v0.3.0 → v0.4.0 (2026-W27)
Production commit:5911cb2
App: https://impress.plebtv.com
TLDRTLDR
Week 1 was a real one.
I got to finish the in-app notification system. So far we have tips, purchases, follows, hearts, impression milestones, low Creator Pro credit warnings, and some neat SVG icons for them.
I also shipped the first version of Impress Labs. Watch the full video walkthrough video below if you are interested.
The Long ReadThe Long Read
Like I said on the last Stacker News post, after years of paying for creator tools that always felt slightly off in my head, the fun part of building Impress is getting to make the stuff I personally wish existed.
This week was a good example of that, but also a reminder that software gets real fast once people are actually using it. 🤣
Finally got around to shipping Impress’s first notification system: Lightning tip alerts, paid purchase alerts, follows, hearts, impression milestones, low Creator Pro credit warnings. I thought I had planned it pretty well, but I forgot to set up backups for my metadata, which resulted in some messier stuff.
During an early deploy, a production smoke cleanup ran with an undefined user ID. That triggered a catastrophic delete. Every user row was gone. I was floored. Videos cascaded with it. Explore went dark.
Thankfully, I had a sort of backup from a couple weeks ago I was able to find. I restored it as best I could and piecemeal’d the videos one by one, then brought Explore back and hardened the delete guardrails. After that, I asked k00b what is a good rule to follow for database safety and retention and implemented a plan.
But it didnt stop there the smaller issues kept showing up too.
Mobile and PWA shells did not always hydrate creator handles or avatars correctly. The sidebar went through multiple passes before Notifications landed under Settings on desktop and inside the Account profile on mobile, so I had to set up a system to focus primarily on both versions individually.
Even the inbox names were wrong at first had to go back and re-fix display names from creator channels and make those deep links actually useful. A handful of cosmetic items.
The other stretch goal this week was Impress Labs. So this will be kind of long, but I have been trying to think how to redesign remix creation so it is faster than normal. Experimental by design, but built on the same upload, FFmpeg, and publishing stack as the rest of Impress so nothing has to be rewritten if it graduates alongside Studio v1.
The first Labs product is Impress Remix Mark I an homage to the RCA Mark I, one of the first sequencers of the time, not to undermine anything Raymond Scott created. If I do get to another Remix product will definitely use his Electronium somewhere in there in remembrance of Scott he also was into wonder.
So to be straight I think of it less like a music sequencer and more like...What makes a great edit? Well a great edit has strong repetitions and patterns. Studio v1 already puts clips, captions, transitions, and editing on a rail that you can save to your Impress library. Mark I is different on purpose more an intent based step sequencer for remixing ad infinitum.
Some parts are still honest stubs. Punch zoom needs work. Audible SFX needs to feel better. Real beat detection is still coming. Transitions can get richer. But the UI/UX shape is not quite right but I do think its important to show what is coming ahead of time to users. Trying to keep it really simple, ship creative tools, reuse the infra, and let creators come and make it.