Dark mode and weekend settings

November 15th, 2020

Hi there, it's been a while! I procrastinated hard and didn't get enough done the week before, so I didn't want to disturb your inbox for nothing. However, there's a lot of new stuff to share this week about Lotus.

Dark mode

I'm working on Lotus mainly in the evenings and I felt like I had to implement dark mode sooner to reduce eye strain.

It also turned out to be an interesting and new challenge for me, because it's not as simple as inverting the color scheme. There are still some issues, but after a lot of experimentation and examples from Tailwind UI I landed on a UI that looks good in the dark.

Lotus uses Tailwind, so after setting up tailwindcss-dark-mode plugin, it's quite easy to add dark versions of components. While it would certainly be nice to have that feature built into the Tailwind itself, tailwindcss-dark-mode plugin will work just fine until then.

There's only one thing that's missing dark mode - a <webview> that embeds github.com. I left it as-is for now, but I think it could be solved by using CSS from github.com/StylishThemes/GitHub-Dark. It's wonderful that this project already exists!

Oh and getlotus.app now has dark mode as well.

Weekend settings

Work shouldn't interrupt your weekend. With Lotus, you can configure a list of organizations or individual repositories, notifications from which will be ignored on Saturday and Sunday.

As you can also spot in the screenshot, you can now also change how many notifications you want to see at once. This means, that you can see 20 notifications, then see another 20 after you've handled the first batch.

Recently viewed notifications

In case you accidentally close the notification or mark it as read, there's no way to get back to it. To solve that, Lotus is going to show recently viewed notifications in the sidebar. It's a small addition, but I think it will be quite handy.

There's not a lot of space for the title and practically no space for repository name, so the UI may change in the future.

Animated logo

It wouldn't be a good newsletter if it didn't have any animation demos, would it?

Other improvements

I've also added some improvements that aren't big enough for their section, but still deserve a call out.

Lotus aside, I admit it was hard to break the procrastination streak and get back to working consistently. I thought writing a weekly newsletter would help me stay accountable for shipping consistently, but turns out my inner laziness devils are much stronger. I don't want to give any promises that it won't happen again, but I also do feel bad for missing last week's email to you folks.

Steven Pressfield's "The War of Art" really helped me dig myself out of that distraction hole. If you're struggling to stay focused and get the work done, I highly recommend to read it. One of the ideas expressed in that book is that every person knows what kind of life they want to have, what exactly they need to do to reach new accomplishments and so forth. But there's an internal force called resistance that is standing in a way and it's going to fight hard to keep you away from change.

It's not a silver bullet, but this book presented my flaws in a way that's hardly even been put before and somehow it gave me the push I desperately needed to get back on track.

Thanks for reading this far and stay tuned for more! In the coming weeks I'm going to share some new exciting ideas for Lotus, like "Screener" from HEY. I'm not even sure I'll build them for the initial release, but I thought I'd share them with you anyway.

Unfortunately, replying directly to this email doesn't work for now, but feel free to message me at vadimdemedes@hey.com.

I'm building Lotus in the open and I'm sending out progress updates just like this one every Sunday.

I won't send spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.