andrewthebold

I tried it out for a bit and I think it's generally pleasant.

Some thoughts:

- The cleanliness and whitespace make it feel like information's been lost compared to the previous version. Probably just psychological and I'll get used to it.

- I wish the header search button was a search bar instead. While it looks cleaner, I actually had a moment where I thought they removed search completely. My preference would be to have a large, highly visible search bar in the header. Increasing the click/tap area would help as well, as I misclicked on the dark mode toggle.

Thanks for catching that! Fixed it up.

Thank you!

My impression is that my use of Flutter has been successful (especially in an iOS build) because of my heavy use of custom-designed components. There are packages built by the Flutter team to mimic native behavior, but they aren't good enough in my opinion. I'd go with react native if you want something that feels (at least on iOS) native.

The biggest plus for Flutter in my opinion is its great animation system. It's difficult to learn, but it makes things that would have been near-impossible in react native relatively straightforward.

I'd use Flutter again for sure. I'd rate it like an 8/10?

Thank for you trying the app out!

On your first point: scroll down on your mailbox screen to see a history of what you've opened up! Sorry about that. It's a poor design decision on my part to make it so undiscoverable. Will fix it soon.

Reactions of some sort are one of the high priority features I plan to build.

No strong opinion from me on horizontal cards and swiping. It is intentional to add some friction to skipping a message (so it feels a bit more weighty), but I'll play with it!

Thank you for the praise for the design!

Hey! For now I have it locked to portrait orientation and no official support for iPad. Very sorry for the trouble with this — it does sound annoying. I'll look into enabling iPad-specific rotation.

Not at all arguing that this is novel or innovative — rather my own take on the genre. I'd argue that some aspects of the system incentivize better behavior:

- It'll be a purchased app (not free), so the stakes of being banned are higher. Right now in beta, it is more open for sure.

- The 1:1 message sending doesn't give any feedback to bad actors, so attention-seeking behavior is more limited.

- I'm also hopeful to continue to design an experience that's calm and cheerful, and provides guidance about good behavior (in a way that's more in-your-face than most social media).

Of course, there will always be malicious people, and neither I nor this project are perfect. As I mentioned elsewhere in this post, I'd be quick to shut things down if it got out of hand.

Happy to discuss this more.

Thanks for the info! I guess it also only happens if you have some VR device setup. Sorry for the trouble with that. I'll swap out the vimeo embed soon since that sounds like annoying and unnerving behavior.

Also, thank you for the praise!

That's... unusual and concerning. You're talking about the gentle.app site, not the testflight link, right?

The only thing I could think of to cause that is the embedded vimeo iframe. But why? If you're open to share, I'd love to know what browser you're using.

Thank you! I'm really happy you tried it out

Thank you and that's amazing! It's great that you're really embracing the attitude of thinking about this other person and trying to empathize.