Here’s another maintenance release fixing a crashing bug in the About section.

Changes

• Fixed: Crash on trying to open usage instructions
• Added: More detailed explanation of accuracy and filter settings

This update, like the one before it, goes out for the paid version of GeoCorder first. If the issues are resolved once this comes into the store then we’ll update the ad-sponsored version, too.

This is a maintenance update. There was a bug in DTAboutViewController which caused a crash under iOS 5.

Change

• Fixed: Crash on iOS 5 when opening About Section

The update has been submitted to Apple for approval.

Update Feb 8th: Ready for Sale. It should be available shortly.

Besides fixing several bugs reported by users this release focusses on implementing a new custom-built super-charged strings scanner.

Changes

• FIXED: missing strings file no longer aborts import
• FIXED: added – Button for deleting tokens
• FIXED: deletion of wrong row
• FIXED: over-escaping of \ on writing strings files
• FIXED: wrong token name updated on enter key
• FIXED: search filter not reset on adding a new token
• FIXED: Previous/Next buttons in wizard cease to function
• NEW: replaced genstrings with high-speed custom implementation (>20x speed improvement)
• NEW: support custom localization macro prefix

This new version does no longer support 32-bit because the new strings scanner was implemented using ARC. We hope that this does not inconvenience any of our existing uses. But then again, serious developers are on a 64 bit machine anyway since Snow Leopard…

The new version has been submitted to Apple today.

The second hot fix pack for Linguan 1.0 fixes a couple more issues that some of our (mostly) happy customers reported.

Changes

• Fixed: Translations will no longer get trimmed
• Fixed: Problem opening projects with absolute file paths
• Fixed: Table did not update on deletion of token
• Changed: Extended duration of “no new tokens found” HUD
• Changed: Enter key now opens selected recent project in welcome screen

If you haven’t done so please post your feedback on iTunes. To be able to add additional features to Linguan we need to have sufficient sales. And for that we need your positive reviews, high rating and that you tell other developers about Linguan.

Today is the best day for them to also get a copy because: As a Thank You for your interest in our app we reduced the sale price by 50% until the new version gets approval by Apple.

My partners at BytePoets have been causing their keyboards to emit steam from walking through 26 issues that we identified on the 1.0 release just 9 days ago. Almost all had been identified as typical “oh shoot” elements, mostly items that you only find when people begin to actually use your software. Also I was able to smuggle in one or the other new feature since I consider “user confusion” also as a form of bug that you should hot fix if you can.

Changes

• Fixed: potential crash on exporting tokens
• Fixed: on Export Missing Tokens + Translated Tokens = All Tokens
• Fixed: Undo bug when adding a new token
• Fixed: Location of HUD with app running on external monitor
• Fixed: red filename when opening a single strings file
• Fixed: entries in recent file list get duplicated
• Fixed: string parser did not properly deal with escaped characters
• Fixed: Warnings window scrollbar was cut off
• Fixed: Warnings and Errors should not be editable
• Fixed: Potential crash on closing a window or sending app into background
• Fixed: Problem saving files with French accent characters
• Fixed: Problem reading certain UTF16 files
• Fixed: Double-clicking a Warning should select the related token
• Fixed: Order of files to select for export was different from project tree
• Fixed: Warnings did not get flushed on revalidation
• Fixed: Inconsistencies in Wizard mode
• Fixed: Inconsistent handling of recent files
• Fixed: App no longer asks if you want to save the xcodeproj (which it does not modify)
• Fixed: you could open the same file twice
• Fixed: Inconsistent showing of Welcome window
• Fixed: Potential crash on reopening a file from recent file menu
• Fixed: confusing behavior of the setting for the token order in saved files
• Fixed: saving of files now cleans them up properly
• Fixed: Previous button was active in Wizard even when there was no previous token
• Changed: Error message improved when trying to import file that was not exported from Linguan
• Added: you can now add newlines in grid view with Alt+Enter, regular enter moves to the next row

I wanted to also get in several localizations and 10 volunteers jumped forward to provide translations of the tokens. But it turns out that this is only a third of the whole app. There are also many strings in XIBS and the help file. So instead of doing an incomplete job, I did not put these into this version just yet.

