11 May 2016
So I made a Yeltzland app for iPhones and iPads.
I really just made it for myself, to make it easy to read everything about the mighty Halesowen Town FC (Forum/Official site/Yeltz TV/Twitter/…) in one place rather than have to click around different places. There is no new content you can’t get elsewhere. I am lazy.
Anyway it turned out OK so I thought I’d stick it on the App Store so other people can use it if they want.
You can read a bit about it/install it on the App Store
Before you ask, it isn’t available for Android right now I’m afraid, and I have no immediate plans to write an Android version. I may change my mind of course.
04 May 2016
I’ve been thinking a lot about how I work on my apps in a sustainable and realistic way recently.
One of the conclusions has been I should stop pretending there is a corporation behind them - it’s just me (with some inspiration and help from Nick on Daily Optimiser).
Therefore in the latest version of Daily Optimiser
- v3.1.0 - I’ve removed a few things, and made a few other things a bit clearer.
I’ve removed integration of the Daily Optimiser Twitter feed and blog posts into the coach area. It was a good idea, but we never really used it
much (at all!) to publish useful productivity posts and information, so it was always a bit stale and getting in the way.
I’ve also simplified the settings page, to make it more efficient to change what you need to optimise your use of the app (see what I did there?)
and get rid of the “promotional links” - no one ever gives us a review and almost certainly never will unless the app nags them
more than I’d be happy doing.
Accessing online help is much easier too - well at least a lot less ugly
Finally I’ve renamed the in-app purchase from being about “patronage” to be becoming a “Pro User”. You still don’t get
any extra features as a Pro User (other than removing the occasional nag message in the coach), but I may change this in future so want
to be honest about what the money buys you.
The price of becoming a Pro User has also been reduced to $1.99/£1.49. I really do appreciate everyone who has donated
so far, and obviously the more support I get the more likely I’ll keep working on Daily Optimiser going forward.
P.S. The App Store review process only took 2 days which is much faster than usual, and follows a 3 day review for Pixagogo.
Be great if this is an ongoing trend of faster reviews.
03 May 2016
Instagram are mostly pulling access to their API in June 2016, presumably so they can show lots more ads to their users.
This means Pixagogo - my app which displays public posts based on location - isn’t going to work any more once the API is pulled.
However, I thought I’d go out with a bang and spent a little time reworking the UI to make it look a LOT nicer and be much more useable.
Version 2.0 is available on the App Store now, so get it while you can!
Some screenshots from the iPhone version, soon for posterity
02 May 2016
There have been lots of posts recently about what people would like to see in WatchOS 3, so I thought I’d add a few thoughts of my own.
A Brief Review
Mostly I’ll echo what it seems most Apple Watch owners say - they love it despite its obvious limitations.
The apps are very slow to load, and despite changes to run apps natively on the device in WatchOS 2, that didn’t make any difference at all.
However, the really useful things are great:
- Fitness Tracking - I’ve had a FitBit before, but the additional information from the extra sensors on the watch make a big difference.
I love both of David Smith’s excellent Activity++
and Pedometer++ apps for tracking standing/exercise/calories used and step tracking.
- Notifications - once the settings have been tuned so as not to overfire, having a subtle Haptic tap on your wrist for important notifications
is really useful. You really do learn to recognise the subtlely different taps for different alerts, and it’s so much handier than
having to keep getting your phone out.
- Music control - the one Glance I actively use is “Now Playing”, which lets you control the music playing on your phone
(like the controls on the phone lock screen) - so much more handy when commuting.
- Watch face complications - the most useful feature of all, seeing quick pieces of useful information at a glance is fantastic
and very powerful when done right.
The one improvement I’d love to see
Obviously I’d love to see general improvements in speed and battery life. Charging the watch every night,
like I do my phone, is really no big deal, and I often have over 50% battery life left at the end of the day.
What I’d really love to trade off is some of the battery life for extra background processing to keep the
watch face complications more up to date.
As I said above, the complications are possibly the most useful addition 3rd party apps can add, but very often the information
shown isn’t always up to date.
I know from my own app that complications are only update on a slow background schedule. Seeing as a watch
should by definition be all about timely information, it’s really sad that the complication info can’t be fresher.
Finding a way to do that would make such a difference - I’d love it if WatchOS 3 can do that
(especially on the existing hardware so I wouldn’t have to buy a new watch!)
14 Apr 2016
One slightly strange and irritating issue with Count The Days Left is the app has a small but noticeable delay on startup.
I added a ton of instrumentation to help figure out what was going on, and was then able to make some micro-improvements which have helped a little. However this small decrease in loading time makes the app FEEL a lot quicker on startup.
Changes made:
- Move the Watch communication initialization code off a background queue onto the main thread
- Removed an additional and unnecessary call to update the badge number
- Moved updating of control settings into viewDidAppear() from viewWillAppear()
- Optimised watch app view updating logic to do minimum work necessary
The first point was unexpected, but after measuring the actual speed of the code the overhead of spinning up a new thread and running code in parallel was not actually worth doing. As ever, measurement trumps expected outcomes.
The third point clearly didn’t really any difference to the amount of code to be run, but perception is all and it feels a little faster.
The final point is obvious - the Apple Watch is very underpowered, so doing the absolute minimum amount of work at all times is essential.
Summary
The startup time is still a little slow - and my unproven suspicion is that Swift apps take a little longer to initialise in general anyway - but I’m a lot happier with it now.
As ever, more details can be found on the GitHub repository where all the code for the app lives.
I’ve just submitted v2.0.3 to the App Store for review, so unless we have any shenanigans as before hopefully it will be available in the next few days.
