Day 21: Sleepy reflections

status

It’s 10:40 PM and it’s the latest I’ve written one of these posts. I’m on the verge of falling asleep due to sleep deprivation (I very rarely drink caffeine and thought it’d be fine to have some green tea at 4 PM yesterday — ended up staying up until 7:30 AM. Yippee.) and organizing a picnic that I had as a farewell with my housemates and friends I’ve made in Austin. It was a really fun day but now I’m exhausted.

I’m basically falling over on the verge of passing out, so I’ll quickly write a bit about Hide Feed’s progress before going to bed. I think it’s time that I set a date for launching. I just submitted version 1.4.0 to the Chrome Web Store and I’m really excited to see what people make of it. There was a massive change I made to the core UX where instead of integrating a toggle button into every site’s toolbar, the extension icon now serves as the toggle. I really like the consistency and simplicity of it, but it did take a while for me to get used to because I had become so accustomed to the toggle on the page itself. We’ll see how people respond to it.

With this change, Hide Feed feels pretty much ready. There is one more feature I’d like to build before releasing though: Being able to set a custom photo to replace the feed. Unsplash’s quality is unreliable and I’ve been getting ones that are totally whack or questionable in a work context. Here are some photos I’ve gotten from Unsplash’s API for the query “nature”:

Not exactly a stellar experience.

I’ve been toying with the idea of transforming this space into a personal dashboard where you can have things like todo lists, data about your browsing habits (e.g. integration with my old extension Web Timer), and things like that, but I think that kind of stuff makes a lot more sense with Intention, my other extension for time management.

Here’s how I’ve been thinking about the difference between Hide Feed and Intention.

  • Hide Feed: Hide distractions by customizing websites (helps you when using the website)
  • Intention: Spend less time browsing mindlessly (helps you before you’ve started using the website)

Intention feels a lot more productivity-focused, and I imagine it would actually be a better business as well because it provides pretty tangible benefits. But it’s also fairly hardcore in how it works so the potential audience is much smaller. I’m excited about being able to use a lot of work that I’ve done on Hide Feed to make Intention even better.

But first, I have to ship Hide Feed!