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My name is Théo and I made a little app to resolve a little pain.
Plume is a free Light menubar app for taking Notes.
I've been looking for a long time for a simple popup app in the menubar to get a little notepad.
I found different solutions like Tyke for example which is really nice, but a little too simple for the job and it has a too small writing area. I also found other nice solutions but the apps were always no free and too complex for the need. I couldn't find anything I liked, so I took advantage of the confinement to make this app!
Plume is a Free, Fast and Light app for taking notes, I made some basic features from now long : - Activate minimalist interface for full focus on text edition - Activate magic mode to allow smart text completion - Manage Popover dimension (small, regular, large, xlarge)
It's a simple version for the moment, but if people like it I could work on a more complex version with : - Advanced Backup - Several notes - Checkboxes - Management of bold, italic, ..
And if people really like this application, they can find a link in the settings to financially support the project!
I would love to get some feedback on my little lockdown project :) Best. Théo.
Also, I think if you miss for exemple a trench-coat for hot temperature, I can tell the user that it's something missing in his/her closet. And also if the user have too many t-shirt entered in the app for exemple, I can tell this user that it's too much and letting a word about it to help him/her organized in a better way their closets.
I learned a lot while coding this little side project app on Android and iOS, like using the OpenWeather API.
I created the algorithms to propose the suitable outfit for the day anywhere in the world. It took some time to assembly and think about the looks and the illustrations. But I want to talk to you about my biggest pain: the timezone module.
It was very difficult to get the app working on every timezone of the world. Indeed, I wanted to give weather from morning to night but I needed to know what time was at every town of the world (to display only 4 simple informations : morning, afternoon, evening, night). At fist, I wanted to use the Google Timezone API but it was very expensive.
My first solution was to use Kevin Robert module called city-timezone, it covered 80% of the users requests. Sometimes the city is not found, in this case I choose a timezone list from the web that I parsed, then I used another list for the towns of the world with a timezone indication code inside. So I was able to match the town with the timezone when a user select a town. And finally, if the timezone of the town is still not found, I use timezonedb API (link below) who let me cover at the end almost all the town of the world.
I also set things to not call too much the weather API (like if you want to get the weather 8 mins later at the same position, I didn’t call again the API, I save it for 10 mins inside the app).
The app is still in progress, because I want to add an Inspiration section and to create a more complex outfit proposition algorithm (I like it so far, but I think it can be improved). I already got design feedback by a UX/UI designer that helped me to think about the future experience inside this little app. I also used the Humaaans illustration base and recreated clothes on top, it was very creative and fun to do.
Fun fact: I wanted to create this app at the beginning only for Men living in Paris, France because it was my actual pain: what outfit I should prepare to look my best throughout the full day? And now, my biggest users this month (51%) are Women living in US and UK. It took me a huge amount of time to create english speaker and Women version of the app, but it was a great idea to offer the app to as many people as possible from the beginning, because my target users revealed itself.
LINKS : - Weather API: https://openweathermap.org - Timezone module: https://github.com/kevinroberts/city-timezones - Timezone last chance API: http://timezonedb.com - Humaans illustration library: https://www.humaaans.com/ - Google Timezone API: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/timezone/in...