Yep, I think snazz said it better than I could have here! I'll emphasize the last point especially, about saying it out loud – I may not /actually/ read my stuff out loud, but I'm always very focused on how my writing would sound if I was talking to someone. I want it to sound comfortable and natural, while also keeping it well-structured and grammatically correct.
Yep, I just started with a Jekyll template and tweaked it over time. But, fair warning: I am by no means a web developer, and most of my "tweaks" are just poorly written css changes.
I started doing iOS stuff in 2012, so a lot has changed since then! If you're just getting into it now, I'd probably recommend diving straight into SwiftUI, which is Apple's new UI framework, and likely the future of iOS dev. Paul Hudson's "Hacking with Swift" website has a "100 days of SwiftUI" series that I've seen people really enjoying – might be worth checking out!
Short answer: I'm a professional native iOS developer ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Been doing this full-time for many years, so that's the area where I'm trying to make a splash with my personal projects at the moment. I'm by no means against cross-platform tools though, if it suits your product and your goals! It's easy for people like me, who are super embedded in the whole Apple ecosystem, to forget that iPhones aren't that common in many parts of the world.
So far, my approach has been to not think too much about the in-office use case since, in theory at least, there are already tools like Slack that _should_ be able to serve this purpose (though admittedly, they don't always do it well).
It's still very early days with this thing, and I've got lots of ideas bouncing around, but one avenue that might be interesting to explore is to try to better serve the use case of letting friends and family know, at a glance, what you're up to and whether you're up for a chat. I know I've already got users doing this kind of thing with the app today.
But we'll see! I think what makes the app appealing is its simplicity, so I don't want to stray from that too quickly.
This is a great point, and you're not wrong. This was a pretty unique case where I had a really clear idea in my head of what this would require from the get-go, and it was also meant to be a pretty quick, experimental little project. It seems to have struck a chord with some folks, so now I get to find out if my off-the-cuff approach is going to come back to haunt me soon.
As for SwiftUI, I think it'll be a slow and steady process for most of us. I've been a UIKit developer for the better part of a decade now, so I still feel most comfortable in that domain, but I think most folks acknowledge SwiftUI is the future. Although it's still a bit immature, I'm hoping to start shipping bits of SwiftUI here and there soon.
Thanks for the kind words. Sorry you can't check it out – really wish I could get this onto Android too, but I'm a solo iOS developer who can only take on so much at once :(