In Mac apps people tend to put more text in XIBs. Probably because there you have much more screen space which leads to more labels and setting all those in code would require many more outlets. But I ordered XIB support for 1.1. Linguan is localized in English and German at present, so I’m also taking the opportunity to add a German app store description which I found you can only add if the app is not yet approved. More languages will follow in another point release.

Another thing that did not make it for 1.0.1 is support for settings bundles because Xcode 4.2 seems to be in inconsistent about importing and handling these. So that needs a bit more research to support.

One thing that was also confusing was the naming of the “Last Import” auto-folder. If you scan your sources – Linguan uses genstrings for that – you will see new tokens appear there for quick access to what you need to add translations for. So we renamed that to “Last Scan”.

There are many more things that our enthusiastic users would like us to add, but as you can see we had our hands full at polishing up the 1.0 release. New features are being planned for the 1.1 version due later this year.

It would be awfully nice of you if you could help us spread the word about Linguan, here’s the app store link. And maybe a review on the app store, preferably with 5 stars? If you need support with Linguan please e-mail us.

UPDATE Nov 23rd: Now available.

There was a stupid problem before this version that could only be seen by users who where traveling between time zones. Notes that you made for a specific date would disappear when you moved into a different time zone and reappear if you moved back. This taught me that it is a bad idea to use an NSDate for a primary key.

Updating a lower version iWoman will restore all entries that might have disappeared. In very rare circumstances – involving traveling more than 12 time zones – some entries might end up the day before or after the day they were originally entered on.

The second change came from a user request who wanted to see the day number on all days of the cycle view. Previously it would not be shown on fertile days.

Changes

• FIXED: Items would vanish from calendar view if user moved between time zones.
• MODIFIED: Now the day number is shown for all days in cycle view.

The update has been submitted to Apple and we hope for a swift approval.

UPDATE Sept 7th: the update is now available on the app store.

The latest HotFix committed to the MyAppSales GitHub repo contain a fix for an AJAX change on iTunes connect.

Changes

• Fixes a problem where only the first daily or weekly report would be downloaded.

The problem started to occur because apple added a javascript function call into the method to switch between days and weeks. Something to do with rate limiting, I think they now disable the download button while the AJAX request is ongoing.

Development of version 2.0 is still ongoing, you can sneak a peak on the development branch. There are a couple of  things to do before I can merge it back into master: changing the charting to DTChartView and doing the summing per app on a background thread.

In the future I am still hoping that the Open Source community will get a bit more involved than it has been. i.e. totally hands off. I’ve open sourced MyAppSales precisely because I was hoping for contributions, but I have yet to see the first.

Summertime is my app that helps you to never be surprised by Daylight Savings Time transitions. A customer nudged me to update the app in time for the upcoming transitions. Since he is traveling a lot I needed to add the capability of configuring multiple time zones.

I spend several days to enhance the functionality as described below and to polish it to a level where I can release it in time for the upcoming DST transitions. March 13th in the US and March 27th in Europe.

Updates

• NEW: Completely new Design
• NEW: Set multiple time zones for your travels
• NEW: Choose “Local Time Zone” to be automatically updated to your local time zone
• NEW: Multi-Language Time Zone picker

The update is now under review by Apple.

I’m rather proud of the new look which is modeled after the weather app.

Before (October 2009):

Now (March 2011):

I’ve been working on several ingredients that made this possible.

One part was to be able to localize the time zone name you see on the cards. This is typically in a form “Europe/Vienna” and there is no localization for it. The only localized description you get is for the “Central European Summer Time”. Quite an oversight I think, that’s why I started an Open Source project to have this available in a translated way as well: NSTimeZone+Localization. In order to get a well-performing way to group and filter the time zones I added a CoreData backend which re-imports all known time zones every time the locale or the iOS version changes. With this the grouping by continents is happening automatically for me and searching via the search bar on top is a snap.

Time zones which observe DST are shown in green. Those which are not are shown in red. This is also an interesting view of the world.

