Creating a Project Estimator in less than 48 hours.

Estimate your IT Project Development Costs on your Android Device with this Android app. Learn more.

So it all started one Saturday morning when our CEO came up to me and said “Hey! Why don’t we do some fun mobile app?!”

His request was so sudden, so out the blue that I was left tongue-tied (only momentarily though 😉). But at the same time, I was pumped about it! At Skcript, we get so immersed in so many different, large scale projects everyday and this gives us (exception: gives me) very little time to do other creatively relevant, fun things. So when I heard the words mobile app, I was super set on doing it. Fast forward to a week ago, me and my CEO sat to brainstorm on what mobile app we could make, and we came up with the idea of making a project estimator for two simple reasons,

• One, we haven’t come across a mobile app that helps estimate the cost of a project that a particular customer wants to make, and making this app will help solve a lot of relevant problems and
• Two, we wanted to test our app making ability (and we also did it for fun, because why not?! 😄 )

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The idea behind EstimaThor 🔨

Cutting to the chase, Estimathor is a handy application which calculates the cost of iOS, Android and other web applications. The day we began working on this project estimator, we decided to take it up as a challenge and finish this application within a single day! Talk about taking too much on your plate - there were still things that we hadn’t researched about in terms of the scope and reach of this estimator. We then did a lot of reading and started designing the outline of this app based on what we had found. To mention a few of our findings,

• There were a only few web-based applications that can approximately estimate the cost of a project
• Even these web-based applications had a few loop holes - they didn’t provide certain features like email login, payment registration etc. - with Estimathor, we have included all these features and more
• A few other estimator apps mostly do not give a price point for projects
• Most of the times, a user has to go to an organization to get the correct cost estimation for his/her project

And Estimathor was created to curb all of these scenarios.

Next step, what language to use?

Once we started on the development we were soon met with another huge confusion - where do we develop this application? We had two choices, one was to go with React-Native and the other one was Native Android. Now the thing with React-Native is that it’s components are pure, side-effect-free functions that return what the views look like at any point in time. For this reason it’s easier to write state-dependent views, as you don’t have to worry about updating the view as and when the state changes since the framework does this for you, and that is why we chose React-Native to develop this application.

The real work: Developing Estimathor 🔨

We divided development into two sessions. We started on the first session with developing the logical part (screens, transition etc.) of the application and at the end of first session we started designing the application. We iterated with many designs provided by our design team at Skcript and came up with a lot of ideas. It took about four iterations to come up with the final design.

It took us two whole days to bring Estimathor alive. And this taught us one thing, all you need is one small idea and that can be the next big app. Now most of you might be wondering, what is Estimathor - well, the humble gods of Asgard have been very kind to us. They think that Estimathor will help a lot of people here like it has helped the good people of Asgard 💪

For a mobile app developer like me, bringing Estimathor to life definitely had a lot of challenges, but the whole ride was worth it! And as most of the people at Skcript are enthusiastic (even on a normal basis, we’re a very excited lot!) you can expect much more of funs apps just like this one! Until we come back to you with another app, may the humble gods of Asgard watch over you! 🌟

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