Work Log

Hey everyone, I wanted to share an update on Smart Lists progress…

During the holidays, I made good progress on the feature, but then ran into some tricky issues. I had to revamp Sofa’s data model a bit to get things working properly. This little detour took a decent amount of time, and I’m just about wrapped up with it. In hindsight, it’s good that I made some of these data model changes because it should make Ingredients more efficient throughout the app.

Anyways, once I’m finished up with the data model work I’ll be jumping back into finishing the UI for Smart Lists. This still needs a good amount of love, but I’m hoping to have it in your hands for testing in the next few weeks.

Thanks for all your patience and let me know if you have any questions!

Smart Lists in Sofa are coming along very slowly, but nicely. I finished a lot of tedious work this week to get all of this connected, but it’s starting to come together. Right now only Text Ingredients function, but I’ll be diving into the other Ingredients next week. Open to any and all feedback on this 👋.

Since working on custom categories and Ingredients, I’ve been thinking through the most useful first way to “expose” all those new features in @sofahq. I’ve settled on “Smart Lists” and I’ve just started working on it this past week. If you’re interested to see my progress and how it’s going to work, check out this video.

I’m 100% open to feedback on this too.

Soon you’ll be able to add anything into Sofa via a link. There are two reasons this makes sense for the product:

1. Sofa’s data sources don’t have everything and adding a book, video game, or music via a link is handy
2. People do more with their downtime than just consume media. They eat with friends, travel, cook, and more

Adding links into Sofa increases it’s flexibility, and allows people to organize their downtime beyond media.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what to call “Custom Properties”. That name feels a little too technical to me.

Here’s my working idea that I’d love some feedback on: “Enhancements”

With these new properties, you can essentially create your own custom features in Sofa. They enhance the experience you get out of the box.

Enhancements sounds much simpler and friendlier to me, and also kind of describes what this feature does.

I’m open to feedback on this 👋

I want to share a little preview of something pretty cool I’ve been working on for Sofa. There’s still a good bit of refinement that I need to do, but I want to start getting feedback.

The working title for this feature is called “Custom Properties” (I’m open to other ideas…naming is hard lol).

Basically, you’ll be able to add your own custom properties to items in Sofa. Here’s the different properties you’ll be able to add:

• Text
• Number
• Date
• Link
• Toggle
• Select
• Multi-Select

Here’s a little demo showing how you can edit the properties within a detail view

This shows how you can edit existing properties and add new ones

I’m working hard to get this out to the beta group for further testing and feedback. First, I need to finish a few things and do some testing.

I’m open to any and all feedback on this. There is a lot of power in this feature, but also a lot of potential for confusion. I’m happy to answer any and all questions.

A few weeks ago I really needed to communicate with people who were using Sofa…but I couldn’t. The best option I had was social media, a blog post, and App Store release notes. So yea, not many good options.

I wanted to fix this, so I built a real-time announcement system into Sofa. In this video, I talk about how it works and how I plan to use it.

I think I went a little too extra on this simple setting 🙃

📺 New Video 📺

I think this one is pretty fun. The current pricing page for Sofa has a few problems and I show my process and design iterations for fixing it.

So if you like seeing UI redesigns, this video is for you.

I am working on some changes to the Super Sofa upgrade screen. Basically, I want to highlight the annual plan more than the other options. Lots of good reasons for this.

See the full convo on Threads

Here’s another iteration I’m trying. Still keeping the pricing up top, but tidying up the spacing and overall visual hierarchy.

I’ve seen more my pricing screens with price on the top or bottom. So I’m not sure what will work for me here. But I have some benchmark numbers to track against.

This might be a good compromise…using a floating card at the bottom. Still needs some TLC, but this might work

This is pretty close to final and I think it’s coming together pretty nicely. This solves the two biggest problems my pricing page had:

1. Too many price options (want to highlight annual)
2. Not showcasing what people get for upgrading

I’m still open for feedback if you have any! (constructive is welcome)

My video this week is a little messy, but I think it shows how this past week was for me…messy. Working through my board games data provider going away has been stressful, but in the end I think Sofa is going to be a more resilient app because of it.