Neil Macy

Running Track release: Slowly but surely!

I've spent a little while recently getting Running Track ready for release.

New goal type

I've had three goal types in mind from the start. I initially cut two of them so that I could focus on getting the total distance goal working well, but I've added another goal now: a single distance target. Set yourself the goal of running a distance in one run.

For example, some people might want to set a target of running a 10k or a marathon for the first time. In training for half marathons, I always feel like doing a 10 mile long run is a milestone, so I'll be using it for that.

Adding another goal type makes me feel better about launching with a subscription, because I want to make sure there's as much value as possible for people to pay for, and goals are a subscription feature.

UI cleanup

There's a lot I want to do with the UI, which is a blog post in itself. I restricted myself to only those things that are necessary, or especially bad, so that I can focus on shipping now. Things that might be confusing, or that are egregiously ugly. This is the painful part, because I have to be less harsh on myself and try to judge this objectively...

Code cleanup

I don't want to ship with any compiler warnings, and mostly that's fine, I clean them up as I go. But I have SwiftLint configured to generate warnings for TODO comments, and I left a few of them in as reminders to myself. So I've been cleaning them up, as well as removing some that relate to future work - they moved to Todoist, where I track all my tasks.

Bugs

I don't want to ship any known bugs. I've made a good dent on the ones I've found myself during testing, and after I complete that list I'll open up to TestFlight to see what others might find.

Getting there

I have four known bugs left, and then I can finally feel comfortable with getting a TestFlight build out to people. The rest of the code and marketing materials are in a good place for a first launch.

It's getting there, slowly but surely!

Published on 17 February 2023