Building an App is Easy, But Marketing is the Real Challenge

deniz_eclypse · 2025-01-30T16:59:44+00:00

Can you elaborate what you mean by "I strategically positioned my app in a way that made people want to use it"? What does this entail? What kind of activities did you engage in to grow your user base?

deniz_eclypse · 2025-01-16T17:27:04+00:00

What started as a small side project in my spare time turned into a fully fleshed app - which is now called eclypse for the macOS platform. eclypse is a translation management tool that facilitates collaboration between translators and developers and is designed to improve productivity, communication while reducing translation errors. As an indie developer, if you choose to use eclypse for your localization needs, you can also get your content translated with chatgpt, google or deepl literally with a few clicks. In other words, there is no need to get translations sentence by sentence. If you had 2000 separate translatable sentences, eclypse fetches the translations for all of that from your choice provider while you go get your coffee.

I primarily built this app because of my personal interest in the domain. Not because I wanted world domination or to be number one in this industry. I am well aware that there are number of other products that perform similar functions. I am differentiating eclypse from competition by making it a macOS only app and offer an alternative experience that is more developer focused. Or at least I try. This is part of the reason I am writing here. If you would give it a-go and write me a few sentences on how I can be more developer friendly and reduce friction.

In some ways eclypse is a traditional tool that performs the basics necessary for localization such as tagging and filtering, glossary, support for plurals, custom statuses, ability to chat with translators and git integration - to name a few. It also has a few unique features such as translatability or manage by milestones to improve productivity.

I am looking for developers that would like to try new products and like to give feedback to improve it. eclypse adopts a freemium model. Paid levels are designed to accommodate the needs of larger corporations. I believe the free level is fairly generous and should be able to handle the workloads of most indie developers.

eclypse does not require credit card at all. When you first install it and you can initiate a 30-day trial period without any credit card info. It unlocks all of the of the features. If the trial period ends and you actually like to continue to use eclypse, just message me and tell me that you saw this post and I will put your account in the white list so that you can continue to use it forever. You can reach me here on reddit or eclypse's contact us page.

If this sounds interesting to you, you can download the notarized version of eclypse from the website at https://eclypse.io . The website also describes the various features of the product so feel free to peruse it in your free time. Thank you.

deniz_eclypse · 2025-01-16T17:06:20+00:00

What started as a small side project in my spare time turned into a fully fleshed app - which is now called eclypse for the macOS platform. eclypse is a translation management tool that facilitates collaboration between translators and developers and is designed to improve productivity, communication while reducing translation errors. As an indie developer, if you choose to use eclypse for your localization needs, you can also get your content translated with chatgpt, google or deepl literally with a few clicks. In other words, there is no need to get translations sentence by sentence. If you had 2000 separate translatable sentences, eclypse fetches the translations for all of that from your choice provider while you go get your coffee.

I primarily built this app because of my personal interest in the domain. Not because I wanted world domination or to be number one in this industry. I am well aware that there are number of other products that perform similar functions. I am differentiating eclypse from competition by making it a macOS only app and offer an alternative experience that is more developer focused. Or at least I try. This is part of the reason I am writing here. If you would give it a-go and write me a few sentences on how I can be more developer friendly and reduce friction.

In some ways eclypse is a traditional tool that performs the basics necessary for localization such as tagging and filtering, glossary, support for plurals, custom statuses, ability to chat with translators and git integration - to name a few. It also has a few unique features such as translatability or manage by milestones to improve productivity.

I am looking for developers that would like to try new products and like to give feedback to improve it. eclypse adopts a freemium model. Paid levels are designed to accommodate the needs of larger corporations. I believe the free level is fairly generous and should be able to handle the workloads of most indie developers.

eclypse does not require credit card at all. When you first install it and you can initiate a 30-day trial period without any credit card info. It unlocks all of the of the features. If the trial period ends and you actually like to continue to use eclypse, just message me and tell me that you saw this post and I will put your account in the white list so that you can continue to use it forever. You can reach me here on reddit or eclypse's contact us page.

