MarsManaged onboarding – Unleashing a new golden age for humanity!

‘Creating a future for Mars!’ ‘Unleashing a new golden age for humanity!’ This weekend I’ve been working on onboarding CARDs for MarsManaged. What’s that I hear you ask? Let me explain… When the user first opens the app these onboarding CARDs show how to use it in a subtle way, allowing users to become familiar quickly …

Enabling undo CoreData + SwiftUI

I did a post a while back about how to enable undo functionality when using CoreData. It continues to work great for AppKit or UIKit apps, but what about if you’ve adopted SwiftUI as Apple is suggesting we do? Well… unfortunately the previous approach won’t work quite as well. After a few hours working this, …

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, …

MarsManaged July Update: New Palette, Icon, UX Improvements…

Back in Sunny California! Portugal was great: the food, the weather, the people… In between hikes, museums and reading breaks I’ve done quite a bit of progress on MarsManaged: it’s looking better and better. Every day a bit more polished and user feedback is helping raise the bar big time. Here’s how the main screen looks like now: …

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 …

Replacing NSTextView text programmatically without affecting its style and format

In the previous post I discussed the addition of Dynamic Date parsing to MarsManaged. In a nutshell: actions containing certain keywords (i.e. today, tomorrow, next month) are automatically converted to target dates.  High level, the flow is as follows: Nice right? Well, I quickly discovered an unexpected surprise: the TextView format was being lost when the keyword …

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 …