When creating a new app, a developer always has two competing desires:
- To add as many features as possible to make the app as powerful as it can be
- To ship the app quickly
This makes the initial release of any app a balancing act, finding the earliest point at which the app has enough features to be considered useful and worth releasing. However, this means the first release is just a fraction of the vision the developer has for the app. Coppice is no exception to this.
So far we've looked at what Coppice will be at launch, but in this post we want to explore what we want Coppice to become.
Frequent Releases
Last time, we discussed how going for a subscription business model means we can release features when they are ready, rather than saving them for a big paid upgrade. The consequence of this is we want to put out small, but frequent updates to Coppice over time. These updates can be more focused, adding or improving a single part of the app at a time. This gets updates to you sooner, without overwhelming you with a mass of changes at once. It also means we can get feedback on changes sooner.
This approach of more frequent updates doesn't gel well with the traditional versioning system of 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, etc. as the change going from 1.8 to 1.9 may be the same (or bigger) than 1.9 to 2.0. So instead we will be going for a year-based versioning system. This means the first version of Coppice will be version 2020.1 (the first release of 2020).
The Far Future
With Coppice 2020.1, we have deliberately kept things simple, focusing on the core functionality of the app to provide the foundations on which to grow going forward. We have many ideas of how to improve Coppice, so want to share some of our long-term goals here for 3 of the core concepts in Coppice: Pages, Linking, and Canvases.
It's important to note that nothing mentioned here is set in stone. Features we think are a good idea now may not make sense down the road. We also expect to receive a lot of feedback from our users after release which will shape Coppice in ways we haven't even imagined.
Pages
Pages are at the core of Coppice. They hold your thoughts and ideas. Pages are relatively simple in Coppice 2020.1, with basic editing functionality and just two types: Text and Image.
Over time we want to expand both the types of pages and the editing functionality. Some examples of new page types we're considering are PDFs, Markdown, Audio, and Video. With our existing types, we want to expand the formatting options available for Text pages and provide basic editing tools for Image pages
Linking
Linking is a key feature of Coppice, letting you represent the relationships between your thoughts and ideas. Coppice 2020.1 only supports adding links to a Text Page, but our aim is to support linking in some form from every type of Page. The obvious priority here will be Image Pages, allowing you to turn parts of an image into a link.
We also want to investigate more ways of having Coppice help find these links for you, and highlight potential relationships you hadn't considered.
Canvases
We want to further enhance Canvases over time to help you better organise your thoughts and ideas. Key to that is improving navigation. We have many enhancements planned to make it quicker and easier to move around your Canvas and find the pages you want.
Our vision for Canvases is for them to be more than just a place to put multiple pages. Showing links between pages is the first step, but we want to explore more ways of adding to a canvas, from less formal forms of linking pages, to drawing notes and diagrams directly on the Canvas.
Canvases are also great tools for helping others to learn about a topic, so we want to provide ways to export Canvases so you can share them far and wide.
The Near Future
While it is fun to think about the distant future, it's worth looking towards the near future for releases: specifically the rest of 2020.
First, we are hoping to announce the release for Coppice 2020.1 in the next few weeks. Be sure to subscribe to the Coppice Blog to be the first to hear about it.
Secondly, we would like to get a follow up release (2020.2) out before the end of the year. The focus here will be on some improvements to editing Text pages (in particular adding support for lists) and responding to any early feedback from the launch.
We're excited to finally be approaching the final leg of our journey in releasing Coppice, and to start work on the next journey of adding new features and functionality. We can't wait to get Coppice into your hands and start hearing what you want for the future of Coppice!
As always be sure to subscribe to the Coppice blog, follow @mcubedsw on Mastodon, and sign up to the Coppice Mailing List to get all the latest news and tips on Coppice.