workaholic that set ambitious goals for the rest of the year….I went right into work on finishing RX Quiz of Pharmacy. I finished several tables containing questions and answers in September so October development went towards implementation of that data into the actual app, design, testing & audio. After implementing the quiz data I jumped more into design, design, & more design. I decided to make the app basically look like a clipboard with pills on it but also have an overall clean bold look. So I made flat clipboard backgrounds and slightly raised buttons that looked like tablets. For the color of the tablet graphics I used colors from actual real life pill images online. After finishing those graphics I decided to make a statistics page that would store the number of questions answered, number answered correctly, and answered correct percentages.
After the all the work mentioned above was finished, I went into the testing phase. After finding and fixing some of the data issues I went to work on the audio. For most of the audio on the app I recorded sound effects using actual pills and pill bottles. The button click sounds are the sounds of tablets dropping into a bottle. The Start Quiz button sound effect is the sound of a pill bottle opening with pills inside, and the sound heard after finishing a quiz is the sound of pouring pills on a table. I added minor effects to these sounds in GarageBand after recording them to make sound more bounteous. Then after finishing those sounds I also made basic correct & incorrect sound effects.
Recording sound effects for RX Quiz of Pharmacy
I really wanted to make sure this app looked different from my Quiz of Medicine app, but also kind of pay homage to it because that app inspired me to make this app. When I started working on Quiz of Medicine I thought I was going to make it more focused, but I went a little overboard with the medications and the app ended up turning into a massive quiz app featuring thousands of questions for over 400 medications. However, I definitely wasn’t disappointed with how that app turned out. I still think it’s a great app and it’s one of my best performing and well received apps with a lot of downloads and mostly positive reviews.
My goal for RX Quiz of Pharmacy was for it to be more focused on pharmacy overall as a whole. I believe I succeeded with that goal by having it feature abbreviations, law, history, and only the top 200 drugs(in 2015 currently). I’m also really satisfied with the look of the app. I even smiled at the app icon for about a minute after finishing it. Working on an app icon is usually one of the final things I do during development, and that was also the case for this app. So I wasn’t just smiling because I really liked the look of the app icon, but also because it was a moment of culmination.
Working on the RX Quiz of Pharmacy app icon
Up next on my app development plate will be a finance app and the next Word Owl’s Word Search app. Not sure which one I’ll focus more on, but I’ll be working on both until I figure it out. Until next time ∞
