I’ve been a fan of the iPhone since watching Steve Jobs unveil the first one in his now famous keynote.
Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.
So, three things; a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough Internet communications device. An iPod, a phone and an Internet communicator… an iPod, a phone and an Internet communicator… are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.
Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.
Steve Jobs - January 2007
In 2008, the App Store was launched. Paving the way for the way we now interact and use our phones every day. Some of them making us better, connected, more productive people. Some slowly absorbing our souls with mindless scrolls. Having an App on the App Store is a tech nerd bucket list item, and today I ticked that off.
A few weeks ago I mentioned, after being amazed by the capability of Anthropic’s AI model Claude Code, that I was going to attempt to create an App. Many hours of prompting and troubleshooting later the idea I had has turned into a beautiful iOS App available to download today. Introducing…
I listen to a lot of business related podcasts, and people who have successfully built businesses often solve a problem for themselves. If you have a problem you think is worth solving, maybe other people will need that problem solved too. For me the problem top of mind is getting my daughter to sleep through the night. While that remains a pipe dream I do have other problems worth solving. As I signed off my Continuous Professional Development for the year, I thought there must be a better way to track this.
I’m a Chartered Accountant of South Africa. One of the best accounting designations in the world, and one that requires a long, difficult journey to acquire. The professional body that governs this designation is called The South African Institute of Chartered Accountants, or SAICA. I made a video back when I miraculously passed my second board exam talking about the magnitude of that journey.
To be fair to my daughter I looked just as exhausted back then. Must just be my face.
Most professional bodies just require you to prove that every year you’ve done a certain amount of verifiable (provable) training so that you stay up to date with changes and updates to the profession. A few years ago SAICA moved away from tracking hours every year for professional development and moved to a competency based approach.
This approach is very forward thinking and brilliant. Don’t just do a bunch of hours to tick a box. Think about where you may have gaps in your knowledge, where you want to go in life, and target the things you spend time learning around that. So much better than falling asleep during a random technical update course for a week to get forty hours of ‘learning’ under your belt.
The problem? When there are no strict guidelines, it can actually make it difficult to ensure you are not only meeting your yearly requirements, but enjoying the benefits of this modern way of encouraging professional development. SAICA has pages upon pages of guidelines to help with this, but that was not cutting it for me.
This is the problem I wanted to solve. And this is why I built CPDTracks.
I won’t go into the nitty gritty of the App here, but I encourage my fellow SAICA members to check out the App on the App Store. It’s free to play around with, and there’s a yearly subscription if you want to really start using it properly. Send me a message with what you think.
As I said in my article a few weeks ago, I’ve been using AI to build applications for work for a few years now. These applications have gotten increasingly sophisticated as I’ve gotten better at using the tools and as the tools have gotten increasingly intelligent. But building this application was on an entirely different level. I’ll break this down the same way CPDTracks breaks down your learning year.
I’m so clever. I should have been in marketing.
I started with the concept. Spending a significant amount of time ingesting the guidance provided by SAICA and then workshopping the way I wanted this to be presented by CPDTracks. Essentially building up what would turn into a monster starting prompt, broken into different files for the AI to work with.
Even though this was a big effort to start, I actually wish I’d spent more time in this planning phase. Changing things later is much harder than getting it right the first time. Kind of like everything in life. As I started building I came up with more ideas, added more features, and iterated over and over. All fine but it introduced a lot of bugs that would need to be fixed later on.
Monster prompt inputted, Claude Code set to work while I watched in amazement as a pretty decent first version came to life. It wasn’t perfect, it didn’t understand everything I meant, it took its own liberties on things based on what it believed an App of this nature would look like and we had words about that. But friends, this thing created a working app in one go with a decent prompt. That’s wild.
This is where the real work began for me though. Playing with what was there, keeping what I liked, throwing out what I didn’t. Coming up with crazy ideas and trying them just to see how it would look. It truly feels like anything you can think of could be possible with a bit of effort.
For example I thought it would be cool to have a safari animation at the top of the main screen. The jeep drives along an African landscape, goes fast, slows down when it sees a big five animal, other African trees and animals pass by randomly - some rarer than others.
A random idea, and the first decent prompt came up with a great start that told me this was achievable. I then spent hours refining it and making the animals and trees look better. Even throwing in some fun surprises if you watch it long enough. These little things make an App special, and were really fun to include.
Once the App was finally working I then got Claude to audit the work. Knowing full well how awful auditing is I subjected this poor AI to the ultimate pain. Sorry Claude. Go looking for bugs, explain why they are bugs and what we should do to fix them. I even prompted Claude to write the prompt itself. One that I would eventually use multiple times as I went through round after round of bug squishing. Slimy yet satisfying.
As I fixed problems, I came up with more ideas, more features, better workflows. The artist in me who is never done improving was switched on and loving the new challenge. Reflection returned to actioning activities and around and around we went. Finally my wife had had enough of me being on the laptop while she was trying to sleep, so it was time to wrap up development.
There are things about building an app I hadn’t even considered. Of course I asked Claude what I needed to do, and I was guided every step of the way. Is Claude my new best friend? Even as far as filling in all the different settings and forms when setting up your account on the App Store.
I needed a website, a support page, a privacy policy. Claude ran with it all. I’ve built a few websites in my time, coding them one line as a time like a slave. I have never made a website this easily that looks this good. (Check out cpdtracks.com). Claude went as far as finding a way for me to host it for free, and took control of my browser to set everything up.
Earlier this week I hit submit and my App went to Apple for review. When they came back with a few small issues, Claude walked me through fixing them and resubmitting. What a guy.
This experience has reiterated my excitement for what could be possible in the future. This is the worst these tools will ever be! That is insane.
Without having any experience building a native Apple Application I was able to make one that - if I do say so myself - looks beautiful and works really well to solve a problem I’ve been frustrated by for years now.
In a future where anybody with an idea can spend some time on it and make it happen with a relatively inexpensive tool like this, what incredible possibilities could be unlocked? What great new inventions could be created? What great medical mysteries could be solved? It’s an exciting, albeit nerve-racking time to be alive.
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