🐾 A month since opening: 30 finished flyers, an improved wizard and 4 new references ✨

It has been a month since I opened the app to everyone. Back then I wrote that the flyer generator sometimes needs two or three rounds and works best with one change per round. Building on what I learned since, I rewrote Kyna from the inside, and today I am launching the new version.

The app’s interface is in Czech; the labels quoted below are translated.

What has happened since the opening

The numbers as of today:

• Breeders started 66 flyers in Kyna and had 729 drafts generated. Almost half of them, 332, came after the app opened to everyone.
• They downloaded 30 finished flyers.
• 27 of them are the version with the Kyna mark.
• Breeders took 3 without the mark. I do not use those as examples.
• 20 of the 30 downloaded flyers were finished within half an hour of being started.
• Half of the messages sent to me by e-mail or in the app’s chat had my answer within about an hour.

Four new references

From the flyers with the Kyna mark I picked four and added them to the references. Each one shows the finished flyer next to the photos it was made from, with the story of how the breeder got there.

• A planned Border Collie mating from the Wicca Gabreta kennel. The breeder came back to it for two months and tried four quite different moods.
• A stud dog flyer for Ginkgo from the same kennel. Three photos and two finished flyers, both from the first round.
• A group portrait of four bitches from a single garden photo.
• Cairo, a Staffordshire Bull Terrier, from three phone photos. This flyer went through twenty rounds and I finished it by hand at the end. I say so openly, because flyers like this one are what the new version grew out of.

What is different in the new Kyna

The start stays the same: you upload photos of your dogs and fill in the details. What changed is what comes after.

Kyna handles edits to a drafted flyer far better than before.

The text is checked before anything is drawn. Before the first drafts you see a card called “Text on the flyer”. It shows how the text will look and compares it with your details and with the breed’s public records. When it finds something suspicious, it writes a note and says how sure it is: “Certain”, “Likely” or “Possibly”. For each note you choose whether to fix the text, write it differently or keep it. A dog’s corrected name or title is saved to its profile and applies to later flyers too.

You do not have to wait at the screen. An edit usually takes 2 to 7 minutes. You can ask for an e-mail and close the window, or switch to another tab and wait for a browser notification.

Why

Cairo’s flyer went through twenty rounds. His owner knew exactly what he wanted: bigger dogs, a different heading, the ear of the lying dog, the line with the dam. The old way made him write it piece by piece and hope the next round would not break what already worked. In the end I finished part of it by hand.

The new Kyna is meant to handle that work itself. Read the whole change at once and make it on the draft you chose. Whatever already works should stay as it is.

Where to start

The new version runs at app.kyna.cz, in Czech. If you get stuck or something does not look right, write to ahoj@kyna.cz. I answer myself.

And once your first flyer from the new version is finished, let me know how it went.

Marek Polcar, founder of Ťapka and Kyna

🐾 Kyna - The Digital Handler for your kennel. ✨