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 while a Tag is selected, it will default to that template.
– Tags can now be pinned, so you can easily access what’s most useful to you.
– Tag icons can now be changed, choose from over 100 options.
Also quite a bit of work went to the Settings Page. In addition to changing defaults, it allows users to easily modify the templates of Tags.
Finally, a lot of under the hood engine improvements for To-Dos. Its **crazy fast**.
Will post more soon to deep dive on the app key features, experience & more. So far the feedback has been very positive, can’t wait to get it in the hands of more users.
If you’d like to participate in the Alpha -when its ready- do drop me a line at contact@mmvsolucions.com
This weekend I continued working on the TO-DO area, specifically on bringing the context-aware functionality of Cards to “Target Date” & “Last Modified” views.
As most of the code complexities were sorted last weekend, this one I did quite a bit of progress. Here’s the latest:
“Sort by Target Date” view:
“Sort by Last Modified” view:
In addition to the above improvements, there’s many other tweaks too. Here’s a few examples:
– Double clicking on the note title takes you directly to the note the TO-DO belongs to.
– TO-DOs will only show Smart Dates (’Today’, ’Tomorrow’, ‘Overdue’) if they have not been completed.
– On the ‘Sort by Target Date’ view, dates will not appear on the Overdue, Today or Tomorrow sections.
And finally, worked a bit on the CARD search functionality. Now, when searching, an option appears for you to easily narrow search to the category/tag you have selected.
This weekend I focused on the TO-DOS view of MarsManaged.
Instead of a list, as I originally developed it, working on having multiple context-aware options. In the example below showing the ’Sort by Card’ one, seems to me this makes this view a lot more useful than a list?
Let’s say you’re showing the user a list of sidebar selectable categories. These categories appear on the sidebar as SwiftUI Labels and, depending on the one selected, the app will show one view or another.
So far, so good… But what if the user would like to rename one of the categories?
Ideally Label would have a property to allow us to put it in edit mode. However, as of Jan 2022, that property does not exist.
With that in mind, we could pursue one of several options:
a) Linking to an AppKit / UIKit library
b) Using alerts
c) Implementing it using a combination of SwiftUI classes
I went with the latter, as it seemed the cleanest approach. Here’s the result I came up with:
In a nutshell: it’s a view that by default shows a Label and, when ‘edit mode’ is turned on, becomes a TextView. When the user is done, which is detected by editChanged and commit arguments, changes are saved and the view reverts back to a Label.
Here’s the code:
struct EditableLabel: View{
@ObservedObject vartag: Tag
@Stateprivatevarediting = false
@StateprivatevarnewName: String
init(tag: Tag){
self.newName = tag.name.bound
self.tag = tag
}
varbody: someView{
ifediting == true{
TextField(“”, text: $newName, onEditingChanged: {editChanged in
if editChanged == true{
//Focused
}else{
//Lost focus, catches return or when user taps away
editing = false
tag.name = newName
}
}, onCommit: {
//Catches escape
editing = false
tag.name = newName
})
}else{
Label(tag.name ?? “”, systemImage: “tag”)
.contextMenu {
Button{
editing = true
} label: {
Label(“Rename Tag”, systemImage: “tag”)
}
}
}
}
}
In the above example the view is connected to a CoreData class, same approach could be used with tweaks to link it to any other model.
Thoughts / suggestions? You can reach me @MarcMasVi
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 the app, I wanted to start with something Blade-Runner like…
That gives me a combination or oranges and dark grays to work with. There will be cascading problems from this decision, but that’s for another post, for now let’s move right along.
Designing the first icon:
For inspiration I really liked the image of someone looking over a planet. Something like this:
From there I dusted off Cheetah3D and PixelMator Pro and got to work on putting something quick & dirty to start with.
First was the spaceship, a very basic spaceship with some lighting effects would do the trick. The key here, given we’re testing ideas, is to not spend too much time.
I’m adding some lighting and reflection so it looks like its orbiting a planet with an orangish atmosphere.
From there, in Pixelmator I created background using a gradient and some effects to make it look like a planet surface (I settled on something between Mars and the Sun)…
And then I added the spaceship on top of it.
And that resulted in the first rough iteration of the icon.
At this early stage it’s all about testing ideas and iterating quickly.
