The big release day

I feel like a lot have happened the last week, but when I look at it on "paper", it's not that bad. Although the things that has happened are absolutely huge. But the bottom line is that all that I had planned for this week, did go a lot better than expected! Let's take a look at it!

This week's progress

As you could probably already have figured out, the app is now available to download on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. I am absolutely amazed with how well this went, and now I just can't wait to get people using Mellonn Speak!

Email receipts

As mentioned last week, I wasn't quite ready with a system for sending email receipts, but I'm happy to announce that I did get this up and running smoothly. It's definitely not a perfect system, looking at it from the backend, and the receipts themselves could definitely use a facelift. But that does not matter for now, they are compliant with the laws in Denmark, which is everything I focused on for now!

To do the email receipts I'm using another part of the AWS ecosystem that I haven't touched before now, Amazon SES (Simple Email Service). As it suggests in the name it's used to send emails automatically, but simple, I wouldn't exactly call it that. For someone who's used to graphical interfaces, and always would prefer those over anything else, SES definitely isn't simple. To create a template, you can't use the AWS Console, you will have to install the AWS CLI (Command Line Interface). Then you'll have to make a JSON-file with the code for a template, and use the CLI to upload it to SES. I quickly found a page where you can make a template using HTML, preview it, and then publish the template to SES with the click of a button. Why haven't a multi billion dollar company done this? It's an absolute amazing page, and if you use SES (or looking to use it), I would definitely check it out!

Email Template Manager for SES (sestemplates.com)

Getting approved for the Play and App Store

Well let's just start with the easy one, you guessed right, the Google Play Store. Monday afternoon when I was done working with the last couple of thing in the app, I sent the app to be reviewet. I actually didn't hear from Google, but yesterday when I went to check on the Play Store console, it stood there "Ready to publish". Oh well, when I went to check when it was approved, it said about two hours after I sent it in. That's quick!

The App Store process was more what I would've expected from Google Play, but that's definitely a good thing! Although I, unlike with Google Play Store, had to both do some minor changes, and explain the concept of the app. The minor changes was actually a bug they discovered, they unfortunately didn't explain how they found it, so I had to take a lot of time to find the cause of it. But I got that done by Tuesday, and send it to be reviewed again Tuesday afternoon, having explained why I don't use In-app purchases. This time they accepted the app, and that part was totally ready! All I had to do at this point was just to press the publish button, and I did that yesterday.

Right now though, I'm waiting for the first update to be published, that update should already be out on the Google Play Store, but I'm still waiting for the App Store. It doesn't contain any changes to the app itself, but it changes the design of the store page. Making it look a lot better and more professional, if I should say so myself. Take a look at the new screenshots I have made, I think they turned out great!

Bug fixes and other changes

There's not much to report on here, but as I mentioned, when Apple reviewed the app, they did encounter some bugs. Other than that I also encountered some bugs myself, that I've also fixed. Let's take a look at it.

First the bug Apple encountered. This bug caused you to be able to continue to checkout without having chosen an audio file. This was a weird one to find, but when you open the file selector and press cancel, the app though you had chosen something. This has now been fixed.

There was also a bug causing the app to rarely fail when uploading a file to the cloud. This was a critical error, but it have now been fixed.

The last error happened in the backend, when you're trying to pay the first time with the app, you're creating a new customer in Stripe. This caused the backend to return an error, it was a small mistake by me, but has now been fixed.

This means that there to my knowledge isn't any critical bugs with the core functionality of the app. Said in other words, I feel confident that this app can help a lot of people saving precious time!

What's next?

With this absolutely exciting release, I am ready for moving forward, and over the coming week I will begin to introduce more "nice to" features. I haven't gotten to finish up work on the help page, which I will be focusing on in the coming days. I will Also begin to advertise in the coming weeks, seeing as my main target group, is beginning to write their assignments. This also means that you can also follow along on my new Facebook page now!

Help page

This page will be an extremely important part of the app and the entire company. I want to make the experience of using a Mellonn product as good as possible, and this requires help to be easily accessible. Other than a whole page on the website dedicated to getting help with all the features in Mellonn Speak, I will in the next update to the app, be adding buttons throughout the app, where you can get help to the things that are available to you on the page you are at. This means I will be building the help in as an integral part of the app. And I will be hoping to have this ready in the next week or so.

Nice to features

I have been thinking about other things I can add to the app, to make the experience more complete. To take one of them as an example, there's version history. This means that when you're editing, if you make a change and want to go back, then you should be able to see the history of changes you've done. How I will be doing this is still undecided.

Work on the backend

The backed of this app definitely isn't perfect, but it's working. This I want to change, so I will be doing some work on the backend, this shouldn't cause any downtime for the app. But it should hopefully make the experience for you as a user better, and definitely the development much better.

See you again next week!

A big week is now coming to an end, but this is only the beginning of a new chapter for Mellonn. I'm excited to get my project out in people's hands, and hopefully achieve my goal of making a long and tedious task like transcribing much easier!

As always you can still apply to be a tester of Mellonn Speak:

Speak Test Application — Mellonn

As always, see you next week!