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manuelkehl
Joined 9 karma
Indie app developer for Apple platforms
https://manuelkehl.com
- Came here to write a comment along those same lines haha
- A little less than a year ago, I launched Zenitizer, a clutter-free meditation timer designed and optimized for Apple platforms: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/meditation-timer-zenitizer/id6...
Motivation: As a long-time meditator myself, I felt like I had outgrown guided meditations but still wanted a tool that’d support me in returning my focus with regular interval bells and - on occasion - pleasant background sounds (although I personally prefer to sit in silence) as well as show me daily goals and streaks to stay motivated.
As somewhat of an Apple nerd, I wanted this tool to be well integrated (Shortcuts, Widgets, Apple Health, etc…) and look and feel right at home on Apple devices (especially the Watch, which I primarily use for mediation tracking).
It’s the classic “scratch your own itch” story to be honest. Sounds cliche, but it’s a great source of intrinsic motivation! Seeing others use my app on a regular basis and valuing it for the very same reasons I started building it is a wonderful feeling.
Challenges and Hurdles: One challenge is certainly learning to prioritize new features and other work correctly and estimating the work needed. The latter is particularly tricky when working with new frameworks and technologies and the best way to overcome this challenge is to not be to hard on myself and learn to plan with more slack than anticipated :)
- https://manuelkehl.com is where I maintain an overview of the apps I’m working on as well as my blog.
Instead of running individual landing pages for my apps, I just set up redirects that point to the corresponding page on my website for each app.
For example: https://zenitizer.app and https://latermator.app
- 5 points
- Followed by the last four digits of your SSN and your zip code, right? Perfection!
- https://manuelkehl.com
My personal blog as well as a place to showcase the iOS & macOS apps I’m working on.
It’s statically generated with Hugo and, for the first time, I actually created the theme myself (based on the lightweight CSS framework Bulma). Being essentially just a bunch of SASS files, Bulma allowed me to easily cherry-pick only what I needed, extend and tweak as required and easily integrate it into the Hugo build pipeline.
Designing and developing the theme was a really cool experience because my background is mostly in C, C++ Objective C and Swift and this was the most serious “web project” I have done to date. I still prefer writing native apps but have definitely enjoyed this excursion into the world of SCSS, HTML and JS :)
Now if only I got around to actually blogging more regularly :D
- Hey all! I wrote a post about my high-level thoughts on the utility of ChatGPT, after using it to help me build a Mac app for ChatGPT.
To be honest, my "insights" aren't particularly unique or novel but I figured I'd share this anyway, in case someone would enjoy the read :)
- 5 points
- Hey everyone!
Like many of you, I was excited to play around with ChatGPT when it launched - and quite curious to see what it is (and isn't!) capable of... Being an "Apple guy" who likes native apps that are well integrated into the system, I quickly prototyped a "ChatGPT web interface wrapper" app for Mac shortly after.
The actual chat is, of course, still the original ChatGPT web interface but with a tiny sprinkle of custom CSS and a number of native controls and keyboard shortcuts that hook into the website to make it more convenient to use (IMO). The app window can be quickly summoned and hidden with a global hotkey (my vision for this was basically "Spotlight for ChatGPT").
It can also capture screenshots of the whole conversation in a single image, which comes in handy when sharing conversations with friends or on social media. I know there are browser plugins that also do this (and do it better in some regards!) but for folks like me who just want a Mac app and a convenient way to take, manage and share screenshots this works pretty well. It's just a hobby project after all :)
After using it myself for a while, I decided to share it with others, hoping it'll be useful for some. You can download it for free from Gumroad (just enter $0). I originally just built this for myself and didn't even plan to publish it at all, so I'm just really excited to see that others are using it too!
If you'd like to see it in action, there's a little demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL8sh8kgQBI
- 1 point
It started as a typical "scratch my own itch" indie project since I, too, was looking for an app like this for iOS and watchOS and couldn't find one that ticked the boxes for me.
Happy to answer questions and always open for feedback!
Cheers!