Early stages

Inspiration

It all started in early 2017 when a colleague of mine, Romain Endelin, showed me Helium . A very nice piece of software that lets you have a floating window in front of everything else.

In the following months, I've used it extensively, listening to talks and watching Netflix while coding (please, don’t tell my boss 🙏). But, the more I used it, the more frustrations grew in me. It was missing very niche features I needed. Like a see-through mode, the ability to load local files, a markdown viewer, some code highlighting, more embeds and custom shortcuts…

Proof of concept

In the mean time I also wanted to learn more about the Mac application’s ecosystem, packaging, submission and review loop.

So, in June, I started working on a proof of concept to see if I could have a similar feature-set quickly, with a technology I knew well, JavaScript.

Electron to the rescue (👋 haters), since all I wanted, primarily, was to load a website in a window, it was very relevant to use a web-view framework.

A week later, working late hours at home and supporting my very pregnant wife 🤰🏻, I had a first, very rough, PoC, a logo and a minimal feature set. That’s all I needed to keep the motivation going for the next 6 months or so (TBD).

Very first prototype of Fenêtre.

This video helped me hook my colleague, Max William Neilson, the biggest Beyonce fan ever, and convinced him to do some designs for Fenêtre. Starting with the logo. Then, the website and the settings screen of the application.

Logo evolution, from my first try on the left to Max’s latest, awesomest one.

From there I was able to make a nifty little animation in CSS:

Cost

This was a side project, so I wanted to have something with minimal cost and maintenance possible (because I'm cheap and lazy). That’s why I chose to publish it on the Mac AppStore, following the great advice from another colleague, Saïd Abidi, Chief Laziness Officer.

At first, I wanted to handle both licensing and updating myself, but for the small price of 30% of everything, Apple can handle that for you.

All in all, the application cost me ~115$ (+30% of all sales), which is a fair investment in my opinion… of a cheap person.