Wednesday, April 8th – The HyperTexting public TestFlight is underway (join here), and we're on track to go live in the App Store later this month (pre-order here).
Thank you to everyone who has submitted feedback. You have told us what you like and you've asked hard questions. More than anything else you have confirmed that we are on the right track, and you've helped us refine our vision. We've added several new features, including three that we're excited about: an all-new "swipe-to-preview" gesture, a new unified Discover experience, and Profiles.
Continue reading to learn more, or join the TestFlight to see what's new. Version 0.22.0 is already the fifth minor release in the last two weeks, and it's available today.
First contact. It's not just for astronauts on fictional missions to outer space.1 It is also an excellent description of the moment when an idea finally gets put to the test. 👩🏻🔬 We aren't doing a lap around the moon (!), but we did launch something out into the real world.
We've spent over a year designing and building HyperTexting. Up until last month the only people who had seen or used the app were hand-picked from a pool of family and friends. It's a very different thing to onboard new users whose only context is a tweet or a blog post. Would our ideas resonate? Could we continue moving forward, or did we need to go back to the drawing board?
The app was not done, and it still isn't, but we needed to start collecting feedback. So we kicked off a public TestFlight, and we waited. Then we got the first notification: someone submitted feedback using the TestFlight app.2 A few people commented on a Reddit post. Someone else sent us an email. Then several people emailed us. Some even joined the @hypertexting.community. And every bit of feedback helped!
What's new? 🆕
Before we show you the complete list of new features, let's take a look at how things are shaping up with a few video demos. 🍿 There are too many changes to cover them all, so we'll just focus on our three favorite improvements:
- A new swipe-to-preview gesture
- The unified Discover experience
- Profiles!
Unified discovery
One of the improvements we're most excited about is the new unified Discover experience. It turns out you don't need a complex algorithm to discover new feeds that you might actually like!
The new unified Discover experience.
Swipe-to-preview
One of our favorite things about the internet is the endless supply of creativity. Websites don't all look the same. This is a good thing! But it also means that not all website feeds are created equal. HyperTexting TestFlight users wanted an easier way to "peek" at a feed to see if it was worth following instead of doing the follow, then skim, then unfollow dance. After three or four prototypes we landed on a gesture that feels even better than it looks: swipe left to preview. 👀
Swipe left to preview a feed.
Profiles!
Our mission for HyperTexting is to combine "subscribing" together with "publishing" in a single package. A news feed and a way to post on your website as easily as you might send a text message. Our north star is to make creating a real website from scratch as easy as signing up for a social media account and picking a username. We still have some work to do before we get there, but we're getting very close to making it easy to update existing websites. The first step is to add your existing websites to HyperTexting using the brand new Profiles feature.
The new Profiles experience.
We hope you enjoyed this progress report on HyperTexting. If you did, please consider clicking the pre-order button to get notified when we go live in the App Store. And if you want to try HyperTexting today, please join the public TestFlight. Thanks again to everyone who has submitted feedback! We'll see you in the next update. ✌️
Changelog
Here's what we've shipped over the last two weeks:
- NEW user website Profiles. Add your website(s) to HyperTexting!
- NEW unified Discovery experience combines search with "Suggested For You" feeds.
- NEW Activity experience shows various "feediverse" activities, starting with feed discovery.
- NEW in-app browser for viewing links without leaving the app.
- NEW "Add profile" wizard guides users through adding a profile.
- Added a Settings shortcut to the Timeline toolbar.
- Added in-app Safari extension setup guidance and notification controls to Discover.
- Added pull-to-refresh support to the Discover and Activity views.
- Added support for marking discovery activities as done from the Activity view.
- Added support for context menu actions for suggested feeds, including "Suggest Less".
- Added support for previewing feeds – swipe left to preview! 🤌🏽
- Added unfollow confirmation; tapping "Following" on Profile now asks for confirmation.
- Added support for searching feed titles, descriptions, and URLs from the Following screen.
- Added support for YouTube feed descriptions & thumbnails (video playback coming soon).
- Improved feed discovery notifications to only notify for net-new discoveries.
- Fixed the Profile screen "Follow" button (it actually works now).
- Removed the "Safari Extension Guide" from the Activity tab (moved to Settings).
- Dozens of smaller "papercuts" fixed.
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Real astronauts don't expect to interact with extraterrestrials, but they do go on very real missions around the moon and back. 🚀 🌔 ↩︎
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We do not collect any user data from HyperTexting. The app processes 100% of its data on-device. The only way for us to learn what users think is if they tell us. And they did! And they are liking it! ↩︎