– localized Gestimer into 9 languages (now even more!) Launch – made a YouTube video (currently over 50k views) – collected email addresses for launch day – a short 10s clip of the interaction on the website I won’t go into detail about this here as it would double the size of this post but I took marketing very seriously. That’s where I decided to do some proper marketing. Besides gathering feedback, it got me excited about the prospect of launching and hear what even more people will say about it. Sometime around mid-April 2015 I started sharing a beta of Gestimer with people who I thought might be interested. If you haven’t seen Gestimer yet, have a look at a short clip here. It also gave me time to simply use the app and think about if it truly did the things well that I wanted it to do. I was again content with having an app I made and used every day. In fact, I stopped working on it for a couple months after that. I was never in a rush to release Gestimer. By late 2014 I had a rough but useable version. I worked on the app on and off, whenever I felt like it, whenever I slept off the frustration and head-scratching of the previous day.Īs there was no UIKit Dynamics for the Mac, it was a lot more difficult to imitate the iOS version and to get things behaving as intended. The idea never changed: drag & drop from the menu bar to create a reminder. I made some good progress on Gestimer for the Mac during the summer of 2014. I was especially motivated by the announcement and release of Swift. Creating the iOS version taught me a lot and as I learned from more projects over the last couple years, I felt comfortable enough to tackle the Mac version again. I didn’t do any marketing as I simply put it up on the App Store and I was already happy to have an app that I made and used every day. Gestimer for iOS didn’t do too well but that’s okay. Here is the iOS version which was available from 2013 to 2014: It was only available for iOS and not OS X but it still allowed me to produce a version of Gestimer, even if it wasn’t in the intended environment. I noticed that UIKit Dynamics allowed me to easily do something close to what I had in mind. It seemed like a fun way to make interactions so I played around with it. With iOS 7, Apple introduced UIKit Dynamics. There was nothing that was anywhere close to Gestimer out there so it was impossible finding resources that would help me realize the app. Additionally, making Mac apps appeared to be much more difficult than making iOS apps. Objective-C was also not the easiest thing to learn without any prior programming knowledge. Everything can break easily and you have no clue why. As every beginner knows, coding is frustrating. This was back in 2012 when I had just begun learning to code. With this idea in my mind and a few sketches in my notebook, it was time for the execution. After a couple of months and failed attempts at such an app, the idea that later became Gestimer popped into my mind: “Wouldn’t it be great if I could just drag down from the menu bar to create a quick reminder?” This seemed so simple and fast. To me it just feels slow to enter numbers with a keyboard for inputing dates and times, especially without a num pad.Īs the type person who sits at my Mac most of the time, I decided to make a Mac app to work around this problem. It was too much of a hassle to set alerts for those tasks that have a short lifespan. Sometimes I had these little tasks like reminding me to make dinner (because I’d forget and be too busy or focused with other things) or that I had to leave for a lecture in half an hour. Not too long ago – while I was at university – I noticed that todo apps weren’t entirely fitting all my needs. I feel comfortable knowing that an app will take care of such thoughts as its memory is most likely better than mine. Other unrelated thoughts are too distracting when writing code. That’s especially true while coding where I have to be completely focused. If I had to cook dinner and then went back to my Mac to continue whatever I was working on, I’d probably forget about my dinner. Also, my short-term memory isn’t the greatest. I don’t like to keep too many thoughts in my head at the same time.
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