Week 5 - Community engagement, new conversation, sidebar animation
March 29th, 2025
This week, we took our first step in connecting with the broader community by sharing our development journey on Reddit.
In a post on the r/MacApps subreddit, we introduced 120.dev and invited Mac users to test our first application, 120 AI Chat. The response was positive, with numerous users expressing a willingness to assist in refining the app.
To manage the influx of interest and ensure meaningful interactions, we decided to start with a small group of active users for early collaboration. This approach allows us to address initial feedback effectively and make necessary improvements before a broader release.
The engagement on Reddit has been important in validating our development direction. The enthusiastic response and thoughtful suggestions were inspiring. We're grateful for this support and thank you for joining us on this journey.
Back to our development this week, our efforts were centered on refining the user interface of the 120 AI Chat app, with a particular emphasis on enhancing the sidebar's functionality and aesthetics. The sidebar serves as a pivotal navigation hub, allowing users to seamlessly manage their conversations and access various features within the app.
New conversation button
At the core of the sidebar is the conversation model, which represents focused chat sessions. We introduced a new conversation button, allowing users to instantly start fresh discussions.
We now plan to work on threaded conversations (split chat), where users can engage with different AI models within the same session while maintaining continuity. This means you'll be able to branch conversations to explore different responses without losing context, making complex research and creative workflows much more intuitive.
Sidebar animation
Animation was another critical aspect of our improvements this week. We refined the expand and collapse animations to feel natural, ensuring that the sidebar fluidly integrates into the broader app experience.
Currently, our animation uses linear interpolation, which moves elements at a constant speed. We're planning to introduce easing animations to the sidebar soon, ensuring smoother transitions that feel natural and responsive while maintaining our 120FPS performance standard. If you are interested in what our easing will be like, we recommend a curated collection of easing functions that we are following available at easing.net.
We're also exploring spring animations, which simulate physical properties like tension and friction to create more natural-feeling movements. We plan to implement these advanced animation styles through a cross-platform framework that maintains consistency across all our supported devices.
Avatar component updates
We've enhanced the Avatar component with more personalization options to improve user experience and visual clarity.
We now support radius adjustment, allowing different shapes between square and circular. This small change offers more personalization options. The radius property accepts percentage values, allowing for different corner styles. In addition, we've included some preset options in our design system to ensure consistency while providing flexibility.
We also expanded avatar fallback support. When a user doesn't have a profile picture, the avatar can now display either initials or an icon, ensuring polychromic consistency across platforms.
This aligns with our design principles, where every UI component should feel cohesive regardless of the user's environment.
Development environment upgrade
As technology advances, we recognize the need for our development environment to stay ahead of the curve. By upgrading to Mac Studio, we've improved our build times by nearly 4 times (compared with Mac Mini M1) and achieved smoother performance, significantly increasing our productivity.
We're excited to see how this translates into the quality of our apps. It perfectly complements our rendering ambitions, powering the intricate UI computations that bring 120.dev to life.
Looking forward
In the upcoming week, our focus will be on improving the threaded conversation feature. We'll also continue refining our text rendering system to adeptly manage complex cases involving diverse fonts, sizes, and Markdown content, all while maintaining a seamless 120 FPS performance.
For those interested in joining our testing program, we'll be opening additional spots in a few weeks. Current testers can submit feedback through our Discord community for real-time discussions with our development team.
If you've read and followed this far, we just want to thank you so much for your support!