⚡️ October Development Update

Early Access; iterating with the community.

Zaymon @ LetterDesk, October 2021

Welcome back to another LetterDesk development update! It’s been a busy couple months at LetterDesk HQ.

Lots of people have signed on for early access and it’s been exciting watching the numbers slowly going up.

Early Statistics 📈

• Users Registered: 23
• Number of users who have sent at least one letter: 12
• Letters sent: 21
• Average letter length: 500 words

I’ve been blown away by people’s willingness to give long form communication and letter writing a try. My mission for LetterDesk was to connect more deeply with the people I care about and to keep in touch with people living abroad. Each time I receive a heartfelt letter it reinforces the value I see in the platform and motivates me to keep building new features to improve the experience for the community.

New Features ✨

Weekly Reminder Email 📬

There’s now a weekly reminder email which will gently let you know if you have any unread letters sitting in your letter box. LetterDesk is designed to be unobtrusive so if these don’t provide utility you can turn them on and off in Account Settings

Invitation System for Early Access 📮

Didn’t get an invite? Check your spam folder or send me an email at support@letterdesk.app if you can’t find it. It would be my pleasure to send you another one. 😌

Drafts can now be deleted 🗑

Didn’t mean to hit reply? Want to start over? No problem. Now managing your draft list is in your own hands.

Change your password 🗝

You can now update your password by going to Account Settings .

Bug Fixes and Improvements 🧼

• Fix strange behaviour when pressing tab to focus the next field in log in / register forms
• Better error messages across all forms
• Standardise the positions of toast messages and establish semantic meaning
• Add an invite button to the new letter pal picker if the user doesn’t yet have any pen pals
• Re-implement landing page with Next.JS and move the LetterDesk application to https://app.letterdesk.app
• Improve Google search rankings for ‘LetterDesk’
• Add larger app icon to support ‘Add to HomeScreen’ on iOS and Android
• Fix favicon—the little icons in browser tabs—for many devices
• Update the aesthetics and functionality of www.letterdesk.app/blog
• Fix the ordering of invitations in the invitations page (redeemed flow to the bottom)
• Better error reporting—if something breaks for you I want to know about it.
• Self hosted analytics via https://umami.is/ that doesn’t give your data to big tech
• Fix loading skeletons

Up Next

Now that some of you have letters piling up it’s time to think about archives! It’s going to be an iterative process to get the design right but I’m confident I can improve on the current list view 😅. If you have any ideas for how you would like old letters you have received to be organised, sorted and displayed please email your ideas to zaymon@letterdesk.app I would love to discuss them.

Until next time,

Zaymon Antonio