It seems like we’ve reached an impasse with Treat . It’s been our focus for almost a year now and while we’ve learned quite a bit about what people want and don’t want, there hasn’t been enough interest in any direction to really warrant the continued effort in the product. That said, I still think two key points we got right will define whatever product wins the mobile gift card segment in the future:
- You can send a gift card to anywhere (or nearly so)
- Interactions with your friends during/after sending
The plan is to keep it as a side project so anyone with outstanding treats can still use them and new users can send them. I even have a couple new features to roll out that are mostly done before it really goes into cold storage: full on sender-to-receiver chat (powered by Layer) and a new way to get info about your treat location (business hours, photos, etc) will be heading to the App Store soonish.
I’ll probably write a longer breakdown of the issues faced once that release is out.
Other things for this week: I am writing posts for Try Again before it even exists! This is traditionally opposite of how I usually do things (build first, write later) which doesn’t often work out. In general I tend to gravitate towards the “hard” engineering work first and the actual content or validation steps later which may have been the root of some initial issues with treat 😁 So we’re giving the reverse process a shot.
I lied just a little bit: I did doodle a quick design for the blog and started working up a quick template in Hugo before I started writing this. But it’s by no means complete (I don’t even think I can see this post yet). So the plan is to see how much I like writing about current projects a few times a week and slowly build a local site around it just to see how it feels. I’d like to have a rough site by the end of this week.
I asked around for some connections related to VR Project . I should put together some of the research I’ve done in the case that I get a meeting. I already know one company with a similar goal, though their technology choices make me wonder if they’re competent. It’s a bit of a stretch but I’ll keep tabs on it until it plays out.
I must, must, must resolve the issues with the upcoming
PermissionScope
1.0.2 release this week. We’re encountering more and more people creating issues for stuff that’s been fixed and not released so it’s starting to be a drain. Still no great plans for how to test the project because of the complexity of permissions on iOS. Still thinking about it. I’m happy with the contributions and progress for Pantry so far, I should review the enum support and get that pulled in this week. Also, I have a plan for getting a bit more attention for Pantry that I should try this week.
While we’re on Swift, I started writing actual technical posts on That Thing in Swift again during the break. I realized that I’m being dumb not capitalizing on the insane Google ranking I have for some swift search terms so I might as well put a bit of effort into expanding the topics covered. Most of the blogs/results are slow and littered with ads so the least I can do is give a non-shitty alternative. So far I’ve published a piece on guard statements and I’m working on why you want to write your own API clients (as opposed to ad hoc usage of Alamofire or something).