SideBar: The Silent Super-Feature

If done right you will almost never notice it.. It is however one of the most used parts of any app: the sidebar.  With MarsManaged we’ve gone through quite a few iterations. Here’s a retrospective on the improvements made, and the thinking behind them.  First Iteration (A): Although it was purely a SwiftUI non-functional prototype, …

Bom Dia

I’m writing these lines from a wonderful terrace overseeing Guimaraes, a small medieval town in Portugal.  The day is sunny, there’s a refreshing breeze and -behind me- a fountain provides background noise perfect for focusing.  As you may have guessed, I’m on vacation. My wife and I have taken two weeks to visit Portugal, enjoy …

Schedule & re-Schedule any action with Dynamic Date parsing

One thing is clear when launching a Product: timelines will change.  To handle all these changes with ease, MarsManaged now includes Dynamic Date parsing*. Just type the target date in your own words and MarsManaged will do the rest. Here it is in action:  Here’s some examples of keywords you can use: today (i.e. Did John send …

Badges? Gray Badges? Color Badges!

As I was working on cell badges indicating the number of to-dos pending for a given card it hit me…   The approach I was taking was good, it gave relevant and timely information… But could be much better: what if the flag changes color when you have a to-do overdue, due today, tomorrow or soon?   This …

Iterating on MarsManaged Palette & Icon – First Round

With MarsManaged edging closer to feature-complete, today I took some time to start iterating over color palette & icon concepts.  First, lets talk about the palette: The premise of the app is that you’ll be as productive as future martian generations will be. With that in mind, when it comes to the color palette of …

Looking back at 3 years of NewsWave

With its retirement approaching, here’s some trivia about NewsWave:  ONBOARDING  – 70% of users that downloaded the app ended up creating an account. That was a huge increase from the 20% I was seeing initially. Below the new onboarding flow that premiered with 2020.1 -old icon included-. FEEDS – NewsWave continuously monitored 4,382 feeds for updates.   …