Developer blog

development

The current tech stack of MOTI

There are a lot of pieces to making an app, most of which most users will never know or care about, and they shouldn't. Here's what we're using to make all the stuff we're working on...

Doppler

When you have a bunch of apps and services that all rely on the same set of services, like the database and auth services, you want to make it easier to manage all your environment secrets. We found Doppler was invaluable to be able to maintain multiple dev, staging, and production environments in one place. The Doppler CLI gets integrated into every project so you can easily pull in secrets into the project either locally during development, or during the CI/CD process when building. I can't recommend it enough.

Published Tuesday, July 23, 2024 by Jeff Falcon

release notes

MOTI Chat 5.6.4 desktop app released

This minor update tweaks some of colors and spacing to match the tablet version of the app.

Published Monday, July 22, 2024 by Jeff Falcon

release notes

MOTI Chat 5.6.1 mobile app released

After a big update there's always some small bugs that find their way through. This minor update is a fix for when the app is in list/detail mode on larger tablet sized screens and you tap on a new invite. The detail pane was not showing the content correctly on the selected invited user.

We also fixed some of the store images for iPad & tablets which had bad dummy content.

Published Monday, July 22, 2024 by Jeff Falcon

release notes

MOTI Chat 5.6.0 mobile app released

We bring to you a slight design refresh as well as additional features.

New features:

• Better invite handling for large numbers of invite requests

Published Saturday, July 20, 2024 by Jeff Falcon

development

Dev notes for July 2024

I just spent a week of heavy development on our mobile app and wanted to put some thoughts down.

For background, we have 2 chat client apps in active development. The latest one is a desktop app that was written using Svelte and wrapped into an Electron app for Mac & Windows. The other version of the app is currently written in Flutter and deployed on iOS and Android. And originally I developed the mobile app in Swift back in 2017. This has all started as a side project and now it’s a tiny company. We have a backend, databases, caching, all that shit. For a 1-2 person team it’s a bit to maintain.

Last year we embarked on designing and building the desktop app. We wanted to bring it up to par with the mobile app in every way, and add in a few extra features like screen sharing. After about 9 months we had redesigned and launched a full featured version of MOTI on desktop. This was our chance to redesign the interface a little bit without changing it completely. We didn’t want to reinvent the app since it was already mature on mobile. In the end we had new design guidelines that needed to eventually be applied to mobile.

Published Saturday, July 20, 2024 by Jeff Falcon