Finicky – a Flex and AIR mobile app

For the past few months, I’ve been working hard on a mobile app called Finicky. It’s a mobile journaling application for tracking hard-to-search-for, local items.

The idea for it came to me in San Francisco. I wanted to smoke. I smoke cloves. (Make your hipster jokes.) However, cloves tend to be a little hard to find. Most convenience stores don’t carry them. The tend to be found in tobacco shops, head shops, and occasionally at a random spot like a newsstand. I tried searching on Google, but it’s hard to get reliable data on which stores stock them. The really frustrating part of this was that I know I had found them before. If only I had somehow kept track of it…

Now a mobile app just for tracking cloves would be overkill. But as I thought about it, there were a lot of things that I would love to track like that. Ever been a Coke/Pepsi fan in a Pepsi/Coke town? Can’t search that out. I like a whole bunch of other specific things. So thus was born Finicky.

I approached this a little different from most of my apps, in that I got design help from the beginning. By design help, I mean a full Photoshop comp and UI treatment. I wanted a different look for my app then I’ve seen with most mobile apps, especially on Android. I wanted something grungy and organic. I know what I wanted, but I don’t know how to design it. So I got help from The1stMovement, a design firm who our team had done work with in the past.

What they designed was beyond my imagination. Hence, why I needed a designer. It’s great looking, it’s got a specific style, and it doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen on a phone.

I took those comps apart and turned them into mobile Flex skins. And here is the result. I am releasing it as an Android app first. Then releasing it as an iOS app. I’m going to have it out on Android, iterate through bug reports as fast as I can, then when I’m sure of stability, get it onto iOS. For now I’m targeting just phones for this app. If it there is interest, I’ll port to tablets.

In any case, find out more and link to downloads at http://finickyapp.com.

Source is available on github.