The second part is to eventually be able to make it a universal app that behaves like the weather app on iPhone and presents a novel card-based layout and interactions on iPad. I did not get the final 10% done in time for a release, so I set the target device family to iPhone-only for the time being. Displaying and managing cards works, but I have to think of a way to do what the i-button does on the iPhone version, display a sorting table view. The general idea of DTCards is to be able to fully reuse the views you are building for a utility iPhone app but make use of the wider space available on an iPad. DTCard would allow me to pinch-open on individual cards to zoom into a more detailed view, but in this context this also does not make sense, because I’m already displaying all there is to know about the next Daylight Savings Time transitions.

In short, the iPad UI is not ready. At the same time Summertime is one of my glorified hobbies with which I don’t really make nearly enough to warrant put in the midnight oil. I’ll finish the iPad UI if I ever have time or if somebody specifically asks for it or if suddenly sales go through the roof. IF to the power of 3.

There is one piece of functionality that gets shown only if you run iOS 4 or higher: the reminder button. When pushed it allows you to specify a reminder which happens in the form of a local push notification for the next transition. This way easy enough to implement but only came into iOS with version 4. Thus people still running an outdated 3.x only get the cog button for changing a card
s time zone and the mail button to e-mail somebody with the info on the card.

I posted some screenshots on twitter and feedback generally has been very favorable. Let’s see what the customers think as soon as Apple approves the update.

Update March 12th: Out now!

In this quick-fix update for iWoman I addressed a bug that could only be seen by users of the basal temperature feature.

Changes

• FIXED: The basal temperature chart would only show the first 30 entered values.

Update was approved by Apple on March 8th it is available via the app store.

It’s been a while since we last updated our game LuckyWheel. There was a nasty bug on iOS 4.x that prevented the keyboard from appearing causing a great deal of frustration. We also used the opportunity of polishing the graphics and adding Retina support.

Changes

• FIXED: Keyboard not appearing on iOS 4.x
• UPDATED: Now with Retina Graphics
• NEW: Lite Version has IAP option to purchase full version question pack
• NEW: Lite Version has IAP option to remove ads

The new version has been submitted to Apple and is awaiting review.

The previous version of iWoman has a severe problem if you have an existing database that needs to get migrated. Turns out that old iPhone might take too long doing that. And if it takes longer than a couple of seconds for an app to start then there is a watchdog timer in iOS that will outright kill the app.

Also there was a graphics glitch on the list view which has been remedied. I am really sorry for all these glitches. I promise you that they have not been intentional and I am quite embarrassed by them.

The Update has been submitted to Apple and should become available soon.

Changes

• Fixed: Graphics glitch on list view on 3.x devices
• Fixed: DB Migration is now done after app startup – instead of during startup – to prevent app termination by iOS.

Hopefully with this patch migration and usage should be smooth on 3.x and 4.x alike. If so then I can concentrate on additional features. The app is doing pretty well in Russia and so I will add localization as a “Thank you!” for the Russian ladies. Also I am thinking about adding Japanese to see how this might affect sales there.

GeoCorder started out as a pure track recorder but since version 1.2 it also became a great position tracker, provided that you had your own server to receive the position updates.

In this new version 1.3 you have a choice of two additional services: Google Latitude and Crossingways.

Changes

• FIXED: Tracker would stop sending updates
• ADDED: Google Latitude as tracking service
• ADDED: Crossingways as tracking and upload service

Update Jan 7th: The update is now available for download from the app store.

These changes made it necessary to completely revamp the tracking screen. Each individual service is now shown with a traffic light indicating the last update status. Red means error, Yellow in progress and Green ok.

The Update Interval is now set globally for all enabled service. You can switch services on and off on the “Configure Tracking Services” screen. Additionally you can configure an arbitrary number of custom servers to receive your updates via HTTP GET.

In addition to these changes on the tracking screen there is a new section in settings where you can link the Crossingways and Latitude accounts.

Generally a word of caution: Crossingways insists on mentioning that they are BETA, Latitude keeps telling us that it is a Google Labs service that might change when becoming a released product. Generally my tests have shown them to work without issues.

