Who’s on 8? My Baby Tracker

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My Baby Tracker in the Windows StoreNew parent == Sleep Deprivation, and that’s what makes an app like My Baby Tracker so great.  Keep track of newborn stats like feedings, diaper changes, and sleep patterns – all vital pieces of information that you’ll have handy (on your Surface, of course!) for every well-baby checkup.

My Baby Tracker is Colin Parker’s debut in the Windows Store, and I asked him to provide a few words about the app, his motivation, and what resources were of the greatest value to him. Colin, by the way, was an early adopter and managed to get his application into the store the day before launch!

Here’s Colin’s journey in his own words:

My Baby Tracker is an app for new parents created by a parent. The app is intended to allow for parents to quickly and easily keep track of important newborn stats like feedings, diapers, and sleep. It goes beyond basic data entry and provides analysis and charting of information such as average nap length over time or how many diapers have been changed in a day. When launching the app, you’re taken to a dashboard view of recent entries across all categories and all of your babies. So, if you want to quickly see when the last diaper was, it’s immediately available. And if you have twins or several children you want to track, it can handle that and clearly indicates what baby an entry is for.My Baby Tracker in the Windows Store

My primary background is web developer by day (.NET/MVC) and desktop developer in my spare time. I started my desktop development in MFC many moons ago before transitioning to WPF, which is where I got hooked on unit testing and designing apps using MVVM. I saw a great opportunity to leverage those skills and hop on board with what has a huge potential in a wide open space by doing Windows 8 app development. After our son was born, my wife came up with the idea for app for easily keeping track of baby info and that’s where the motivation came from for my first app.

Transitioning to Windows 8 development was relatively easy coming from WPF. The MSDN documentation and Visual Studio template apps were most helpful in getting up to speed. I also really liked the samples in the Camp in a Box as they covered a wide range of concepts.

Congratulations to Colin, and I know he’s already working on an update. Perhaps we’ll see a My College Tuition Tracker from him sometime in the near future :)

If you’re looking to get started on building your own killer Windows 8 application, be sure to register for Generation App, which will guide you on a self-paced, 30-day journey to getting your application into the Windows Store!