2.0 - A new kind of motivation

I released a major update of No Meat Today with an Apple Watch app, a way to see your cows from up close and name each of them. It also introduces an exclusive cow design to celebrate Earth Day on April 22, and I already sketched two more cows I plan to add in the coming months.

I based all of those features on ideas I had before releasing the first version, but they made it into this version because I received feedback and requests from users that were matching those ideas.

Before I published the app, I was building an app that would please only me, and imagining that some people might love it.

Now I build features that still please me, but I also think about those users. And I always send them a follow-up email when a feature we talked about makes it to a new release. This is a big boost for motivation, knowing that at least one or more users will feel a bit of joy when the feature becomes available.

The Watch app is built entirely with SwiftUI, which I knew nothing about. It took me less than an hour to build the first version of the UI. The hardest part was actually to learn about Watch Connectivity and make it work with SwiftUI.

For the cow population tab, I decided that I needed a zoom transition. It took me a whole weekend before things finally clicked, thanks to a Stack-Overflow answer.

So I learned a lot, hit a couple of roadblocks, and felt quite lonely at times, but I had a lot of fun.

Lastly, I'm trying something about the subscription. I know people tend to dislike subscriptions, so I added a small text which explains why it is a subscription instead of a one-time purchase. I also make it easy for users to contact me if they think my business model is unfair. We'll see how that goes.