It’s been a long long time since I last updated iWoman, more than a year to be precise. I have to admit the success of iWoman made me lazy. Why would you want to change something that is selling so well? In fact iWoman topped the Healthcare charts in several countries for a long time. Other projects seemed be be more important.

I have to credit my wife who kept bugging me about how I obviously did not care about we women on Earth. She is using iWoman for about years now and I kept updating her iPhone with the latest builds. For a long time iWoman was stuck right between versions, but suddenly – about a month ago – motivation returned. I wanted to polish iWoman into the jewel that is was so long ago and add all these features that customers kept requesting.

iWoman 2.0 is now (finally!) available on the app store.

Under the hood the database has been moved from basic SQLite to CoreData and all the graphics have been polished to perfection. Of course fully Retina. But that’s not all. Let’s start with what you’ve seen before.

iWoman 1.x basically consisted of just one table view what showed the cycles. That’s still there right at the heard of the app. But the colors and overall design are more visually pleasing.

Periods are still being entered the same way as before by pushing the Plus button at the top. If you tap on one of the cycles you get the cycle detail view.

You see that here we have a nice tapestry in the back and the individual days are now showing three kinds of smiley to signify certain symptoms.

In addition to this list view there are now two different kinds of view added that serve distinctly different purposes. One that many women have requested is to have a monthly calendar view. You can get to that via the “Month” button.

Besides of giving a monthly overview the calendar view is the place where you manage events and facts on a daily basis. You see the menstruation days marked with a drop of blood and the calculated fertile days marked with a green sprout. If you tap on the row for a menstruation day you get to the symptom details for this day. By tapping on the blue accessory button you see the detail for the whole period.

There is a new memo feature that lets you record freeform notes for every day. That’s also included for free. Then there are two more tools useful on the individual days: intercourse tracker and basal temperature tracker. Those are available via In-App-Purchase. The temperature tracker has a beautiful mercury thermometer to input temperatures. The intercourse tracker lets you rate the sexual encounter, choose a partner and specify whether a contraceptive was used. The purchasing numbers of these features will tell me which to develop further.

The third major screen is what I call “the Wheel”. It’s aim is to give an overview over the cycle and show with a clock hand in which phase the user is currently in. As far as I know this is totally unique for apps in this genre. You can rotate the center circle with your finger and the calendar in the lower left corner will tell you which day your are pointing to. This way you can go a couple of periods into the future to get a feeling which phase will occur on certain dates.

On iWoman 1 I had a view like this on the startup screen and quite a few requests where for a screen like this. But I did not want to just have a static image in the documentation. Instead I wanted to give something to play with something that shows how YOU are.

The wheel control is reused in one of the settings screens where you can choose how many past periods are to be used for calculating the fertile days window. When testing with live data I found that there is a certain volatility in cycles lengths if you record them for like 2 years. The basic Knaus-Ogino algorithm would then cause the fertile days to take up half of the cycle. So I let you specify to use like 6 past cycles to show are more up to date picture. Using more cycles increases the security. This way users can specify what’s more important to them.

The most important feature probably is the passcode lock, also available via In-App-Purchase. If you are indeed recoding sexual encounters or your cycle you will probably be able to lock the app from spying eyes. With the passcode lock you can.

Many of the components that I built into iWoman have already proven their worth in other people’s apps. This marks the first time that all of these come together in a single product: DTCalendarView, DTPurchaseButton, DTCustomSwitch, DTNotePadViewController, DTPinLockController, DTAboutViewController and DTChartView.

I am very excited to have iWoman 2.0 out on the app store before Christmas 2010. I promise to you that I have a renewed sense of duty to keep improving iWoman, so please let me know if you have any kind of suggestions or feedback for me.

The last major update/polish of GeoCorder just got approved only for me to find that I had forgotten to update the iTunes icon as well. Unfortunately you cannot do so any more once the app is published.

Oh well, I also still had my old twitter name dr_touch in the about dialog. So I submitted a quick update to fix these two things. Just maybe users will notice that I update my apps as often as I can and download more copies.

GeoCorder and GeoCorder [FREE] are available on the app store.

