Captain Danko’s JavaScript Lab — Code Smarter with Tutorials, Frameworks & Dev Insights

My Day To-Do  was built to make life easy for it's users and as such it has several useful features to achieve that goal. One of the things that has always been a concern to me is that I have most likely doing a very poor job of making sure that the users know about what these features are. The features are in place to help users and as such if they don't know about it, they can't use it, so it is all somewhat pointless and a lot of hard work has gone into it. I know I am not a good designer and I think my best design would be just 'acceptable' at best and there's a good chance of it not being very intuitive. At this stage My Day To-Do is very small and as such there isn't a dedicated designer, so in this post I will talk about all the things that I tried to make educate the users about all the features of My Day To-Do, taking into account the design limitations at My Day To-Do. What you can expect to read are a chronological list of attempts (techniques ...

The reason why this post has taken some time to come is there's simply too much going at My Day To-Do right now. There are far too many disparate (different) things for me to keep my head around, hence I simply haven't had the time to write a post about it all...at least till now. This going to be a slightly shorter post and it will have a slightly different structure to my usual blogposts. 2017 Year in review It was a pretty good year for My Day To-Do and we experienced significant growth at My Day To-Do, let's start with a short summary of it all. Summary My original goal going into year 2017 was to increase download numbers of My Day To-Do , and end the run of abysmal download numbers of 2016. How bad? 44 downloads per month for Lite yes that bad.  As far as the goal  of download numbers is concerned, 2017 was a very successful year for My Day To-Do. Here's a breakdown of the the total download numbers Total downloads: 10, 500 Now a break dow...

In November 2017, I wanted to boost downloads of the Pro version of My Day To-Do , so I did (conducted) a little experiment. It was at this time that I thought of giving Facebook marketing another go for My Day To-Do . This time I thought of running an ad targeting app installs on Facebook. In this post, I will talk a bit about my background to Facebook marketing, some of my expectations behind this, the eventual outcome of this, my analysis of the results and what to watch out for the next time we run an ad campaign. All in all, I aim to share the lessons I learned from this and what can anyone else learn from my experience. Background Prior to this, I have tried marketing for My Day To-Do with varying amounts of success, you can read some of my posts on it below, Marketing to Chinese consumers Marketing an iOS app with Bing Ads ... and now more specifically the following posts talk about the kind of Facebook marketing that I did at My Day To-Do before, Marketing wi...

Upto this point, I had only worked with the UIWebView in iOS, even though I had heard/read about the new WKWebView . I had only read good things about it but given the limited resources at my startup, working with WKWebView was a lower priority. A few weeks ago, the time was right for me to have a more in-depth look at the WKWebView and while learning more about it I realised something. I realised that while there are a ton of useful tutorials out there, almost none of them covered it with the depth or all the use cases that I was after. One example of missing information or a use case is, if we receive a json object from the webview, how do we parse it in Swift? In this post I will be talking about how to parse json data in Swift sent from web content hosted in a WKWebView of an iOS app. Background As seen from HTMLStarterAppWithSwift , my interest in the webview is not for showing content hosted in a website but more towards working with content hosted locally i.e. a nati...

In the last few months we added a third party app analytics solution i.e. Firebase to My Day To-Do  and soon we realised that Firebase may not work every time. Hence we tried to abstract the analytics (decouple/separate) solution from the rest of the app code i.e. the app code can log analytics data without knowing about what analytics solution is in use. In this post I will talk about our analytics solution and provide some code examples for an iOS app with Firebase analytics. The aim of the code is to provide an example of how to abstract the analytics part from the rest of the app. Hence without further a due let's get to it. Background In June 2017, we added a third-party analytics solution i.e.  Firebase analytics to My Day To-Do for tracking app usage i.e. we wanted to know what aspects of our product do people use the most. At this stage I am the only developer at My Day To-Do and it was the first time I had worked with an analytics solution. Anyway I added ...

How did I get here ? yes that is the exact thought in my head right now, how did I get here? ( or this link ) Yes not long ago, I had a job that paid a somewhat decent amount, I was working on a very challenging (and interesting) project and I had plenty of time to play games. Right now: well I am still working on an interesting project, not getting paid (not yet) and I am getting very little time to play games. Ok so maybe not 'thaaat' different from my former situation except the part about the money. The point is that being a sole founder in a startup, I just have to so many things at the same time, I mean seriously think about this, I am building a Java Spring web version for My Day To-Do , I have to deploy it to AWS , learn new APIs in iOS 11, make iOS11 updates, make job descriptions, find more employees (interns) to work with me at my startup etc etc. The number of disparate (different) tasks I need to get my head around is just staggering. In this post I will be shari...