Happy Monday, everyone!

We made it to Issue #63! Thank you to everyone who read last week’s issue ❤️

It’s a new month which means time for a new sponsor! This month is sponsored by Keygen. Keygen is awesome service that let’s your team focus product and not in-house licening and distribution. I can’t thank them enough for supporting Indie Dev Monday! Make sure you check them out 👇

Today’s Spotlighted Indie Devs

📆 Today I’m featuring Leo Mehlig.

Leo is the creator of Structured. Structured is a visual day planner, which combines calendars and to-do lists into an easy-to-use interface. You can schedule tasks with a few taps, see their progress throughout the day and tick them off once you are done. I’ve had problem with scheduling my day and prioritizing and completing tasks for so long. I’m so happy that Leo took the time to analyze this problem and make the perfect solution 🙌 I set my ideal wake a sleep time and synced my calendars into Structured. This gives me a great visual of how to start planning my tasks. Tasks can be scheduled right away or put into an inbox. You can schedule tasks that are in the inbox put you can also just do them right away and complete them if you want 😅 The killer feature for me is autoomatic importing into the inbox from a Reminders list. I can use Siri or Reminders on my Mac when I think of something and Structured will pick it up for me. Structured doesn’t do my tasks for me so I’m still responsible for that but it does help me manage and prioritize the tasks I need to get done. Check out Structured today and support Leo! I know you’ll love it ❤️

👉 Please make sure to follow them or support them anyway you can! 😇 I’m excited to share their indie dev stories.

Indie Devs

Leo Mehlig

Berlin, Germany

Product manager and creator of Structured

Structured

Leo Mehlig

Q&A

1) What is your name? Where do you live?

Hey! I’m Leo 👋 I grew up in a small town in the south of Germany and moved to Berlin around 3 years ago.

2) Introduce yourself. Education? Background? Main job? Interests outside of tech? Interests inside of tech?

Back when the 4. Gen iPod Touch was released, I used all my money to buy one and wondered how to build apps for it. So I started saving for a MacBook and actually learned Obj-C 🦕

Then in 2015, I won a WWDC scholarship, which is probably the greatest experience ever. This gave me a real motivation boost and introduced me to the iOS Dev Community.

After school, my path was pretty clear. I moved to Berlin to study CS and got a job at a mobile app start-up there. Since they did not have an open iOS position, I started as a Product Manager, which has taught me a lot about design and UX.

Besides work and studying, I enjoy running and biking (just did a bike vacation from Berlin to Copenhagen) and in tech, my biggest interest is, how to use it to make the world actually better…

3) Have you ever considered yourself an indie developer?

I never knew how to call working on my app. Cause it isn’t “work”, right? So I always said I did my hobby. So I’m a hobby indie dev…

4) What got you started/interested in creating your own applications outside of your “normal” job?

When I started the PM job, I didn’t code at work or uni, so I needed something to keep my code skills sharp. Plus SwiftUI was just released, which I was super excited to try!

5) How do you balance your time between friends/family, work, hobbies, and indie dev?

With the pandemic and home office/uni, things got a bit easier, since I can just seamlessly switch between different tasks and don’t have to commute. But it’s definitely hard not to neglect one…

6) Structured - I love being on a schedule but I’m so bad at sticking to it. I’ve actually been searching for an app like Structured for years 😩 I’m so happy I found it now! I tried scheduling calendar events for something like Structured but it just didn’t work. When did you start building Structured and what problems were you facing?

I actually started building it, after seeing other people write down their day plan on a piece of paper. I’m way too unorganized to do something like that, so I searched for a simple app to do something like that. But most productivity apps are very powerful and complicated. So around 1.5 years ago, I set down and tried to design a simple day planner. After some iterations and 4 months of work, I just released the first version, even though a lot was missing. Unexpectedly I got very good reactions and immediately started implementing new features…

7) Structured - The inbox concept in Structure is so 💯 Not every task I do needs to be scheduled and sometimes I’m too lazy to even schedule a task when writing it down. Using inbox as a dumping ground for tasks and then optionally scheduling them works so well for me. And importing from Reminders makes this even easier! Was this feature in your original scope of Structured? How has it evolved? Is there any awesomeness about inbox that I’m missing? 😁

This is actually a new feature in Structured 2.0! I’ve always had a lot of people ask to import Reminders, but I didn’t know where to put the imported tasks. That’s basically why I added the Inbox, but I think it can be actually used in many different ways. For example, I’ve heard from a beta tester, that they have their template tasks in the Inbox and just create a copy, whenever they need to place it in their day plan.

