Howdy, Journalers!

Firstly, if you're one of the poor souls who has had to listen to me go on, and on, and on, and on, and on some more about the huge gigantic project that me and Ryan (@Lanny) have been working on for the last few months – I would like to thank you for being kind, patient, and not killing me 🙏🏼 And if anyone was still considering it, no need! BECAUSE JOURNALY IN-APP NOTIFICATIONS IS FINALLY HERE!

A Little Background

To share how special and exciting this platform milestone is, I thought it would be nice to give you a little timeline:

• November 9th, 2020 - We created the original "issue" (ticket) outlining the need for building the system with some initial ideas, which can be found here. We always knew this was going to be a massive project and one that would be greatly needed. Over the months seeing how many of you were using Journaly, I wished almost every single day that we had a beautiful notification system in place for you and talked with Ryan about it so many times, but we had to always keep priorities in mind and there was such a mountain of stuff that needed to be built first.
• September 15th, 2021 - Finally, we began a very detailed and collaborative process to create an Approach Document over a few weeks, which entailed everything from Technical Design, Data Modelling, Visual Design, User Experience, Product Requirements, to even what we did not want to build. You can find that document here.
• October 2nd, 2021 - At long last, the heavy lifting began! Long days and late nights afoot 🏔
• December 8th, 2021 - The Journaly Experience took a giant leap forwards for everyone 🚀 You can find the complete work here.

The System

I was absolutely determined from the start that this was not going to be something that "just works". My philosophy with designing and building Journaly has always been that we'll always take the time to create bespoke solutions that look and feel beautiful, with each one truly being designed and built with love and care to solve for the specific needs of our Journalers in the most effective and intuitive way that we can.

We came up with a system that has two "levels":

1. Level One is what you see at the top level, designed to be convenient and space-efficient, giving you snapshots with sophisticated grouping.
2. Level Two is revealed when you click on a notification, and has a unique design for each different notification type, striving for the most effective and intuitive visual organisation of the relevant information of that specific notification.

I really believe (and hope!) this will transform the Journaly Experience and make everyone's lives so much easier, but also make us all feel so much closer and more connected. While we group certain notifications by post, for example, we chose to give you a Level One notification for every person who thanks you so that you feel appreciated and connected to those you help with feedback. You'll also now know when Journalers you follow publish new posts. Additionally, now if you click on the "clap icon" on your own post, you can see a complete list of those who clapped for you 👏🏼

Another huge improvement is that when you click on a notification for a particular thread or general comment, after you land on the post page, we automatically scroll you to the correct position and open the thread for you. This also works with the Daily Digest Email, too! 🎉 If you're using Journaly on your mobile device, we tried our best to build our own "Swipey Swipe" gestures for marking a notification as "read" or to delete it.

Upcoming Improvements

In the coming days and weeks, we are hoping to make the following improvements to this system:

• Browser Notifications (with a simple toggle to turn them on and off)
• A little icon in your browser tab if you have unread notifications
• Relative timestamps on Level One notifications ("about 9 minutes ago")
• Automatically marking notifications as "read" once you click on them
• Default swipey-swipe actions on mobile: swiping all the way will delete the notification in one gesture

Feedback Is Welcome!

As always, we welcome your feedback, suggestions, and any bug reports with open arms. We'd LOVE to know what you think of the new system, any additional thoughts or ideas you have, and of course if you find any bugs we'll jump on them as quickly as we can.

A Special Thanks

I really do want to give a special thanks to Ryan for the absolutely epic work and all the time on this project, as well as all the others we've worked on. Journaly wouldn't be what it is without him and all the time he's put into helping me build it, and I wouldn't be nearly as happy as I am working on it either. This project was massive both in terms of scale and complexity, and despite just being two developers - while it is definitely not perfect and might have a few rough edges - I would like to think we built something just as good or perhaps even better than many companies out there with large teams and infinite resources, and we had a damn good time doing it. I think this is emblematic of our team culture and friendship.

And lastly, THANK ALL OF YOU! I'll never ever get tired of opening Journaly each morning and seeing your posts, and that sigh of relief that everyone didn't leave forever 😂

Happy Journaling everyone. You all rock 🎸