Idea Growr for iPhone & iPad is live
You can now also capture your ideas on your iPhone. Quickly write them down, add notes with pictures and answer questions that help you take on fresh perspectives. It’s free, no ads, no account required.
In earlier articles, we shared how we are working to bring the Idea Growr online. This version is still offline.
On your iPhone:
On Android:
While the android version has some extra features like recording audio. We’ll quickly add improvements to bring it to the same level.
Translations
The other articles are quite heavy on the technical aspects (Stack: React Native, Expo, GraphQL, SQLite), for this article I’ll limit it to a fun little thing I’ve done for translations.
Translations are managed by a Google Spreadsheet.
The texts are automatically translated by Google Translate. Then a bash script downloads a .tsv file and triggers a python script that turns it into a .json file that the app can use.
This means that adding a language requires me to only add a column. At the moment the app includes: English, Dutch, German, French, Finish, Estonian, Czech, Greek, Malaysian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish
Improving translations
Google translate allows the app to be usable for those who can’t read English. While that’s great, the translations are sometimes a bit off. In those cases I can just replace those in the spreadsheet based on your feedback. So if you want to help to improve the translations, please send me a message.
Up next
Stay tuned for more updates, the next steps should roughly be in this order:
- Some small design and user experience improvements, like how you add your first idea.
- Improvements based on your feedback.
- Export & import of ideas.
- A simple and cheap subscription to allow for full back-up and reset of all your ideas online.
- Real time sync between devices.
After that we’ll evaluate the commercial potential and expand the roadmap.
What do you think?
I know feedback is hard, I even wrote an article about it, but it would be much appreciated and help us improve the app. If you tried it out, it would be great if you could give feedback on your experience over here:
You can follow and connect with us on Twitter, and leave a comment on this article.
Update December 8, 2019: …and.. it’s gone. I wrote about it in earlier articles, but I was not really happy with how the iOS app was set up. I decided to take it out of the Apple store.
The Android app is very solid and I haven’t given up on taking Idea Growr online, but I don’t think the path I was on could keep momentum.
It was a good to get the iOS version live. Made it interact with reality. Stay tuned for what will happen next :).
