Finally, after many a weekend playing with my mac mini and
objective C, (and occasionally tearing my hair out) the Bristol
Stool Scale iPhone app is now available in the app store. The
reactions that I've had to the app range from bemusement to
outright laughter, so let me explain the thinking behind it.
When I first started work on it, I saw this app as a prototype
for future, more complex apps. I was working with a couple of
friends who work in the healthcare industry, and we could see that
the iPhone has a lot of potential as a device for data capture. So
I thought I'd build something very simple to begin with, which
could then be built on later. The simplest tool we could think of
was the Bristol Stool Scale, which basically involves tracking a
number between one and seven and a timestamp.
Initially objective-C was a bit of a struggle, but after a few
days I started to get used to it. I used C and C++ in university
and I use C# in my day job so it wasn't too alien. The biggest
challenge was to get the graphing of the time-series data correct.
I wanted something that looked good and that could stretch over an
unknown time span. I had no idea that this would be difficult! I
tried CorePlot (a plotting framework for Mac OS X and
iOS) and Google charts before finally settling for Flot. As
a web developer I found flot easy to use and it handled the
time-series data with ease. As the graph expands it automatically
outputs the date labels in a sensible manner - and it looked pretty
good too. I could tweak it using css as well which was great.
Anyway, despite the fact that most people laugh hard when they
see the slider, this app has been developed with a serious medical
purpose in mind, and I hope that it comes in useful for some
people. For example a person with bowel cancer or irritable bowel
syndrome might find it useful to present a graph of their recent
stool quality to their doctor.
The work isn't over yet. The next challenge is to market the app
and get it out there - with over 425,000 apps (and counting) a new
app isn't going to be successful without some hard work on the
marketing. Especially when it's an app about poop.
