Month: February 2020

Categories
Should I Put The Washing Out?

Finally got the website sorted.

6 months after releasing Should I Put The Washing Out? on the iOS store I finally got around to putting something on the website 😂

Until now I’ve just been sending people straight to the App Store listing, which means I was missing out on potential google traffic and analytics data.

I gave myself an hour to get the site sorted, but it actually took me three. Which I suppose isn’t that bad really, although the site is just a simple .php and .css file (compiled from sass of course!)

Live at https://shouldiputthewashingout.com

I’m really starting to doubt the name now, that’s a looooong URL.

Initial scribble on the iPad, to final design in Sketch. Note to self: clean your keyboard! 😬
The finished site. I think it came out pretty good considering how long I spent on it.
Categories
Should I Put The Washing Out?

Deployed a UX destroying bug. Whoops.

I was trying to add a little prompt asking users to leave a rating on the App Store.

Unfortunately you can’t test this kind of this on the iOS simulator since there’s no App Store on there. But stupidly (and I won’t make this mistake again) I didn’t test it out on my phone. I just deployed it. Oops.

Only after the update had gone live did I realise the app was taking people straight to the rating page on the App Store EVERY TIME they opened it 🙈

I mean how annoying can you get.

There’s also no way to roll back a deployment so I’ve had to submit a new version for Apple to review.

Lesson learned 😂

UX; ruined
Categories
Should I Put The Washing Out?

The app is now free!

Someone recently created a free clone of Should I Put The Washing Out? While I genuinely think my app is better quality and worth the £0.99 I was charging, I can’t help but think that he’s going to get all the downloads, while it’s going to be slow growth for us.

So hopefully, since both apps will no longer be compared on price, they’ll be compared on quality instead which is where I think mine stands out.

The new plan to monetise the app going forward is to build a small subscription feature that’ll check the weather ahead of time and notify/warn you when relevant. Adverts in apps just fucking annoy me so I definitely won’t be adding those anytime soon.

I did however add one of those annoying “please rate my app” modals. Hopefully I’ll get some ratings that’ll get the app a bit more credibility on the store 🤞

Categories
Project Progress Tool Projects

Reigniting an abandoned project – starting small

Last year I started building a website for people to share progress updates on their projects.

I started working on it because I had a few ideas on the go, but I was having a hard time keeping up momentum and progress felt slow. I thought if I could post small updates somewhere public it’d help me to keep moving forward, and also be a good way to tell people about what I was up to for when I launch something etc.

The project fizzled out. The problem was that I had to build a complete product before I could start using it myself. And I just wanted to get something going without any friction.

I also did my usual trick of thinking up loads of fancy features and convincing myself they needed to be included, which means loads more work and put me even further behind from the start.

Instead I just need to keep things simple, which is what made me start this blog. It took less than an hour to set up using WordPress and I’m just using categories to group projects together.

I’ll be posting updates as I work on various things, and any new ideas I come up with and see how it goes.

Keep it simple, stupid 👍🏼