A calendar app is anything but simple. Week Calendar has evolved into a powerful app that not only manages and visualizes calendar events and reminders, but does so with amazing power and extensibility under the hood. Some of its unique features are — event templates, custom calendar colors and icons, advanced rules based automation, access to calendar content, inline reminders, advanced customized alerts, Spotlight searches, and integration with Dropbox for attachments.

EventKit on iOS is very limited. This makes it very difficult to add any new functionality without also building a custom calendar backend, and hence compromising on user privacy. Week Calendar does not ask for login details to any of the existing calendaring systems from the user, instead using the accounts set up on the device. The app is hence able to focus entirely on a unique user experience instead of optimizing for data collection.

One of my first projects was to add an ingenious technique to support attachments by way of embedding a Dropbox link to the notes field of events. The attachments are hence neatly inlined with rest of the event details, and remain available as a hyperlink on the customer’s other devices.

Then came a new widget for the Today screen, followed by an Apple Watch app. For a few months, the app also included integration with Datumprikker, a leading group scheduling app in the Netherlands, which was re-engineered to work with the app, complete with a unique invitations view.

I also built a new reminders functionality that inlined reminders inside the calendar to be able to view them just like regular events, except without a start date. This was a completely custom architecture that was heavily inspired by Apple’s own Reminders app.

Almost every module was written in-house with roughly no external third-party dependencies.

Under my development leadership, the app also underwent a change in the business model from paid upfront to freemium, with recurring subscriptions.

After writing thousands of lines of code for everything from building a new in-app content store to remote receipt validation to custom animations, this app has been an amazing adventure into learning how to make a really amazing native experience that customers of all ages love.

The app was acquired by Maple Media in July 2019.