On my recent trip to the USA I put the finishing touches on the next big update to GeoCorder. And today (while recuperating from a bit of a cold) I finished up with some 3.x compatibility issues and integration with the latest versions of DTShop and DTBannerManager.

This version became necessary because I wanted to fix a slight problem one special customer was having with the new tracking function. The tracker would disable if you didn’t have internet connectivity, say during a phone call. Another user who is into ballooning asked for a method to better filter the path to prevent the jumping around that occurs when CoreLocation switches to cell-tower locating due to signal degradation.

Updates

• NEW: Fully redesigned artwork for Retina display
• NEW: Map View now displays path of currently recording track
• NEW: KML supported for exporting
• NEW: new filter option to eliminiate implausible track points
• NEW in free version: Option to remove ads via In-App purchase
• FIXED: Default Recording Settings not showing on Settings View
• FIXED: speed would not be inserted in called tracking URL
• FIXED: tracking ping would be disabled if Internet connection was lost

While at it, I needed a testbed for the new option of DTBannerManager to allow the user to purchase removal of the Ads, which can now come from iAd, MobFox or AdMob.

Finally, I added KML as export option because this can be readily used by FTLocationSimulator to simulate movement in iPhone simulator.

KML uses so-called line strings which contain way less information than GPX tracks. They only have coordinates and altitude, no timestamps. KML was designed to represent a recorded movement through space but rather static three-dimensional lines in Google Earth.

There IS a way to represent movement through time in KML as well, but it is extremely verbose as you can see from the whale example in Google’s KML documentation. It works by creating a place mark for each track point which is very ugly. I’m only going to implement that if it turns out to be “absolutely necessary” for a specific use case.

Therefore this version of GeoCorder has one “known issue”: KML cannot be used for GeoTagging because of the missing time information. For geotagging you have to stick with the GPX format.

The update is now with Apple and should be approved in a week or so.

With Apple totally revamping the “Sales & Trends” and “Financial Reports” they gave a shiny and wonderful AJAX Interface. But at the same time, because of the lack of a public API, this meant that we tool vendors had to burn some midnight oil to get our downloaders fixed up again.

This version of MyAppSales is a maintenance release with these goals:

• navigate the AJAX pages to retrieve Daily, Weekly and Financial reports
• adapt to the changes in the financial reports format (reports would be empty)
• Minor tweaks, like use the smaller financial report description when displaying report sums

I am still working on migrating the database into CoreData to be able to make it 4.x compatible. Currently there are lots of caching mechanism that cannot handle when the app is being killed, like when you remove it from the recent apps list. Another problem is that settings will not be saved. So until further notice you have to keep building it against SDK 3.2, it will still run fine on your iPhone with iOS 4.x.

The update is in the trunk of the subversion repository.

A user of MyAppSales approached me and asked for the possibility to pre-configure the app such that he could give it to a partner of his. The goal was twofold:

1. Pre-configure the account for iTunes Connect such that you don’t have to give your credentials to your partner
2. Filter sales reports such that only the apps come through that the partner is receiving a share of sales for

… and all of this without impacting the other features like review downloading.

Since I have such a partner myself for which I’m now publishing 3 apps, I sat down and – after fighting with Xcode over a second target – added a couple of lines to the MyAppSales trunk to enable the “Partner Version”.

In the PCH file you enable and configure this special version by removing the // in front of the first define. Then you need to specifying your ITC credentials and an NSSet of Apple App Identifiers.

// to enable the partner version, re-enable the following define and fill in the three values below
//#define PARTNERVERSION
 
#define PARTNERVERSION_ITC_LOGIN @"account@server.com"
#define PARTNERVERSION_ITC_PASSWORD @"SECRETPASSWORD"
#define PARTNERVERSION_FILTER_APPS_SET [NSSet setWithObjects:@"335519920", @"329678407", @"374457741", nil]

I’ve added a filter for the specified PARTNERVERSION_FILTER_APPS_SET in two places to ignore all lines on sales report where neither the Apple Identifier nor the Parent ID is in this list. Since the app never sees any apps outside of this filter those also won’t pop up on the apps page.

For the preconfigured account, the app adds this ITC account if there are no accounts defined. So if your partner were to remove this account accidentally it would be configured once more on next app start.