8) Structured - The UI/UX are so 😍 I’ve noticed a lot of nice little animations and transitions that make the app even more fun to use. I focus a lot on functionality in my personal apps and not on the small details. But I want my next app to have all the fun small details like Structured does! How do you balance your design/animations with functionality? Or do you see them as one in the same? Do have any tips for other developers (me) on how to have a good process when designing the UI/UX?

I find this very hard to balance since I often go down rabbit holes wanting to perfect the interaction on one screen when I actually should just release the update…

I really enjoy using apps, that just feels great when you interact with them and I think good transitions and animations can really help people better understand what’s happing.

For the design, I usually start in Figma and iterate a lot. I also look at a lot of other apps and try to replicate things I like there. It has also helped me a lot to define a design system since I then don’t have to think about colors and fonts in the design process.

For implementing animations and transition, SwiftUI really does the heavy lifting ✨

9) Structured - What has been one of the hardest things you’ve come across when building Structured? What was one of the most fun things to implement?

From the UI side, the gradient timeline was definitely the hardest, since there are horizontal cells, but also elements, which span over the whole vertical space. I did a lot of iterations there since everything was just too slow and ended up basically splitting the vertical elements and including them in the horizontal cells.

From the logic, the recurring and imported tasks are definitely the most complicated. I spend so much time, figuring out what should happen when you change a recurring task or when a calendar task is updated. I bet there are still 100 edge-cases left, which I didn’t cover.

10) Structured - Oh my, Structured has as an amazing rating on the App Store (4.9 with 3.7K ratings) 🤯 I think I’ve always read through about 20 written reviews and there is soooo much love! Have this 🏆 for your App Store excellence. Not really question here but I dream to have ratings and reviews like this myself!

Thanks so much! I’m really amazed at all the feedback I get. I’m always so happy, when students or neurodiverse people write me, that my app helps them ❤️

11) Structured - What’s next for Structured? Anything awesome in the works that you can share with us?

Firstly, I hope everything with the 2.0 update went smoothly 🤞I’ve also already created a macOS target in Xcode already… One big goal is also, to make the plan easily adjustable if something changes (maybe drag & drop).

12) What’s been the hardest part of being an indie dev? What the most fun part of being an indie dev?

The hardest part is definitely the time. I have so many ideas, but so little time to work on them. Everything takes sooo long.

The best is definitely the interaction with all the users 😍

13) Is there anything else you’d like to tell the indie dev community about you?

Sadly I’m not that active on Twitter, but I’ll try to do better 😊 But feel free to reach out @leoMehlig.

Also, if you know a third-party SF Symbol pack or want to collaborate on one, let me know!

14) Do you have any other indie devs that readers should follow / lookout for?

As said, I’m not that active in the community, but if you want a good countdown widget, look out for @StefanLdhl

Newly Released and Updated Indie Apps

Here are some newly released and newly updated apps from this past week! If you would like to possibly see your app in this list, please submit your app to the look at me form 👀

ForecastAI Newly Released
Enables users to quickly setup a customized budget and forecast account balances up to 24 months in the future. Not sure if you can afford Christmas this year? Property taxes sneaking up on you? Allow ForecastAI to help!
Applytics: App Sales and Metrics Newly Released
Applytics a reporting client for App Store Connect with a beautiful user interface and advanced metrics and reporting such as new downloads, re downloads, paid downloads and subscriptions. Other features include, comparisons, metric breakdowns and widgets.
Belongings Newly Released
When something goes wrong, it can be a stressful time. To make matters worse you will need policy documents, proof of purchases plus photographs of any valuable items to claim on your insurance. Store photographs and receipts of your belongings so that you are not caught out.
Memento Updated
- Sidebar layout for iPad - Extra Large Widgets for iPad on iOS 15 - Improved time alarm UI - Tab bar icon refresh to follow Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines - Can now select any tint colour for a reminder list - Time sensitive notifications - Drag and Drop support for creating a reminder from a URL - Notification action icons
Set Your Intention Updated
Similar to the concept of Activity rings for physical health, Set Your Intention makes it easy to keep track of your Mindful Minutes through Apple Health and the supported Watch Complications. Starting with Version 2.0 you can now practice meditation within the App & store your mindful sessions in Apple Health.

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