I’m on the fence between going for something fun, using renders, or going for a more serious/flat design…
Given the target audience, I’m thinking it should be the latter or a combination of both.
Will take a couple days to think it through and start on the next iteration, let me know your thoughts / suggestions @MarcMasVi
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.
– Top followedfeeds among users were:
| ORDER | NAME | URL |
| 001 | BBC News | bbc.co.uk |
| 002 | CNN Top Stories | cnn.com |
| 003 | The New York Times | nytimes.com |
| 004 | NPR | npr.org |
| 005 | Reuters: Top News | reuters.com |
| 006 | HuffPost – Front Page | huffpost.com |
| 007 | 9to5Mac | 9to5mac.com |
| 008 | The Guardian | theguardian.com |
| 009 | MacRumors | macrumors.com |
| 010 | Wall Street Journal | wsj.com |
| 011 | Washington Post – World | washingtonpost.com |
– It would take the server around 600 seconds to crawl & fully refresh all feeds.
– Metadata provided by RSS feeds can’t be trusted, to work around it NewsWave servers used a hash to track changes.
– A de-duplication check before any article was added to the database ensured similar articles, with minor title changes or description tweaks, would not be sent again to users.
– If enough people would subscribe to a feed, the server would then make that feed discoverable by search to other users. That’s great, right? Well, except for adult content…The good news is NewsWave already launched with an explicit content detection algorithm. The bad news is I found myself updating it quite regularly to ensure it caught all variants.
BOOKMARKS
The average user had 12 bookmarks, in line with my expectations when I designed the system. But there were outliers at >1,500 bookmarked items, leading to some unforeseen synchronization complexities.
…how much time should you invest on accounting for a use case that will only few users need vs. working on what the majority of users benefit from? Finding the balance is quite tricky, but I’m pleased with the mix achieved.
USERS
At the time of this writing, NewsWave had 1,955 users and a total of 2,105 devices. The vast majority of users either used the macOS app or the iOS app, the split was:
iPhone: 47%
macOS: 41%
iPad: 12%
REVENUE MODEL
NewsWave had two tiers: a free tier and a premium tier. The objective was to make the app available to as many people as possible, thus the Free Tier aimed for a great experience with minimal server requirements while the premium one added features that had higher server costs.
– Free Tier: Great for users that only had one device, allowed up to 24 fetches/day.
– Premium Tier: Provided unlimited daily fetches and synchronization between any number of devices.
In retrospective, differentiation between both tiers was not significant enough to motivate most users to move up to the Premium Tier. I had originally planned to show some non-intrusive ads to free users -in a very similar fashion to how Overcast does it– but I never felt NewsWave had enough users to justify all the development it would require.
NewsWave is the app I’m most proud of to date, not only because of the iOS and macOS apps, but also because of the server-side components: php, python, sql, Debian… I had a blast learning & building the crawler engine, the synchronization logic, the maintenance scripts…
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 it for sale while it languishes is not something I feel good with, and would not like it as a user either, so I’ve decided to sunset it now that its still working very well.
WHAT IS CHANGING?
NewsWave is no longer for sale on the App Store and it is no longer possible to become a premium user.
Existing users however can continue to use the app normally until July 2022, and paid subscribers can continue to use it until their premium subscription expires (subscriptions will not auto-renew).
HOW DO I MIGRATE MYDATA?
First step is to extract the list of feeds you’re subscribed to, you do that differently depending on the app you’re using:
– macOS: Feed -> Export OPML
– iOS: Settings -> Export OPML
That will generate a file that you can then proceed to import in your RSS app of choice. There’s many options, I personally like NetNewsWire as it leverages the latest Apple technologies -like CloudKit-, is available on iOS and macOS and is crazy fast.
If you ran into any issues during the export process please do not hesitate to drop me a line at contact@mmvsolucions.com
—
If you’ve been a user of the app, thank you. To date, I’ve never worked in an app with such an engaging userbase. Tons of great feedback and always done in a constructive way, much of it translated into app improvements too! This goes to show the type of users NewsWave has had 🙂 Its been a truly rewarding side-project to work on.
It’s always hard to sunset an app you’ve worked so hard on, at the same time it’s exciting as this frees my capacity to work on new projects.
I’m considering a follow up post about some of the insights and learnings about NewsWave, let me know if that’s something you’d be interested in reading.
