Consult With Simon

DoneThat Status Update

Since the more or less public announcement of the DoneThat project during the FyneConf2024 conference earlier this year and the general interest in the project, talking about it with people, it seems justified to start sharing official status updates.

Busy Times Lately

Picture of a young plant sprouts from the ground Photo by Ksenia on Unsplash

It has been almost two years now with intense focus on this project to go live and offer the app and service.

That alone is expected to take some time to grow into a strong enough income stream. And it might require side quests in the form of consulting work, temporarily taking some effort away from the app to sustain it.

This is expected to slow development but still leave enough time for at least support and maintenance of the app and services.

Things Are Happening

Since the conference, many things happened, some of which are worth sharing.

For example, the translation tooling developed for translating DoneThat to German and Dutch was shared as a contribution to the Fyne project and might become part of Fyne.

The last few final steps of development are now happening before the first release, which will be for Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows since those can be done without getting into much additional administrative work while still covering a good part of the systems out there.

So. Many. Things.

Those last steps before going live feel rather intense, and there are many more details to deal with than initially anticipated, slowing progress down at a point where the milestone seems already very close.

Many small and straightforward things pop up during the initial testing on other devices/platforms and aspects that deserve more attention later.

Saying “no” to the little developer inside is critical in these moments, which can feel counter-intuitive.

Security Is No Joke

As is often the case, there is an exception to the rule, which in this case is security.

The current focus is on implementing a secure key exchange with other devices to allow secure synchronization across multiple devices without the server ever being able to see the data unencrypted.

Beta Testing Ahead

I am considering starting a beta test phase to allow interested people to try the app before release without support or synchronization.

This means that soon, there will be a way to sign up for beta testing or a waiting list, allowing you to select the platforms you are interested in.

Depending on the interest, this could also influence what platforms will be prioritized for the next release.

2024-11-06

An update of what has been happening behind the scenes of the DoneThat project lately and what is coming up.

donethat, fyne, android, linux, macos, windows