Journaling + Community = Loopify
Loopify combines Q&A journaling and online community to make journaling social & fun!
You can not only answer daily prompts to keep your journal but also share & connect with the world. Reading differen stories of common prompts is a real eyeopener.
Photo courtesy of Jakub Skafiriak from Unsplash
The Idea behind Loopify
Both of Andy and I used Loop Journal to keep journal everyday, sometimes we would exchange our Loop Journals with each other and it's really fun to see how different people answer the same prompt.
So we were considering the possibility of adding community to Loop Journal. With the idea on our mind, we asked users about this and most of them feel interesting as well. The result excited us to do it.
Concept Development
1. Another New App
We were planning to add the community to Loop Journal directly; considering keeping a journal is a private habit and not to ruin the simplicity of Loop Journal, we decided to make another new app to validate our hypothesis.
2. Login via iCloud
Since decided to build our own community, we had to select a back end service. At that time we had two choices: Cloudkit and Parse, and finally we chose Cloudkit because all iPhone users had iCloud accounts and we assuemd that most of them would turn iCloud on to backup their iPhone data, so using Cloudkit could reduce the barrier to signups to max the user experience.
Screenshot of Unsplash
GUI Design
We used to use our own photos in our apps, but we didn't have much time taking new photos and those old ones were used again and again. Buying such a great amount of stock photos was really expensive to us, so we try to look for alternatives. Thanks for Unsplah for providing ten handpicked free high-resolution photos every ten days, we could use those beautiful photos for free and they go well with our GUI and make Loopify more appealing.
Though photos posted on Unsplsh are licesned under Creative Commons Zero, to express my sincere appreciation to those contributors, we email them and credit them inside Loopify.
Best Apps in 2015 Featured by Toutiao
Media Coverage & The Difficulty
Loopify was not featured by Apple again but quite popluar in China and had been featured by many media website such as 36ker, Baidu, ifanr, zuimeia and so on.
This time we've recived many emails from our users for the extremely long loading time. We don't realize that using Cloudkit would encounter performance issue is Asia, especially in China till that time. People complain about the connection speed and left, but some still are willing to endure the long loading time (we are fixing it now) to tell their stories. We are really moved and swear that we will do our best to make the product great.
New Designs for Loopify
New Version of Loopify
Loopify is the first step of our overall planning for this platform. In addition to simple inspirations for weekdays, we plan to offer various inspirations including photo challenges, easy recipes, simple DIY projects or activities/events as weekend projects. People can make cool stuff alone or with their family to not only learn something new but make beautiful memories.
iCloud settings
Brief Summary
As mentioned before, the connection speed of Cloudkit is slow and many users have difficulty logging in iCloud in China because 1) many user don't sign in to iCloud 2) even people have logged in to iCloud, they don't turn iCloud Drive on to backup their data 3) if people don't turn "Use Cellular Data" on, they fail to connect to Loopify in mobile environment. So if you want to use Cloudkit, test the speed before you start working on it or you might suffer the same situation as us.
