Sleepy Eyes

During the weekend I took the decision to remove Sleepy Eyes from the Apple App Store.

Sleepy Eyes has been a great little app that I used a lot when I developed it. With our daughter being a newborn at the time, I wanted to create a white noise app to help her sleep.

Unfortunately it didn't work on her... it's just the way she is. Fortunately it worked very well on myself. So many times did I fall asleep whilst testing the timer functionality. It was fun.

I wanted to learn iOS development, so I sat down and learned Objective-C... and then... Swift was announced. I immediately jumped onboard with it and loved it! The early days of Swift were amazing and I think it's only gotten worse over the years (too complicated in my eyes). I maintained the app with each Swift release until a few years ago.

For the live of me I wanted to update the app as I went, and to this day I still work on a small update that has been sitting at the back of my mind for years.

Unfortunately, it's an iOS only affair... which I'm not too interested in anymore - I'd rather make it cross platform and concentrate on that.

Sleepy Eyes made some money on the way... however in the early days I spent a lot of money on advertisement on Twitter and also Apple Search Ads. I've never broken even from that even after many years! It was a paid up front app...

The app itself has many long time users, to this day! With 5/5 star reviews.

However, it's time to let it go and concentrate on something else. I do want to revisit it, but with another name and cross platform. I'm a huge fan for white noise apps and I see myself creating another at some point.

With new versions of iOS coming out, and with me not maintaining it, it is best I don't sell it under false pretences that it will continue to be updated. I tried... but it just didn't work out.

I want to give a huge thanks to my old friend Tom who sat with me in Jersey where we talked about it and he went off to design the sound icons and general look and feel. I never felt such great energy than woking with him on a project.

Thank you Tom and everyone who has used the app throughout the years.

With iOS 11 now being generally available, I’ve released an update to Sleepy Eyes (version 2.7) to fix a few bugs, add a few tweaks and changed that icon.

Changes

• New app icon. I think you’re going to love it. The old one was… well… old.
• Bolder fonts! To boldly go where many fonts have gone before. OK, that was bad.
• iOS 11 fixes and improvements. Boring.
• Thanks to iOS 11 you can now pause and un-pause the app, when playing, from your Apple Watch. Yes, I was surprised to see it. Love it!
• Fixed some weirdness that would occur on the iPad. Also boring… yet satisfying to fix… finally.
• Made the app size smaller by removing a couple of things and making optimisations. Well, it optimised itself pretty well to be honest!
• If you’ve used the app for a while, after updating, it may or may not ask you to leave a review. Please do :) Don’t worry, nothing pesky there!

Naming change

The app used to have ‘Baby Soother’ at the end, I now removed that.

After reading reviews and getting feedback it became clear that more and more people are using the app for themselves. How could I be so short sighted? Anyway, keeping it minimal. I’ve got some nice updates for version 3 planned to make that even more universal.

Update on version 3:

In the last release notes I mentioned that I will stop working on version 2 of the app.

I am working on two new apps which are coming soon, when they are ready. I’ll be announcing more soon on those. Once they are complete I’ll be heading back around to version 3 of the app.

Happy calming and sleeping!

Had a great few hours getting my Sleepy Eyes app ready for another update. Waiting for review at the moment. Will post a blog post on what has changed when it’s approved. Nothing too major though.

Celebrating the upcoming WWDC next week, that’s Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference, I made Sleepy Eyes half price for you all. That’s $0.99 instead of $1.99.

I’m working hard on version 3 for the app and that will hopefully come later this year.

Enjoy and happy calming.

Vincent

A tiny but totally great update to Sleepy Eyes (version 2.6).

A new Settings screen built from scratch and localised into 4 different languages. I’ve also included some accessibility improvements here.

Changes:

• A new settings screen, which is now localised to Japanese, German, Dutch and Polish. English too!
• Fixed a bug where the timer would not correctly increase or decrease once the sound started to play.
• Improved localisation for Japanese, German, Dutch and Polish. More coming soon.

I wasn’t too happy with the one before so I hope this settles it for you folks. Hoping to add more full localisation to the app in future and better accessibility.

Future development:

This is my last update to the app for version 2. Work on version 3 has begun after months of planning and designing. I don’t have a release date yet but it will be ready when it’s ready.

Version 3 will be a complete rebuild of the whole app and sounds. I’m starting from scratch.

If there are major issues on version 2, I will be sure to fix them though!

Happy calming and sleeping!

I’m happy to announce a small but great update to my iOS app, Sleepy Eyes (version 2.5).

Changes:

• Timer can now be set to up to 3 hours… because sometimes 60 minutes isn’t enough.
• Sounds now fade in when you start playing them. To avoid those moments when you’re tired and the sudden start of the sound makes you panic. No more.
• iPad fixed issues with Settings screen, now works nicely.
• You can now increase the timer from the lock screen when you’re playing a sound. Neat.
• Removed the timer slider control - yes, that existed.
• Various other behind the scene fixes and improvements.
• The app now requires iOS 10 or higher.
• Now running on Swift 3.

Another thing I did is remove any third party tracking that was used to track a few things like how many times a sound was played, what the most set sleep time is and various other things. It never tracked any identifiable information, of course! It was also helpful to alert me of any crashes. However, Apple’s built in analytics and crash reporting is way more appealing to me. Not only does it give me the piece of mind that your information will never be sold to anyone (without my knowledge), but it also allows me to open up any crash reports straight in Xcode. That’s neat! Oh and because I removed the third party code, the app now starts considerably faster!

A few updates and change of direction for the app are coming at some stage this year.

Can’t wait to make it even better!

Happy calming and sleeping!

Go grab it on the App Store.

(you have no idea how many times I fall asleep testing the app!)