Seasons Journaling v1.15 - Journal Bands & more!

This release primarily featured the introduction of a new customization type - journal bands, but also included a lot of less glamorous behind the scenes fixes.

There were fixes made to address edge case crashes (refreshing access tokens, date conversions), a fix for an issue related to the iOS 16 update that left the app unusable, and optimizations to how files were being saved to AWS. I learned more about Core Data. Data can only be updated in the same context it was created. I don't really understand this, but I wasn't about to try and rework Core Data to work from a background thread. Instead, I limited the data being updated to recent entries based on date to prevent my UI from being locked up while data was being stored to Core Data. I even squeezed in a long overdue security measure to store tokens in a Keychain.

On the UI side, I'm very happy with the continued progress. The design is more and more skeuomorphic and really highlights the customization aspect of the app. The design looks more professional and minimalistic. I can see parts of the app that have taken big steps forward, which makes it clear that other areas of the app have room to catch up as well.

All in all, it was a very productive release. I kind of sputtered near the end (as I often do). My friend says the last 10% is the next 90%, but as always we got it done, and I'm very satisfied with the results.

On the business/marketing side, we have new app store previews, I'm continuing to tinker with ASO keywords and Apple search ad bids and keywords. I'm not sure how much I'm learning. It's a very unscientific process, but I hope that at least I'm getting a feel for what is working and what isn't. A few more purchases have come through, which is encouraging.

There are two remaining features I plan on implementing before slowing down on the engineering side and ramping up marketing. 1) encryption - it will be very nice to be able to say with full confidence that journal data is private, even from me and 2) I want to add another item (stickers) - I feel like this will give users plenty of fun ways to customize their journals.

I am eager to focus more on marketing. I know people always say not to wait to market your product, but I will be happy to market a product that I am proud of, even if it still has a ways to go. I've also decided that it's just hard to do both at the same time, even harder to do both well.