Pixa - My year in pixels

Bullet journaling made digital! With Pixa you can log your year in pixels. By creating fully customizable logs which represent anything you wish you can get an overview of your year in colors.

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Inspiration

What inspired me to do Pixa is my love for structure, organization and bullet journaling. In bullet journaling there is a chart called "Year in Pixels", which makes you get an overview of your whole year in colors.

The problem with journaling is that it takes so much time and you have to be good at drawing. I had neither the patience nor the skills required for traditional journaling, and thats when I got the idea and what inspired me to make this app! What also always has inspired me is visuals and the aesthetics of things. I really wanted to make this app both visually and practically pleasing.

What it does

Pixa lets you track and log whatever you want. You can for instance log your dreams, track your energy or rate each day.

Let's say you want to make a "Rate my day" log where each day in a year would be rated between 1-5. You could then create your own "keys" that consist of a color and a label and each key would in this case represent a number of that scale. In the end of the year you would end up with a aesthetically pleasing and easy to understand graphical visualisation of what you have tracked.
As keys and log names are fully customizable in Pixa, the only limit for what could be tracked is your imagination.

A pixel chart is a satisfying method to visualize your chosen topic in a colorful grid. The grid consists of the day of the month (vertical) and the months (horizontal). Each square/pixel in the grid represents your rating for that day.

The app has a free tier and premium tier. The free tier includes one log in total, while the premium tier includes an unlimited number of logs across every year. A premium tier can be purchased either through a very affordable monthly subscription or a very reasonable one time fee, which grants lifetime premium access.

How we built it

The app is built using React Native / Expo with a TypeScript tRPC API handing all the backend logic. RevenueCat is used to handle In-app Subscriptions and Purchases due to its seamless integration into the Expo app and also for the sake of peace of mind, knowing everything money-related will be handled properly and without surprises.

Challenges we ran into

As the app is quite simple by design, it was imperative that the app felt responsive and snappy. Although most backend requests and database operations are inexpensive, the slight latency introduced by performing the requests, waiting for a response, invalidating the tRPC cache and re-rendering the components left the experience feeling a little bit lacking. This was resolved by making a lot of client side predictions and manually editing the tRPC cache before invalidation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are so proud of our app and the community we've built during this short peroid of time. We are also proud to release our first ever app to the App Store, and the fact that we reached the top 100 list of Productivity apps is something we feel particulary happy about.

We have got so much positive feedback and response from all around the world, especially on TikTok. People are saying that they've been looking for an app like this and that they love the simple yet aesthetic design.

As this app was something we really felt we ourselves wanted to use, it was validating to see and hear that people have been missing an app like this the same way we have.

What we learned

As this was the first app I have ever released on the App Store (prior I had only released updates to existing apps at work), I have learned a lot from this journey.

In terms of technical knowledge, I have learned:

  • how to set up a good CI/CD pipeline for apps
  • how to implement in app subscriptions/purchases
  • how to write a tRPC API
  • in general elevated my React Native skills.

As a team (me and my girlfriend who designed the app and the concept), we have learned how valuable feedback from others is. We have also discovered the benefits of creating something that you actually want to use yourself.
By using the prototype app a lot during development we found "missing" features and what could be improved.

What's next for Pixa

We have so many plans for Pixa and we can't wait to get started. In the very near future we are planning to launch the app to Google Play. Another plan in the near future is to provide translations to other languages than English. We also want to make it even more customizable by letting you change almost everything, such as the starting month of each log, the font used within the log and the color theme used across the app.

Marketing wise, we want to make it the most used productivity app in the world! We want everyone to be able to know about our app and to feel the satisfaction of a completed year in pixels.

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