The story behind Current’s launch.
In February, Scott Kyle quit his full-time job as Head of Engineering at a startup and went indie.
Working out of Cruzio in Santa Cruz, Scott began to build Current, the Facebook client for Mac that launched this week to rave reviews, climbing to the top of Product Hunt and becoming the #1 top-selling app in Social Networking on the Mac App store.
Scott is visiting Hacker Paradise this week to teach a workshop on React, the JS UI library.
[Alexey] So how does Current work, exactly?
[Scott] The app uses Facebook’s JavaScript directly to render parts of the page into different web views—messaging, news feed, etc. I learned a lot about decompiling Facebook’s Javascript and their React implementation.
Facebook has been porting most of their components into React over the past year. They’re doing it iteratively. Every time they make a change, I can tell, because the code keeps getting cleaner. It’s great.
Current launched with support for 32 languages.
…yeah, that wasn’t as hard as I thought.
First, since most of the elements are coming from Facebook, they are already translated—so I don’t have to do those parts.
A lot of the translations that were left were preference and menu options: “Notification Center,” “Open New Window,” etc. I found out that Apple actually provides a lot of common strings (developer account required) in each of the 32 languages that OS X is translated into.
After I incorporated their translations, there were around 40 words left [to translate] per language. I got a quote from Tethras for about $7 per language to get the remaining translations done. So I just got all of them. The whole thing cost like, $220.
Was it worth it?
Easily. About half of sales so far have been from outside the US, and about a quarter are in a language other than English. That’s a third more sales for maybe a week of work, altogether.
Even a week after launch, Current is still the number one selling Social Networking app in 18 countries. Brazil, Germany, India, Poland, Czech Republic, Israel, Malaysia. I don’t know how many of these we would have gotten without localizing the app.
How’s life as an indie dev?
More stressful than anything I’ve ever done. Pretty sure I’m working harder than ever before. I’m responsible for everything—all the bugs, all the support, all the marketing. It’s just a lot.
How do you feel about articles like this one that talk about the decline of the Mac App Store?
Yeah, I’ve read that. I mostly agree with it.
I don’t think [the Mac App Store] is dying. I feel like the market is still growing. But I think it could be growing faster if Apple iterated more on the Mac App Store experience.
How’s Hacker Paradise?
It’s alright.
Don’t actually write, “it’s alright.” That was a joke!
…now you’re just fucking with me.
I’m going to publish this verbatim.
Sure! I actually really like it. Everyone seems to have a great work ethic and be very interesting. I especially like being around people from many different countries.
Current is for sale now at $1.99. Buy it now in the language of your choice.
