My Indie Dev Journey: Week #1
Topics: The Importance of X/Twitter Friends, Android Widgets & New Application Idea
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Yes, I am stepping into this scene. The Indie Developer scene. I have been very silent over the past months here on Medium, as I was busy with school, but also with some other programming projects.
Let’s start with the first topic I want to talk about:
The Importance of X/Twitter Friends
It is no secret that most of the Indie Dev scene is on X. I never really liked being on X, but in the past few months, it kind of got better. As one of my goals as an indie developer is to build a supportive audience, I’ve taken the Skillshare course Making Twitter Friends by Kevon Cheung. It opened my eyes that X is not only a platform to “market” your indie product, but also to learn a lot from others. That’s why I’ve been committed to interacting with a lot of different people on X the past few days, and I have to admit: It is quite fun. I like this more personal approach a lot and am excited to continue using this approach.
Implementing Android Widgets for my App Doerr
Okay, now let’s make a bold statement: Creating Android Widgets is a huge Pain.
And the second bold statement: iOS Widgets are easier to create than Android Widgets.
Whew, these two opinions will earn a lot of critique. But, let me explain why I think so:
When I started implementing widgets (for both iOS and Android), I started with iOS. What I loved about Swift, is, that it’s not that different from Dart & Flutter. I didn’t think I was going to appreciate this about Swift, but after starting with Android, I realized: One file is enough. Literally. You can write your whole code for your iOS widget in one single file if you want. In Android, you have tons of different files for colors, fonts, receiving data, UI…
Don’t get me wrong. It is important to have a good file structure and separate your code into different parts. But being forced to do so is a huge problem in my point of view. Especially when you only need to make these adjustments for one single widget. I get it. You develop your entire Android App in Kotlin: You’ve already defined all the colors, fonts etc. But not if you are just using it for Widgets.
New Application Idea
The past few weeks, I had a very interesting idea that resulted from a problem I had while I was creating a presentation.
Imagine this: You have a statistic, a white background, black graph, and you want to make it transparent. So you search for a tool that does exactly that, that removes the background.
Here are the three difficulties I had: Either you had to sign up to access the tool, OR the UI was terrible. The third issue: I uploaded the file, selected the color, converted it and I downloaded it, until I realized, that the edges looked shitty. In the end, I wrote a quick Python script that does that for me, where I can tweak different parameters to make the edges look smoother, because I couldn’t find any tool that met my requirements 100%.
My point is not to create a platform that does that. My point is: I experienced this issue with so many things related to design, that it got me thinking.
Why isn’t there any application, one-time payment, that has all these different designer utilities ready for access with instant feedback?
And that’s the idea, my friends. But this time, I am not just going to start building and hope that it sells. I am not a designer myself. So I need to validate the product. And that’s going to be one of my main to-dos for next week. Validate this idea. And in one week, I am going to tell you guys how it went.
Thank you for reading through my journey! I appreciate any feedback, positive, or negative!
