The app briefly peaked as the #3 Top Paid US app, beating my personal record of 2011. My creation got praised with reviews and ratings on the Mac app store as well. Product hunters’ response was remarkably positive and helpful. This was an exhausting but incredibly electrifying experience. This started a 3 day marathon of commenting, twitting, emailing old customers, pitching web sites, replying to feedback, sending out promo codes and monitoring Google Analytics and App Store rankings like crazy. The product held #5 spot among the products of the day. The next morning (noonish, to be honest) I woke up, read a reply from Bram Kanstein and found out that HazeOver got featured on the front page of Product Hunt. With little expectation I contacted a few product hunters to help me publish the app on the PH. In late May 2015 I stumbled upon a Russian article about Product Hunt promotion guide based on MailBurn success story. This eventually lead to a quiet unnoticed release of the new version of HazeOver in March 2015. I also spent some time rejuvenating my drawing, sketching and design skills to create the new icon, UI and website for HazeOver. Namely ARC, Auto Layout, Base Localization and then Swift. There was no clear perspective and little incentive developing it.įrom time to time I returned to the project to catch up and get practice with technologies that I could not otherwise implement yet in my production apps due to backward compatibility requirements. Being merely a hobby project, HazeOver got shelved for a few years. ![]() The app relies on Accessibility features not available in sandboxed apps and every update could get the app rejected or completely booted off the app store. Then came the Mac App Store sandboxing restrictions which made HazeOver fate especially gloomy. Sales completely flatlined shortly after and I was left with a bitter-sweet aftertaste of my 15 minutes of app store fame. A few days later it got off the charts like it’s never been there. April, 2011.ĭespite positive ratings and user feedback, HazeOver turned out be a flash in a pan. HazeOver at #5 spot on the US Mac App Store. Mind you this was the time back when Angry Birds games were all over the place. The single publication made HazeOver #1 Top Paid US productivity app and #5 Top Paid US app out of the blue. I tried to promote the app with little success until HazeOver got mentioned on the LifeHacker. Using Mac OS X API to work with other apps and their active windows turned out to be tricky, but in 2011 the app was finally released on the Mac App Store. I did not get to develop HazeOver until a few years after I started developing Mac software. I immediately bought this domain, set up a web page… aaaand… did absolutely nothing else. I had been developing Windows shareware programs at that time and I was looking for a way to manage my window chaos and improve productivity. Looks like nothing has changed in my work process since 2007 when the idea of HazeOver was first conceived. Besides, I find it satisfying to toss away crumpled paper notes and close related windows when I’m done with something. It’s the same reason I have paper notes on my table. I keep track of what I need to do by having all these items around as reminders. ![]() Open windows, documents, browser tabs, developer tools and notes taken in multiple TextEdit windows. It gets even worse on my computer Desktop. I don’t like it so I force myself to clean it up every few days. I have notes, pencils, papers and books scattered all over the table. My workspace turns into a mess in no time.
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