Fast Start

I’m proud to announce the release of my second Mac app Fast Start. Fast Start started as a CLI tool that I was using to create new files since Sublime Text did not offer easy template support at that time. While the CLI was useful it would constantly break and it was a massive pain to try and add/edit new templates. To fix this I decided to build a native Mac app that would allow me to easily create new templates and make editing these templates painless.

Initial Fast Start "App"

I started this new project in August planning for it to be a quick weekend project that would be a nice break from what I was working on at the time. Quickly this project started to take more and more of my time since I wanted to make this tool as perfect as I could because I would be using it daily. While I was working on the app I kept thinking of ways to make creating new files easier, which lead me to creating a Notification Center Widget. Since Yosemite allowed for custom widgets in Notification Center I thought that if I could put Fast Start there it would always be accessible without requiring to launch the app. Once I got the widget working it quickly became obvious that a Notification Center Widget would be a perfect place to store my code snippets, so I added code snippets to the app/widget and began the long road of testing. I kept using the app everyday to ensure that the experience was easy and unobtrusive to my daily routine and finally finished the 1.0 in December.

While this project took a lot of time to build and get right, the entire time I was motivated by wanting to improve the app and make it exactly what I wanted. This was the first app I wrote that I used daily during the development which helped me find bugs and think of new ways to improve the overall experience. Fast Start was one of my favorite projects I’ve worked on in a long time and I plan on building new features for it in the near future. You can download Fast Start on the Mac App Store.