All you need to do after configuring and building a release version is to zip and ship the app and provisioning profile to your partner. Easy enough?

Some time ago I got approached by a corporate customer who was looking for a solution to have his vehicles report their location to his server. Previously he had been using Nokia phones and now he was looking to switch to iPhones. So I built a quick app for him, but due to lack of multitasking in iOS 3 it had limited use. But then Apple surprised us with backgrounding for location apps and suddenly make apps like GeoCorder all the more useful.

But I did not think that this mini tracking app by itself would make a good addition to the app store, so I insisted of merging this functionality into GeoCorder. So now GeoCorder can record GPX tracks for photo tagging or viewing in Google Earth and can also ping your server with a customizable HTTP GET.

• Background Recording on iOS 4
• UI improvements
• Completely rewritten backend with CoreData engine
• FREE Version: iAds on iOS 4 Devices with AdMob fallback
• User Guide and Support
• Map View centering on current Location
• Tracker Mode to ping corporate server with location updates

For the UI you might notice that I moved the recording controls into the navigation bar. Also this is now using a tab bar controller to switch between multiple views with differing functionality. I switched the tracks view and the recording view because for a recording app the recording screen obviously is the more important view.

Once I started to think about the functionality of this app I suddenly had my head fill will lots of additional things, most of which did not make the cut for what is supposed to be a minor upgrade that turned into a 4 day project. For example I had considered adding Google Latitude updating as a Tracking choice. But 1.1.0 is meant to give my customer (and other people with similar logistics use cases) a tool which he can easily install through the app store.

The problem with those many ideas is that nobody is paying for their implementation. On both the full and the free version (ads) I’m making like 10 Dollars a week. Only if I see a dramatic uptake in downloads I will be able to afford implementing more features. But I’m still interested to hear your thoughts should you be amongst those few people who have a use for this uncomplicated app.

Maybe it helps a bit that I am also targeting iOS 3.x which still is the OS of choice for iPhone 3G. Where I previously had only AdMob ads, I have now also iAds on iOS 4 devices with AdMob being the fallback. I’ll report on how that goes.

I just submitted the app to Apple for approval. I tested orders of magnitude more than before and eliminated all bugs that I could find to make this a really high quality release.

Update Aug 6th: The update has been approved. What’s a first is that the review team approved the update first and later wrote a mail to me asking to add a battery disclaimer to the iTunes description. Apparently all apps using background GPS are required to have this in the description:

“Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life.”

So I added it. Much obliged!

Update: I found two bugs in the free version for which I just submitted update 1.1.1: Ads could not be tapped on and I had forgotten to include background location support.

Apple changed two column headings on the financial reports because apparently the June reports are the first ones which will also show eBook publishers their revenues.

• “Artist/Show/Developer” became “Artist/Show/Developer/Author”
• “Label/Studio/Network/Developer” became “Label/Studio/Network/Developer/Publisher”

There where quite a few hot fixes that I had to put into MyAppSales and also if you look at the code you’ll see that it’s in the middle of being migrated to CoreData. The latter is necessary because the current method of caching everything is really ugly code whereas CoreData will permit me to make the app perform way better and it only fetches data I truly need.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) I’m very busy with a major project for the last few months, so I cannot really muster the time right now to carry through this migration. But because this is a point of stability in MyAppSale’s live that I can publish it as a new version. Lots of people where continuing to use the previous “released” version because for some reason they feared that the “2.0 BETA” in the Subversion trunk might be unstable. When in reality it aways was the code I’ve been using on my iPhone.

Speaking of iPhone 4, you still need to build it with SDK 3.2 until further notice for exactly the reason I mentioned above: ugly caching. It works fine on my iPhone 4.

Here are some goodies that I also hacked into 1.0.16:

• Ability to remove individual reports. For example if something goes wrong during download.
• You can opt to show a report sum on the overview pages. This is slower because for it the app needs to fetch the sales data, so it will impact scrolling. But if you don’t scroll much then its a useful number to see at a glance.
• I’m now using the standard currency formatter for all amounts

Please update your copy from the repository as usual.