Today’s efforts centred around three small things:
- Even more web interactivity.
- What should the key first release features be?
- What does an intuitive and clean settings page look like?
And one big thing:
- How should we handle distribution?
We discuss the details below.
App
Deciding on the minimal key features for the app proved harder than we expected. It’s hard to let features go, because the app would just feel so much better if it just had this one more thing!
But given we’ve set out to release this app in a week, we have to be very strict on what the most essential features are — optimize for them — and get the app into users hands.
One feature we decided to add to the first release, is the feature to hide / unhide the app with a hot-key. After using the app myself for the last few days, I realized it might be nice to have the clock hide when watching something like Netflix or Youtube in full screen.
However, I don’t necessarily want my timer to stop, I just want to be able to hide and unhide it with a hot-key. So we added that in today, a demo of which can be seen in this X post
We also redesigned our settings page again…it’s not as easy as we initially thought.
Website
Today we added the final feature to the homepage demo! It was a preferences window that closely mirrors the one in the app.
This gives users an idea of what they can change in the preferences, and also gives them another window to play around with.
We ran into lots of fun bugs… Everything from not correctly getting the window the user clicked on to pop-in.
Finally we’ll be able to start doing some work on the back end!
Distribution
We were deciding between distributing through the App Store or doing it ourselves, and ultimately landed on the latter.
Not only will it be good practice to set up payments with Polar, but the 4% + 40¢ fee is a lot easier to swallow than the 30% cut Apple would take.
We also decided on having a free trial period; if users decide they like the OverClock app after 3 days, they can purchase a license.
Polar is nice for this since they handle the license key generation, activation, and validation. However, it's up to us to connect the pieces from there.
Though this does add some extra complexity, we’re excited to get started!