We're nearly halfway through the year, and Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC, or "Dub Dub" for those in the know) has come and gone. It's a special time of year for iOS and Mac developers, where new features of the platform are announced, along with ways to build for them. There's always more there than I can consume during the week that the conference runs, but I'm slowly catching up, and I'm really excited to see what's coming to iOS 15 and macOS 12.
Often, these new features aren't available to older versions of iOS and macOS. It may not be a feature that is visible to people using the device, either, but rather a feature of the Swift programming language that makes our code more reliable or performant.
This year, I released Thought Detox, written in SwiftUI. For the way I think about apps, SwiftUI lets me build things faster, but as it's new, there were quite a few rough edges that needed special care. For iOS 15 and macOS 12, many new features are being added, and that will make building with SwiftUI even better—but much of that will be iOS 15 only.
I've also started working with a UX designer to (finally, for real) update Per. The current version hasn't been updated since iOS 9 was released nearly six years ago, so it's long overdue. Being able to focus the update only on iOS 15 and macOS 12 will make it much faster to build the update across iOS and the Mac.
May 2021 Updates
Recap: May 2021
Looking purely at dollars, May appears to continue the downward trend of sales for Thought Detox. However, because the app was on sale all month, downloads are actually up. And, again, this is a very small number of downloads, so big percentage changes might still be in the margin of error for number of units.
Here’s what the download numbers looked like for April:
How Do You Detox?
When I created the original Thought Detox web app, it was meant to be a digital version of a traditionally-analogue concept: take a thought that’s upsetting to you, write about it on a piece of paper, and then throw away that piece of paper. And there’s evidence that this works, too:
As it happens, writing down your negative thoughts on a piece of paper and then physically throwing this piece of paper in the trash lessens the salience of these thoughts. Our neural circuitry doesn’t always make a clear distinction between the mental and physical. Physically discarding negative thoughts turns the volume down on them mentally too.
I always thought about the app as a way explore your thoughts through writing. What’s interesting to me is other ways that folks are using the app!
While I tend to use the app during quiet hours at the end of the day, Tony writes about using Thought Detox a little bit more in the heat of the moment, to release negative thoughts about work as they come up.
April 2021 Updates
Recap: April 2021
April appears to continue the downward trend of sales for Thought Detox, though frankly in this very small range of downloads, big percentage changes might still be in the margin of error for number of units.
Here's what the download numbers looked like for April:
Thinking About Syncing
I'm working towards the next major feature of Thought Detox: making it available on the iPad and the Mac.
Well, sort of. That's more of the end goal for the actual next feature that I'm working on: adding another way for you to track your time writing in the app.
Persistence
Right now, if you choose to track your writing time, the app does so by storing it as Mindful Minutes in the Health app on your iPhone. That's a great solution, but it's only available on iPhone — so I'm working on a second option for tracking this data.
March 2021 Updates
Recap: March 2021
Compared to February, with the new app launch, March has been much slower. While that's pretty much what I expected, I didn't think it'd be this much slower. That's okay! It gives me a baseline to compare against as I try things.
Here's what the download numbers looked like for February:
Kind Business ❤️
Growing up watching my parents run a small family business made some lasting impressions on me.
First and foremost: the importance of taking care of your customers. They didn't charge a whole lot for their services, but bent over backwards to serve their customers, often working weekends, and rarely taking a vacation. While I don't think that's especially healthy, that focus on customer service stuck with me, and evolved into a strong user advocacy in any products I'm involved with.
Reinforcing this is the difference that size makes. There are excellent, caring people in every business, but I can't agree more with this post that as a company grows, the less likely their customers feel looked after. "Don't scale past the number of users that you can excellently serve," Sam writes, and that has become a mantra for me. I don't want a million customers — while that would probably mean a life-changing amount of money, I couldn't excellently serve them all.
It's also important to realize that your business is a member of a community — many communities, really. Beyond the community of customers I serve, there's the community of other developers whose advice and whose products make it possible for me to build my own business. There's the community of people in Montreal that, often behind the scenes, help keep me going.
Thought Detox: Updates and Roadmap
Thought Detox v2021.02 Released
Happy Wednesday, friends! A small update has been released and includes the following changes:
- The Settings button is now hidden during the release animation, to match the Release button.
February 2021 Updates
Recap: February 2021
Just like last month, most of my time was spent working on launching Thought Detox on the App Store. This had a lot more to do with all of the other moving parts, besides the app: the landing page, the marketing copy, the press emails, and the Product Hunt announcement.
Here’s what the download numbers looked like for February:
Thought Detox Launch: A Retrospective 📊
Thought Detox has now been available for sale on the App Store since February 15th, with pre-orders opening one week before that. I'm going to focus the discussion on the following timeframes:
- 8-14 February (pre-order week)
- 15-21 February (launch week)
Prior to that, I was sharing some of my work on the app via my personal Twitter account, and set up a beta-testing program via AppAirport. I didn't get a whole lot of feedback from public beta testing, but it was useful to check that the app wasn't crashing anywhere.
(I'll write more about my beta-testing approach another day, and what I've learned from this launch.)
Thought Detox Launch Sale Extended 🚀
It's official! Thought Detox is available for sale on the App Store, and to celebrate, I'm extending the sale price.
The official website also went live Sunday night. Many thanks to Christina Szilbereisz for her work on the design — I'm really thrilled with how it turned out!
I haven't seen a tonne of downloads yet, but nonetheless, Thought Detox has done way better on launch than other apps I've released, which I'm really thrilled about. As of this morning, it's 14th on Product Hunt with 150 upvotes, is in the top 100 Health & Fitness apps, and got its first five-star rating on the App Store. Thank you all for your support!
