Updates February 2021

By Josh Willuhn. Feb 28, 2021

This was a big month for MOTOrift! The new dashboard is almost ready and some pretty awesome features are going into it.

First the boring stuff: Stripe (payments) and SendGrid (email) changed their products a little bit since I last checked them out, so I updated the web app to work with their new libraries.

But the best part has been the new web dashboard. It isn't live quite yet but it will make the web app feel much more complete. It's the initial dashboard once you login, so a very high touch point that everyone sees.

This new dashboard brings live location updates to the web app, easily share your location with friends. The beta version of the spare phone bike alarm is now controllable by the web app.

For maps, there's a new 3D terrain option to see your ride map in 3D. Soon you'll be able to choose a map style from the web app and have it apply to both Android apps as well.

It was a busy month!

March and April will be the last days of strictly beta testing. This thing is hopefully gonna be live on the public side of Google Play in just a matter of weeks. Developing this app to this point has really just been the beginning.

Launching in Spring makes the most sense because that's when everyone gets their bikes out. But last year covid hit right when I was getting ready to launch. It made me rethink my plans and adapt.

I've been lucky so far on the covid front. In many ways the world feels different than it did this time last year. The half million lives lost are individuals with families and friends, goals and dreams.

Hopefully covid is a distant memory one day and life returns to as normal as possible

What's next for MOTOrift?

Product development is unlike most tasks because it's such an abstract thing. Hopefully by May MOTOrift will be completely launched out of beta.

After that the focus will be on creating help pages. Implementing feedback and handling problems that show up before another round of updates.

This update marks more than a year of monthly updates, it makes me realize how far MOTOrift has gotten and how far I have to go 😂 as I get to more of a launched product out, these monthly updates will change to feature updates in addition to monthly development updates.

Well that's all I have for now. Thanks for reading this and reach out on the support chat if you have any questions or anything!