Mind canvas for Quillcaster

Yesterday, I wrote about my new side-hustle. Before starting the research on whether to proceed further, I would like to elaborate on what’s my idea and end product would be. There is a bit of an imagination here. No code, no research, and I haven’t looked at any competitor websites. So bear with me if it sounds too futuristic.

UI/UX

One fine day, you decide to read an article on your computer and open your favorite browser, as usual. After a bit of reading, a line gets stuck in your brain, and you decide to post it to a social media platform.

You press a quick shortcut key, and a pop-up dialog appears. The dialog has all the social media platform accounts you own at the top. The cursor is in focus, inviting you to key in more words after the selected text in the text box. You can add text content in the content area with options to add images, polls, or content warnings based on the platform currently selected in the dialog.

When you finish typing the content, selecting another platform automatically populates the written text. There’s an option to remove selected content for a platform if you change your mind later. Before publishing the post, wouldn’t it be nice to preview how it will appear on different platforms? Clicking on a preview button, next to the publish button, would open a panel from the bottom. This would show previews for the platforms you’ve decided to post on.

On the top-right corner of the dialog, there’s a set of grouped icons. These icons give more controls for hashtags, emojis, and GIFs. For example, clicking on the hashtag icon opens another panel on the right end of the screen. The hashtag panel displays all the trending hashtags of different social networks for a local region and worldwide. Selecting a hashtag automatically populates it for that platform in the opened dialog. The moment you press the ‘Publish’ button, the dialog vanishes, and you’re back to where you were.

Other features like scheduling and drafts could be added as well. There’s a challenge in the content part. When you type content in the textbox for Mastodon and select Instagram or TikTok account at the top of the dialog, wouldn’t it be brilliant to automatically convert the text into the form of an image for Instagram and a video for TikTok? I know it’s a bit of too much imagination here. Making that work would be a fantastic thing to have in future releases. I believe AI could help achieve this.

Stack

I’m using this opportunity to learn React, TypeScript, and Node.js. Implementing the backend with Django shouldn’t be a hard problem for me. In the projects I’ve built earlier, I could extract pieces to set up my backend. But I’m thinking of doing this in Node.js to get experience in the JavaScript ecosystem. The last time I tried, it wasn’t pleasant. Moreover, Node.js is faster and has better integration with WebSockets and Server-Sent Events (SSE). Features like this could help for sending push notifications to browser extensions.

The backend could have login/signup with SSO, pages for billing and subscriptions. In later stages, features like team management, permissions, and analytics could be included. Though most of the UI features could be handled with the extensions, APIs for these features still need to be added to the backend for a seamless workflow. Local storage on the browsers would be a great choice for delaying requests and improving responsiveness.

Things like admin interfaces and worker queues are something I would really miss coming from Django. I haven’t explored similar packages in the JavaScript ecosystem yet. Maybe I might be surprised.

I have come across a few similar products and their pricing before. Having an extension with all these features would make people love this product, I believe. Again, this is purely my mind’s canvas for Quillcaster. Yes, that’s the product name. I still hope I can make this a finished product after my research. I’m eager to post about it as I progress.