A product design (hurried) story
You can blame RevenueCat’s Ship-a-ton competition for the timing, and the public part.
You can thank Apple’s wonderful people at the Design Labs they conduct during WWDC, for Purrticles being a separate product.
I’ve been working up to including Revenue Cat’s support for monetising Touchgram. It’s still a little way off because we’ll also switch to iOS v16 as a base. So I wanted to get a few more releases out for the iOS 12...15 users.
Touchgram, just released as 1.3.5, has been under slow improvement for years so the idea of switching to a build in public model felt a bit weird.
But
One of the things the Apple designers encouraged me to do was to drastically simplify the editing experience. One thing I knew I wanted was an editor for Particles so artists and average users could make them. Touchgram lets you use Particle Emitters for feedback (made more accessible in 1.3.5) and soon as page elements, like falling snow on Christmas Cards or tears when you missed a party invite.
Rather than building another, complicated, editor for particles into the main Touchgram editor, I could make it a separate product.
This would also make it easy to build a Mac version and an iPad version that had a bigger experience more like other design tools.
