Not a ship-a-ton

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.