Intro
This is the first post in the lazy sunday series where I plan to talk about iOS/macOS development in general and my products in particular. They say it's good advertising and fun, let's see.
This post was supposed to come out last Sunday. I had planned to gather ideas for the post throughout the week (which I did) and then write in the morning on Sunday, while everyone is still asleep. I messed up with the second part, getting up early on Sunday is hard, no beautiful photo for the cover, and turning thoughts into text takes more than just half an hour. In general, writing needs to happen throughout the week, seems like I'm not capable of doing it in one morning.
Conclusions are made, I write during the week.
Returning to the apps, there are several that came from under my pen:
Quotato - a quote app for iOS with a cool design (drawn by my friend, not me), currently free, probably will eventually get features and paid subscriptions. Updates are rare. Has widgets.
BitBot - open source client for the excellent CI service - Bitrise. If you use Bitrise - take it, it's convenient. Allows adding multiple accounts and viewing all builds together. Was updated in November during Hacktoberfest for the t-shirts. Now - unclear.
Cleaner - current project in active development in the final stage, actually the reason for all the fuss. Xcode filling the disk with lots of junk, caches, iOS snapshots that will never be needed got annoying. Manually cleaning derived data got tiresome. Product market fit is obvious, let's go. Due to being extremely busy, a year has passed, just need to add a subscription with RevenueCat and it can be released.
Cleaner
As all my free time is occupied by Cleaner, here's a bit more about it. The design was ready a couple of weeks ago and since then all the time has been spent on its implementation, about 30 hours, which is not that much, essentially 4 working days with coffee breaks.
I wanted to add some animated features to the design to liven up the UI and after figuring out what and where to animate, I decided to be on the cutting edge of technology and asked chat GPT to write me the code for calculating geometry for animations. I did this, I must admit, without much enthusiasm, wondering how I would write it myself after the chat hallucinates some Bezier curves. To my surprise, the code it generated not only compiled but also worked more or less fine. In the end, I wrote the two animations in about 30-40 minutes, which is pretty good. I highly recommend not writing such tasks yourself, the chat handles them quite decently.
TF and user feedback
Obviously, during the development process, it would be nice to get some feedback from potential users, so I regularly upload builds of the app to TestFlight and communicate about it wherever I can. At the moment, there are a hundred users who regularly launch the app and some even share their thoughts about it.
The idea has proven itself, at the moment several bugs have been found and several positive reviews have been received which is uplifting. Naturally, analytics are included in the builds, so I know that in a month those who installed the app from TF cleaned 220GB and the largest single cleanup was 29GB.
For those who haven't installed the beta and are struggling with where to get a couple of gigs to install the new Xcode - it's not too late: https://deszip.github.io/Cleaner-Tracker/
I hope the next post will be released on schedule :) Stay tuned!