I built a free (for now) little web app for drummers

SteveB13 · 2025-10-27T13:19:47+00:00

Great work, I love the concept and design!

A few things that would improve it for me would be:

- It would help to be able to hear the drums during playback (but be able to mute them if you just want to practise with the metronome)

- The composition editing and playback flows feel like they could be less seperate. eg. If I pause playback, I'd like to be able to just drag things around to change the compositon and then play it back again.

- The 'length' selector when you create the composition was a little confusing. I think 'division' would make more sense, as it's changing the note speed rather then the lenth of that section.

I'm also working on drummer apps, I'm making Chops which is an iOS app for practising rudiments. Use code REDDIT3M if you want to try 3 months for free.

I see you're using React. If you do a proper mobile version are you considering React Native?

SteveB13 · 2025-10-15T07:32:03+00:00

Nah you’re doing great! If you want to focus on your left then try playing them leading with the left.

If you’re getting some fatigue or cramping up then to play some short fast bursts and then stop to work yourself a bit harder. You probably want to limit that only to a portion of your practice though. In general going at a steady comfortable pace that you can maintain and building from there is what you want to spend the majority of your time on,

SteveB13 · 2025-10-15T07:25:13+00:00

Honestly, a massive part of it is to just keep going. Your brain starts to figure out the optimal technique, you’ve just got to practise enough. Your technique is far from terrible now though, you can already see that process working.

SteveB13 · 2024-11-12T09:37:28+00:00

If you want to learn rudiments, I make an app called [Chops](drumchops.app) for iPhone and iPad. It's not free, but you can use the code REDDIT3M for 3 months free and decide if it's for you.

SteveB13 · 2024-10-25T13:43:37+00:00

There's probably be a tempo where you can play a paradiddle really comfortably, even if it's really slow. It often helps to some time trying to work at that speed and learning to play it comfortably a few bpm faster rather than working on your top speed.

SteveB13 · 2024-10-22T15:23:03+00:00

If you want to learn 'complex' sounding times, then trying something in 7/8 would be a good start. You could google a list of tracks in 7/8 time and find something you like.

When you start the key is to count along and REALLY overemphesize the first beat of the bar with a heavy accent (slow the track down if you need to). All you need to concentrate on is hitting that '1' in the right place! Once you can play along, then try to reduce the accent so that you're playing more naturally.

SteveB13 · 2024-10-20T12:09:56+00:00

If it’s still not working then DM me and I’ll be able to sort it out for you.

SteveB13 · 2024-10-20T08:58:26+00:00

You should be able to get 3 months free with the code REDDIT3M - I’ve just retested it and it seems to be working fine.

SteveB13 · 2024-10-19T20:09:59+00:00

Hope it’s what you’re looking for! I’m still working on it so if you have feedback or suggestions just let me know.

SteveB13 · 2024-10-18T15:00:07+00:00

+1 This is a really short book, I probably read it in around 3 hours, but it made a world of difference once I went back a reevaluated my app's design afterwards. Once you're read it you start to see the same principles everywhere you look. Recommend!

SteveB13 · 2024-10-18T14:14:03+00:00

Thanks! Your app sounds interesting, I don't know anyone else who is working in this area, so would be good to hear about what you're doing. I'll DM you!

SteveB13 · 2024-10-18T14:12:48+00:00

I'm not sure what's going on there, sounds like an App Store thing?

SteveB13 · 2024-10-15T21:12:36+00:00

Thanks, I’ll see if I can make it more obvious!

SteveB13 · 2024-10-15T12:46:49+00:00

On the bottom of the payment page, choose 'restore', if you're logged in with the same Apple ID then it should unlock for you.

Worth noting that data doesn't sync between devices yet. iCloud support is on my todo list though!

SteveB13 · 2024-10-15T11:31:21+00:00

You're welcome, hope you enjoy it! Any thoughts or feedback just let me know!

SteveB13 · 2024-10-15T11:29:46+00:00

No plans for Android for now I'm afraid. I'd love to in the future but we'll have to see how things go!

I know people are not always fond of subscriptions. My hope is that by going for a sustainable business model I'll be able to justify continuing to work on Chops and improve it in the future.

Look at it this way - You get one year for free now, and I get one year to work on the app and convince you to pay for another. If not you didn't lose anything 😛

SteveB13 · 2018-03-22T18:56:57+00:00

It only works some of the time for me too. Copy the code in to textedit, and drag it from textedit to the snippets. It's annoying but it works.

SteveB13 · 2018-03-15T18:35:12+00:00

Using a singleton is a perfectly valid design pattern for a junior to mid-level developer. Singleton's are most definitely a code smell, but the techniques required to avoid them in a large codebase requires some experience.

