First time experience

[mennenia]

Ola!

Congrats on beta 2 :D.

So I tried it for the first time, and I think there are some areas in which we could improve to make it more clear for first time users.

I braindumped 3 main issues with the first screen here:

Based off that, here's a suggestion for a first step improvement? Please give thoughts / ideas / alternate copy / etc.

I know there was an issue on the install CLI UI, and I think it's absolutely great if you've never used cocoapods or don't have them.

So, I do have them.. I'm guessing they're out of date? Or does the prompt just always show? My flow was a bit like this:

So, it's not very clear why the app thought it needed installing. Also, the warning then implies you possibly need to maintain two installations of CP? A different path for the app, and for the existing CLI?

I'd show this prompt if you want to do a fresh install and yes, overwrite. It's a great "are you sure" dialogue for that. If you do want to update, a different prompt with wording like:

"You already have a tool installed. This will update your existing configuration. / This will update Cocoapods to the latest and greatest. "

"If you need to keep your current installation, this will overwrite it. You may want to choose an alternate filename or directory. "

"Cancel | Update"

This dialogue is mainly for if you've got your CI and your whole team running off a specific version properly, and someone updates and it changes things, at least they know / are warned they are updating. We often had to simultaneously (whole team + buildasaur) update at SwiftKey to make sure we didn't break anything.

Lastly, I added a simple open icon thingy. I think it'd be great if you could put in projects, and that the app would init a podfile, but that's already covered here. Just +1'ing it for first time users :).

Actually, the "open an existing podfile" could also be "drag in an existing podfile" or something. Again, feel free to suggest better copy!

[alloy]

I can't +1 this enough. Great ticket @mennenia!

[mennenia]

:) Happy to provide assets or further designs based of what you guys need / think. This was a very quick thing, thrown together just to illustrate points / thoughts.

[orta]

I agree with all of this, you're welcome to do designs, but split it out into different issues. I'm been drinking, so will do a real look through tomorrow.

[mennenia]

I think the "update CLI" needs to be a different issue for sure. I do like grouping some of the other things under "first time experience". I'll sketch out an experience map or something and post that tomorrow or something.

Enjoy the champagne!

[orta]

The grouping only makes sense if you're the one doing all the work, individual issues makes more sense when you can persuade others to do it for you. ;)

This is why this repo has a lot of milestones around bigger picture things: https://github.com/CocoaPods/CocoaPods-app/milestones

[orta]

My plan around (1) was to have it default to a Spotlight query ( e.g. mdfind -literal 'kMDItemFSName == Podfile' ordered by most recent update time )

From my rough mock:

Which should cover ~90% of what people are looking for, and could potentially never need to use Open/Recents. Recents made it easier to bootstrap from initially though, so I started there. I think this feels like a better first launch experience and can happily move that out into it's own issue

[mennenia]

Aahh, so it would always find all your podfiles in the system. That's cool. What if you had none though?

I think that would be a nice place for someone to drag in a project, and a pod file to be init-ed.

Btw, seeing as there are other individual issues now tagged with the FTE milestone (cheers for making that!), feel free to close this one. I'll make one on the update CLI stuff.

[orta]

Aahh, so it would always find all your podfiles in the system. That's cool. What if you had none though?

I wasn't really going to take having no Podfiles on your system into account, happy to have you take over dealing with that. Feels like a pretty small use case though. Make an issue around this specifically?

I think that would be a nice place for someone to drag in a project, and a pod file to be init-ed.

Definitely agree, home window does sound like the right place. Ideally should support either:

• xcodeprojects for pod init or looking for a Podfile in the same folder
• a Podfile which can just open a normal podfile editor.

Make an issue around this one too?

[mennenia]

Hmm. So, I thought that was definitely a use case? As I thought the goal of the app was to make it super easy for people to start installing pods and using them in projects. Or is it mainly to maintain your pods etc, hence it's focussed around a podfile editor?

And yes, those two cases sound perfect. I'll update the behaviour like that in this issue.

On a random note, CLI update/install issue now here: #179

[orta]

Hmm. So, I thought that was definitely a use case

Which is A-OK, but I had/have everything to ship, have to keep making tradeoffs on what I can work on. Totally happy for others to work on it!

[mennenia]

👍

[kylef]

I wasn't really going to take having no Podfiles on your system into account, happy to have you take over dealing with that.

I think this is an important use case, for people who have never used CocoaPods before and install the app for the first time.

[AliSoftware]

For cross-reference, some points mentioned here have also been posted in #169 (especially point (1) in the captures above) 👍

[wrutkowski]

Can we divide copy as a separate task and agree on them? I like the idea to make them more obvious for new users of CocoaPods.

[orta]

Definitely, this issue is long enough.