Darkmatter

It’s going to be a short update this time, because I’ve been focusing on the last 5% remaining to launch Darkmatter.

Dark mode

It’s funny that dark mode was among the last things I’ve shipped given the name of the app, but better late than never. Here’s a few screenshots, I think it looks pretty good.

License manager

I’ve already built several tiny apps to manage license keys for my other apps, but they were pretty basic and didn’t support per-seat billing. This meant I couldn’t implement the pricing I wanted.

I’ve always wanted to have one place to integrate with Paddle and manage license keys for all my apps, so I don’t have to maintain a separate server for each of them.

So that’s what I was working on this week. It’s a tiny project, that:

• Generates a license key when a customer buys my app on Paddle.
• Manages activation/deactivation of devices for each license.
• Has an Electron library, which takes care of free trials and license management.

Font settings

I’ve postponed this for a while, but there were folks who were asking to customize the font long time ago. Finally, it’s shipped.

I decided to go beyond a basic list of all available fonts. Font settings feature a custom menu component, which categories the fonts into 3 sections: default system font, custom fonts you have added yourself and fonts that came with the system. All items use the font they represent to render their label too.

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I’ve mostly stopped working on the new features and I moved the focus to implementing the billing, designing the full version of the website and writing documentation. It’s time for the last-minute preparations ahead of launch.

This is the part where I struggle the most. Once designing and coding stops, it’s not that much fun anymore and it’s easy for me to lose motivation. But, I’m proud of what I built and I want everyone else to experience what Darkmatter has to offer.

It’s been amazing writing this newsletter for the past two months and even more amazing talking to you in replies 💙

Stay tuned for the final push and a launch announcement very, very soon!