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Comment by alexandargyurov | Hacker News Reader

I built and app called Life Tracker[0] a while back, it's aim was to track your mood and have everything in one place. My blue sky goal was to reach something like life.so.

It's good to see people working in this space, though I feel as if sometimes the scope can be wayy to big. Everyone has different types of workflows, so I guess for a product to be used by a lot of people, it has to allow for as many possible custom workflows. Though at the same time keeping a simple design and easy-to-use interface.

It's hard for me to tell, is life.so Mac only?

[0] https://alexandar.me/lifetracker

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Hey Alex, very cool project! What made you pause working on it?

You are making a great point. There is an inherent trade-off between customisability and simplicity. That is not necessarily a problem though because I think there are different target groups depending on where your product is on this scale. I like to think of productivity software as a pair of shoes where everyone has their preferred size and fit. That also allows different tools to successfully co-exist.

The desktop application is Electron-based, so porting it to Windows will be relatively easy. For mobile we go native though and that's why a native Android application will take some longer.

I like that analogy. Works nicely with having multiple products that do the same thing.

> What made you pause working on it?

I lost interest in building it, I still use it everyday but now I'm just waiting (hoping) that I'll eventually get back to it.

I've signed up to the beta, definitely keep me updated :)

Are you happy with how the application looks and behaves on the Mac?

Apple is clearly moving to having iOS apps work on the Mac. Do you think the iOS Routine app would work on the Mac?

That's a very good point. Definitely Apple's direction.

I think it will take quite some time to reunite both world. But maybe indeed, eventually, we'll have only the iOS app that will run on both iPhones and macs.

Note thought that there will always be a big difference in experience. On desktop, we want the experience to be center-ed around the keyboard shortcut, the console and natural language.

On iOS (at least for most people), it's faster to use a well-crafter UI/UX than typing natural language. Though again, in the future, we might go in the direction of voice.

Time will tell :)

> On iOS (at least for most people)

Are you assuming a phone here or including the 12" iPad Pro with a keyboard?

Hi criddell, I'm the iOS dev for Routine. As of now, the iOS application is restricted for iPhone only. Regarding the iPad with keyboard it is definitely something we need to think about, as the usage is closer to a desktop than a phone. As of now, if we authorized the iPhone version to be used on iPad it would lack the main desktop feature : the console.

If you did decide to support an iPad with keyboard, I wonder what the experience on the Mac would be compared to the Electron app?

You can probably tell Electron isn't my favorite way to make Mac apps.

Surely if we were to have the console on iPad (and all the features that are not developped on iOS as of now), we probably could release a native MacOS app along. But realistically it will not be in the near future, as the iOS app is lagging a fair amount behind the electron app. As of now, we're focusing on iOS on the simplest and most used functionalities as well as features that works well with touch UI.

Reading all the negative sentiment on HN about Electron beforehand I was a bit concerned about picking it for the desktop app but now I am positively surprised to be honest.

I totally understand that Electron's memory footprint is not acceptable for very small apps that only serve as a utility. For Life though, which is supposed to replace 2-3 other apps, a memory footprint of ~300mb seems fine to me. In-app performance is also good.

I cannot say anything about the iOS Routine app because I have not tried it yet.

Routine's iOS app is written in native Swift.

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