I built a forum for Kosshi and started running it in July. It's a place where posts and replies stay together by topic, rather like a message board. I've been so absorbed in developing Kosshi these past few months that I haven't had much time to write here. In the meantime, the conversations on the forum have become more active, and I've started to feel tha
Read more →I recently changed how people contact me, from a form to just my email address. It started with a small thing that had been bugging me. People come in through a form, but I reply by email. Once someone writes through the form and we move to email, the next time they want to reach me, they're not sure which one to use. The form again? Or just email me? Eith
Read more →A while back I wrote that feedback for Kosshi had started pouring in over email. That hasn't let up, and I've been living in my inbox ever since. The thing that kept bugging me was simple. I can reply to people one by one, but I had no way to tell everyone using Kosshi, "hey, this is changing." I keep a release-notes page, and I post the occasional "just s
Read more →Lately, the feedback coming in through Kosshi's contact form has been getting a bit wild. As I mentioned in an earlier post, hardly anyone outside Japan was using Kosshi, so when I put it on Product Hunt my expectations were honestly pretty light, something like "maybe the numbers will tick up a little." Then this week, a longtime overseas outliner user, m
Read more →I put Kosshi on Product Hunt. It had been about two months since the release. Kosshi was gradually picking up users in Japan, but barely anyone outside Japan was using it. That was where things stood at this point. When I lined the reasons up, well, yeah, that tracked. On social media I post almost exclusively in Japanese, and I'd said essentially nothing
Read more →I'm not particularly strong in English. Programming is basically a wall of English, so I get exposed to it all day, but reading and writing it is still meaningfully harder for me than Japanese. These days I default to browser translation for most foreign-language sites. I suspect a fair number of Japanese developers sit somewhere around here. For the same re
Read more →When I'd just started building Kosshi, I wasn't all that comfortable with Mac/iOS development to begin with, so the first thing I did was dig through Apple's docs trying to figure out which pieces I should combine to build an outliner. But I couldn't really find anything that would get me close. Even when I tried things out, something would always be off. M
Read more →I left my company at the end of 2021. Before that, a few of us had been building a new product internally. The product itself didn't take off, but I couldn't shake the feeling of building something from zero, so I quit to do it full-time on my own. Going from a salary to nothing overnight was a stretch, so the plan was to take freelance work for a few year
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