Botaybry's iOS Journey Journal

[CalStark]

Hey man,

First of all much respect to you for all your progress and reaching that point!! That’s amazing!!

You’re ahead of me, but still if I may offer my 2 cents

@botaybry

It’s all “workable” but I definitely feel as though there’s a lack of polish and… well there’s just something missing! Perhaps animations to make the whole thing feel complete and actually ‘fun’ to use?

Use the app with your mind open, and try to picture what cool effects could happen every time you do something. Animations for data updates are really cool. If you need some inspiration, definitely check out Kavsoft’s YouTube channel! Also, padding goes a long way. I personally find there’s not enough padding more often than there’s too much of it haha

@botaybry

There’s also one more key feature that we’ve been scratching our heads over. We wanted to include some sort of “scoring” system on the app, where on every user’s profile there is a number displayed. The number increases the more the user uses the app or when they do specific actions, like creating a post, or accepting a trade, etc. Sort of like Snapchat’s Snapscore on their app. We’re kind of scratching our heads at this… if anyone has any idea how we could tackle this last obstacle I would love to hear from you!

I have kind of a simple way to see it, but because all user interactions are not worth the same, I would each give them a “scoring weight”. For illustration:

• User creates a post → +5 points
• User accepts a trade → +15 points

And you store the sum somewhere on your Database. Be mindful to tweak the weight scoring system to reflect the singular value of each “operation”, as well as the orders of magnitude you want people’s scores to reach. Would you consider a user having 1k points a lot? 20k points? What are the implications in your app for having a great score?

On the back-end side, are you using Firebase? For an MVP I’d simply store the number on the user’s document and increment it from the front-end SDKs. For the App Store I’d try to store this number on a secured document and increment the number with Cloud Functions.

Only a user can do something that increments their own score right? In that case you should never reach the writes per second per document limit so that should be fine.

If you don’t know yet how to increment a number on Firebase, you should start with this post

Incrementing Data in Firestore's Database

Hi Philomath! Have you tried this? let kitchen = db.collection("kitchens").document(kitchenID) kitchen.updateData([ "usersConnected": FieldValue.increment()]) Documentation reference (bottom of the page, “Increment a numeric value”): https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/manage-data/add-data#increment_a_numeric_value You could also check for a document’s existence like this: let kitchen = db.collection("kitchens").document(kitchenID) kitchen.getDocument { (document, error) in …

@botaybry

I feel like I’m stuck between: “This is only the first build, and besides people will know that it’s just a beta test and not the final product. You’ve done what you can and now it’s time to just get some feedback and keep making improvements.” & “This is the first time people will see what you’re doing, so you gotta make a grand entrance and WOW them!”

In any case, I think I’m just going to swallow my fear of having this flop and do my best to get it in the hands of people asap. It’s been a long time coming!

My gosh, that’s so relatable. I feel the same way. Honestly both those answers make sense to me, only you can make that decision.

Keep it up, it’s inspiring to read your journey!