In one event in competitive public speaking ('Forensics'), students are given seven minutes to prepare and deliver a speech based on a random quotation. Competitors prepare in under two minutes, but to achieve this level of proficiency requires preparing speeches for several quotes each day. Since this is often practiced in spare time or when traveling, I wanted to practice all on my iPhone, but instead I was carrying around my laptop to find a quotation and my iPhone as a stopwatch--a pretty bulky solution.

I made an iOS app to fetch a random quotation and time my speeches. My university mostly sticks to Java, so last summer I read Kochan's Objective-C book and this fall used the Stanford lectures and Hillegass book to learn iOS development. I got great feedback on the app from my coach and teammates--it was really exciting to build something people wanted to use! There were road blocks--like programmatically changing button images and using Illustrator to make the icon--but SO got me through. Besides, I had a whole lot of fun crossing off features to add, bugs to fix, and especially rethinking everything refactoring my code.

Attribution:

Stopwatch Image: The Noun Project

Current warning is caused by using Git.

Timer does not keep time after closing app.

Start/Stop border inconsistent with border of other buttons