Purrticles

I'm stewing a bit about what features should be in a Pro version, to make v1.0 of Purrticles a bit more convincing.

Code export is an obvious Pro feature.

Do I need to add another Pro feature in v1.0?

In particular, I'm stewing about one of the hook features. You can see that below. If you've ever used a particle editor, there's a wall of settings which is very confusing. In most cases, you can ignore them because they are all using default values.

In the current beta, Purrticles already fixes that. You can tap the Applied tab and see the controls reduce to just those which actually have an effect. It's also live - if you edit something down to a default, it vanishes from that view.

The code export is similarly limited - it only exports the non-default parameters.

Using the Applied view already makes designing particle effects much more enjoyable - I'm starting to feel like my itch was scratched. So I think of this as a core hook to get people interested in the product. Hiding it behind a Pro paywall feels like a bad idea.

SO

Should I add another Pro feature?

Another small one on the roadmap is being able to attach comments to a document. You would still be able to view them but adding your own might be Pro-only?

Purrticles started as a testbed for developing in SwiftUI, especially exploring a "multi-platform" Apple app (ie: including Mac as well as mobile). I also wanted to explore how RevenueCat's platform for managing app store payments worked.

I got bogged down in some poorly-explained aspects of Apple's document-based apps and left it there.

Jump forward to 2024 and I (rather late) saw RevenueCat's Ship-a-ton competition announced.

It was only for new products and so Touchgram didn't qualify, but I realised I could dust-off Purrticles and have a go. I'd already been contemplating a slight pivot into building a family of apps.

Apple give great feedback in 1-1 consultations at their annual WWDC and the design lab people (yes, real Apple Designers!) had been great. One thing they said was that Touchgram needed a simplified experience. I needed to move complicated editing out.

At that point I hadn't even got around to adding the (very) complicated particle editor.

So, moving particle editing out to a completely separate product seemed a good idea and the competition was impetus to focus on getting it to market.

Unfortunately, I was deep in wrapping v1.3.5 of Touchgram itself and didn't get that shipped until about 10 days before the Ship-a-ton deadline.

A deadline, not just to have a product "finished" but to have it through app store approval and using the RevenueCat API...

That didn't happen - to be safe, I would have had to submit it to Apple with days to spare (approval of apps with subscriptions being more complicated).

Having not shipped-a-ton on time, I went back over the product breakdown into v 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 etc. and pulled a few more features into the v1.0 design. I wanted it to be immediately more compelling, useful and to avoid any suggestion from app reviewers that it was "just" a copy of the existing XCode editor.

Unlike previous products, mostly because the competition encouraged it, I've been doing a "build in public" with Purrticles. In my haste, I utterly forgot about the IndieHackers community - most of the posts are on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/purrticles/ but I'll keep up to date on here from now on.

V1.0 is probably a day or two from going to Apple. I've had some fun with iOS18 and polishing those last couple of features.