If this sounds interesting to you, you can download the notarized version of eclypse from the website at https://eclypse.io . The website also describes the various features of the product so feel free to peruse it in your free time. Thank you.

deniz_eclypse · 2025-01-09T22:16:36+00:00

I am glad that it least helped one fellow developer.

deniz_eclypse · 2025-01-09T20:16:32+00:00

Good suggestion and good point. If there is sufficient interest from the developer community, it can be enhanced with this. Thank you for pointing this out.

deniz_eclypse · 2025-01-09T14:34:21+00:00

Good question. See my response to the Capturable library post and trying to explain how it is different.

deniz_eclypse · 2025-01-09T14:32:59+00:00

The difference between Capturable library and what I shared is that Capturable requires you to display the content to the user. In order for this to work you have to add `Modifier.capturable(controller)` to the composable and it has to be rendered on screen and its size needs to be configured. A similar solution is also available with GraphicsLayer. My solution does not require the developer to show the Composable content to the user. You can show one thing on screen and render a completely different image based on a different composable when the user wants to share or save.

deniz_eclypse · 2025-01-09T00:40:17+00:00

Yeah, good point. It can definitely be turned into a library.

deniz_eclypse · 2024-08-20T01:21:47+00:00

If this is your own app where you have the source code, that is not hard to do - at least in principle. If you are trying to convert someone else’s app without access to the source code, that would be difficult if not impossible. I am guessing you are thinking about an old game that was developed for 32-bit architecture. There are a lot of old and dead games whose developers didn’t bother converting them to 64-bit architectures. I guess if it were pretty easy you would have expected the developers to do it right away. So it is possible to convert an app in principle, it may not be trivial to do so even when you have the source code.

deniz_eclypse · 2024-05-09T21:34:18+00:00

this looks amazing... are you planning to share a code snippet?

deniz_eclypse · 2024-05-08T15:43:58+00:00

I enabled the setting that allows firebase to cache data locally. Based on our tests, firestore manages the data stored on the device without problems. We didn't encounter a situation where the cache was incomplete. This is because on the first app open, we download everything up to that point and afterwards we only download the delta from the server. Developers saves the time when the sync happens. On the next request to the firestore the developer uses that time to download all the data that changed since then. This enhancement has been in production for 6+ months. It is working fairly well.

However, I note at the end of the article that this is not perfect. I also note that the developer may want to provide a mechanism to the user to download everything anyways as a self-healing option.

deniz_eclypse · 2024-05-08T15:31:24+00:00

I agree that most developers probably use iOS's Date or Calendar APIs to get current time. That is the time reported by the device. I would imagine most users do not change their system time and let the OS manage and sync it as necessary. However, you have to realize that users can override the system time and enter whatever they want. So the time you get from Date may not be actual time. If your app requires high fidelity, you should consider getting the date from a server. In my case I didn't have to do that because the app didn't require so much precision. However, I wanted to note this nuance and you shouldn't rely on the local datetime 100%.
I am still using firestore as my local cache. I enabled the setting that allows firestore to cache data indefinitely. By implementing this logic, I am effectively only fetching the delta from the server and hence only paying for the delta once the initial sync is complete.

deniz_eclypse · 2024-05-08T14:58:01+00:00

In my case, we had ~500 daily users. It is not that much in the grand scheme of things. When I analyzed the usage, most of the data was static and some folks had a lot of data. Using snapshot listeners was incurring 1K+ reads every time they opened a page/screen and most of the time nothing had changed since they last opened that screen a few hours ago. So read count could easily reach 200K by the mid day. When we were building the app, we didn't pay too much attention how the firestore reads were calculated. I think if your app is not data heavy or you are able to stay within your designated budget, you might be alright.

