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, …
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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 …
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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 …
MarsManaged March update, Alpha coming soon?
Lots of progress the last couple of weeks, the first alpha should be ready… Soon? Hard to predict. What’s **not** hard to do is cover some of the features added last week. First, based on customer feedback, lots of work around Tags: – They can now include a template. If you create a Card …
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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 …
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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. …
NewsWave will be sunset early next year
NewsWave, the twitter-style RSS news feed, will be sunset early next year. WHY? Even though it has very loyal users and both iOS and macOS apps reviewed very well -4.8 for iOS & 4.5 for macOS-, ultimately the recurrent revenue did not justify the time I’d need to invest in to further enhance it. Leaving …
2020 in review
One of the things I really enjoy about the Christmas break, is how much it contributes to looking at things with perspective. It may be the copious amounts of food, the change in schedule, the time to think… Whatever the reason, it really helps assessing how things have gone and where to go next. On …
A different approach to email with ‘Hey’
Email, one of the most widespread technologies of all time, it has enabled so much… At the same time, it was designed a long time ago when the internet was very different. When I read about Basecamp’s attempt at improving email with ‘Hey’, to address many of its current shortcomings I was intrigued. I spend …