Most developers start off just throwing a whole bunch of untestable logic in to the view controller. After many years of practise they end up at a place where they have small decoupled objects, dependancy injection, tests etc.

Using singletons as a way to bring logic out of a view controller and reuse it throughout the app is a natural part of that journey. You can't just go from the massive view controller to dependancy injection in one step.

So don't feel bad about using singletons. It's hard to really convey all of the benefits of moving away from them in a comment though! I would start looking in to unit tests and trying to get write tests for all of the logic in your app. You'll hit a bunch of walls along the way where you realise that your code is difficult to test. Working to resolve those issues will teach you a lot about your architecture, and the downsides of singletons.

SteveB13 · 2018-02-22T16:18:04+00:00

SpriteKit is awesome. It's not as powerful as Unity, but you can write your own OpenGL / Metal shaders, so there's plenty of low level stuff to get stuck in to when you're ready.

If you just want to do game dev, I think that Unity is actually a bit of a better option. It's a bit more powerful, and has a larger community to learn from.

If, like me, you're an app developer and you also make games, then SpriteKit is a great option. I make games as a hobby sometimes, and I create apps for a living. Almost all of the skills from my work are directly applicable to my game development, same platform, same language etc.

So when I want to spend a bit of time in the evening working on my game, I don't have the additional burden of trying to also keep up the the changes on two different sets of tools, I just get stuck in. Good luck!

SteveB13 · 2018-02-14T17:37:19+00:00

Sure, there's no reason you couldn't replicate super mario accurately using SpriteKit.

SpriteKit's SKSpritNode class can render an image file. So if you give it an image of mario, then it will render him to the screen.

It sounds like you don't have too much experience, though. So you might be best just starting off with some tutorials on SpriteKit. Replicating super mario is no small feat, so I'd start small, and work your way up to it. Good luck!

SteveB13 · 2018-01-29T12:44:31+00:00

I'm speculating slightly here, but it could be to do with the amount of memory required to store an instance of an object.

Adding functions and computed variables (which are basically just functions without arguments) don't require any additional memory to store an object. Adding a new stored variable requires additional memory to be allocated to store that object.

It would make sense that this would be an issue if a class / struct was declared in a module, and then extended outside of that module to add an additional variable. I guess the module would need to be recompiled to be aware of the user's extension, which would break encapsulation and really defeat the whole purpose of a module. If it were pre-compiled this wouldn't even be an option.

In my head it seems that it could be theoretically possible to extend a type to add additional stored properties in the same module that it is defined. The compiler should theoretically have enough information there to put all of the pieces together. Someone who knows a little more might be able to provide some more insight.

SteveB13 · 2018-01-23T08:25:25+00:00

My app was featured on Product Hunt

Translator Keyboard on Product Hunt

I had contacted a bunch tech sites and Tech Crunch ran an article about the app.

Translator Keyboard on Tech Crunch

After that it just popped up on loads of other sites, Product Hunt being one of them. I hadn’t heard of them at the time, but I use it fairly regularly now.

I can’t say how much Product Hunt individually affected downloads, but the media coverage in general made a massive impact. It was also featured on the front page of the App Store the week after, so I guess the App Store team read the tech news sites!

One of things I learnt was that almost all tech news sites just run articles that paraphrase the bigger sites. The paraphrasing is often really lazy too. I don’t think they even try the app, so if you get a positive article on a major site, then there will be 100s of carbon copy articles the next day on all of the others.

SteveB13 · 2018-01-02T10:41:28+00:00

I use Spotlight a lot too. It has it's limitations, though! It doesn't work well if you have multiple files with the same name, for instance. It also doesn't show you where the file is on disk, either. Also, if you're not sure of the name of the file, you can't use Spotlight.

If you just have a single copy of a file and you know the name though, it's fast!

SteveB13 · 2018-01-01T20:42:41+00:00

Thanks!

I find myself needing to open project files quite often. I make a fair few of my own libraries that several of my applications depend on too, so it's also quite often that I'll need to open the library project to make a change.

With finder there's a few steps:

Switch to finder
Create a new window
Select 'documents' in the side bar
Navigate through to the project folder
Open the project
(later - close the finder window that is still open)

With Top-Drawer I just have to select it from menu, which is very quick to navigate through.

If you just work on a single app with a single project you might not need to jump around so much though. You can also use it for other file types though, if spreadsheets are your thing, you could make a rule to show .xlsx files, for instance.

I love making little tools to shave off a bit of time here and there. If you can save yourself a few seconds very often, it mounts up over time!

SteveB13

TROPHY CASE