You may remember that Lotus has a Do Not Disturb feature. The idea was to hide notifications from your 9-to-5 job after 5pm and on weekends. I always wanted that feature in GitHub, because I don't want to see tens of notifications from work repositories when I'm having fun with my open-source projects in my free time.
I think that feature has a lot of potential and this week I took it a step further. Lotus can now split work and personal notifications from each other. Hear me out.
Work and personal notifications don't belong together
I think the logic of hiding work notifications after 5pm and on weekends applies to personal notifications too. When you're working on your company's project, you shouldn't see notifications from open-source repositories.
Let's say today is Saturday. It's a weekend and I just want to hack on my side projects. Lotus will show this "Personal" badge on top and hide all notifications related to my job.
If it's, for example, Monday and it's between 9am and 5pm, Lotus will do the reverse. It will only show notifications coming from my work repositories. Now there's a "Work" badge displayed instead.
If you are in "work mode", but want to check something real quick in your "personal mode" notifications, you can click a "Switch To Personal" button. There's also "Switch To Work" button to go in the other direction.
This feature is all about avoiding distraction and staying focused and I think it should go both ways. It's also turned off by default, because not everyone has a job, so this idea would be meaningless for them. If you think it would be useful for you, here's how it can be configured:
To let Lotus know which repositories belong to your 9-to-5 job, enter their name and add them to the list. That's all it takes to set it up. As soon as you start typing, Lotus will search GitHub in background and show you suggestions to speed it up.
If your work repositories all belong to the same organization, you can enter organization's name instead and all of its repositories will be automatically added.
In the future I'm going to let users configure their work time too. For example, you might be working from 8am to 4pm or you're an owl and work only starts at 7pm. Until it's supported, I want to test this feature with a most common case, which is 9am to 5pm.
I'm really curious to find out how this feature will impact developers with full-time jobs and open-source stuff on the side!
This week's newsletter is quite short, but for a good reason - beta testing of Lotus is in full swing!
I didn't have a lot of time for working on new features, because early adopters have reported quite a few issues and I focused 100% on fixing those to make sure people have a good time with Lotus.
I also worked on implementing a smooth update system. I don't want to send a new download link to everyone who's testing the beta and I especially don't want to ask them to re-download the app every time a new release is out. I've stumbled upon some interesting challenges with that and I'm planning to share these in the next newsletters.
If you want to test drive Lotus too, feel free to reply to this email or if that doesn't work, hit me up directly at vadimdemedes@hey.com. Alternatively, my DMs on Twitter are open too.
Thank you for tuning in! See you next week.
– Vadim.
I'm building Lotus in the open and I'm sending out progress updates just like this one every Sunday.
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