Today has been a heck of a day. Too many things going on, and the last thing I want to do is post about the app. But this post was mostly written already, and I told myself I'd track progress daily, so here it goes.
New dictionaries
Finally added some of the dictionaries mentioned yesterday, and some more:
- Sports: including basketball, cricket, soccer, some boxing, formula 1...
- Emojis: some of the emojis in text form will be translated into images.
- English language: contractions to shorten words.
Actually, I really like the idea of using emojis. It adds a pinch of color and fun to the app:
Emojis are changed the last. Which doesn't mean much... until we explain one more functional change...
Change in the basic functionality
So far, the app did replacements until it reached the 280-character limit, then it stopped. This preserved most of the original message but also presented some issues (mainly: why was this word changed and not this other one?)
The decision to do that was rooted in the idea that users couldn't pick between the original and the new term. But now they can, so there is no real reason to keep it.
Initially, I removed it, but then we added some options and brought it back, in an optional way.
The options also allow users to pick which categories will trigger replacements and which ones won't. By default all will be checked.
Finally, there is a language option. It is a dropdown with a single value at the moment: "English." I may expand it to other languages soon (at least Spanish) This could be an option to apply deeper monetization changes.
Another thing stopping the languages is how I structured the dictionaries: not the best way. It will require some core changes to allow multiple languages without duplicating content.
Digital Ocean
Yesterday there was a small hiccup with Digital Ocean and the site was offline for 2-5 minutes. Nothing too bad for me... my only regret is to not have set a downtime alert (I don't think there's one) so I could have tested that functionality.
Summary of the day
Some positives:
- New dictionaries
- Added more details to the readme
- Options!
Some not-so positives:
- App only works in English and the dictionaries structure is not generic enough to support multi-language
- 3 days left!