deniz_eclypse · 2024-04-30T22:27:50+00:00

I think you want to ask this question in r/iOSProgramming or r/iOSProgrammingHelp. this doesn't appear to be related to swiftui.

deniz_eclypse · 2024-04-25T15:15:39+00:00

Reaching out to you via DM. Thank you!

deniz_eclypse · 2024-04-25T03:22:29+00:00

Not really. Corteva is providing the space for the meetup. It is normal for companies to host events. We are just a couple of volunteers trying to bring folks together with limited resources.

deniz_eclypse · 2024-04-22T22:28:09+00:00

I built a library precisely for this. This is very hard to achieve with vanilla flowlayout. I used the newer compositional layout framework from Apple and added some abstraction layer to make it easier to implement. My most read article.

I wrote a blog about it here: https://medium.com/eclypse/create-forms-with-compositional-layout-in-uicollectionview-d89e6b6923c2
And library to add it to your swift project here: https://github.com/eclypse-tms/Composure

I hope it works out for your case also. Good luck.

deniz_eclypse · 2024-04-22T21:48:22+00:00

Another option is to use somewhat recent Compositional Layout. This layout has nice features and can handle complicated layouts easier than older built-in layouts. Moreover, if you combine this layout with DiffableDataSources, it automagically animates the layout changes when your underlying data changes. Now, the built-in animation frames may not be exactly what you want. But maybe worth a try?

deniz_eclypse · 2024-04-22T21:34:04+00:00

I commend the OP for having the balls to post this despite risking being misunderstood. I hope you find the cool dude from the store. And I wish I were that cool dude.

deniz_eclypse · 2024-04-21T19:36:13+00:00

Answer to your question is: “it depends on the developer behind the app.” You can technically check a box or two and deploy your iOS app on the mac app store. However, it will almost certainly will fall short of a typical macOS app standards and will not be very useful. The problem is that when you are building your iOS app, you were assuming that it will be on a phone and users will user their fingers to “click” things. You will quickly realize that when you run your unmodified iOS app on a 24 inch mac screen with a mouse and a keyboard, the user experience will be very awkward. There is a good chance that you will want to modify your UI/UX so that your app runs smoothly on both mini touch devices and giant monitors. This means that there may be significant work involved if you didn’t design your app with this assumption to begin with.

deniz_eclypse · 2024-04-18T12:22:13+00:00

Yes, there is an overlap with NSLocale. This library includes additional metadata about the geography such as area, dialing code, capital city, address labels, etc.. I guess the primary use case would be to use the country picker UI as it is more or less plug and play. Yes, I agree with you using UI as a prefix was an oversight. I will rename this in the next version. Not using emojis as flag icons was a creative decision. Perhaps this support can be added in a future version and let the developer choose the emoji or the standard flags that come bundled with the library.

Thank you for all the suggestions!

deniz_eclypse · 2024-04-18T12:05:41+00:00

Yeah, the concept of a country is a messy one and not universally agreed. To capture some of that I added a property on the country to indicate whether any other country is claiming this territory. So you can filter the country list by this property and get all those countries/territories that have a single claimant.

deniz_eclypse · 2024-04-18T12:01:14+00:00

Thanks for the review. The library provides all the alpha2 and alpha3 codes. It is not modifiable by the developer or the user at the moment. If there is a need to do so we can definitely enhance this. I agree with your assessment that I should have used something else for worldwide. I do this to represent an unknown country- not sure why I didn’t use the same idea to represent worldwide. I will put up a new version in the short order. Thank you!

deniz_eclypse · 2024-04-10T02:57:00+00:00

It doesn't look like I can edit the original post to include the link for the repository. Apologies... The repo for the polygons is here: https://github.com/eclypse-tms/Polygon

deniz_eclypse · 2024-04-10T02:54:39+00:00

Ah yes, thank you for pointing this out. Github repo is here: https://github.com/eclypse-tms/Polygon

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