Data Persistence Across Platforms

We are currently looking at Android for a version of WastedTime…Today when you purchase the iPhone app, you get a fully functioning iPad app two, not some cheap pixel doubling app.  Given this, you may find yourself, like I do, having to chose between the iPhone and the iPad version for all your meetings during a week.  This is because the current version of WastedTime stores it’s persistent data in the iOS’s NSUserDefaults.  Meaning that it is not shared across devices.  

Do you think that it would make more sense to have a data store in the cloud which would automatically sync up when you start the app?  We do want to add a mashup of wasted time around the globe, but did not want to store any specific data.  If we have data persistence across devices, you could show total global wasted time within the app itself.  What do you think of this idea?

Improved Calendar – Don’t ya think?

So got a bit of feedback, and it seems that people agree with me, that the calendar was pretty bad… even lame may come to mind… So here’s an improvement (?)

And just to complete the image.. here is it small (as it would show in the app…

 — And just for fun.. the clock in app size —

 — I think the clock shrinks down well….

Clocks and Calendars

Ok, two graphics so far… Not really happy with the calendar, but really like the clock.. thoughts?? comments???

 

These are early drafts… and the days of the week on the calendar are not consistent.. (learning new tricks in Photoshop – may need to get a book 🙂 ).

Ideas for graphics

In the last post, we indicated we were working on improving the graphics for Wasted Time.  Here are a couple of suggestions we are working with… Feedback is appreciated:

1) For the toggle on hourly verses salary rates

A) Hourly would be represented by a clock. 

B) Salary would be represented by a calendar

2) Our toughest design will be for meeting information, but here’s what we are thinking so far:

A) Start a meeting would be represented by a runner in the starting blocks

B) Quorum achieved is what is driving the design here – There is no universal quorum graphic, so a runner in full stride is our graphic of choice

C) and to complete the image – Meeting Ended has to be crossing the finish line, and breaking thru the tape.

3) If we do this, our goal is to remove the instructions page.  It is, after all, a bit lame.

If you have any suggestions, we’d love to hear from you.  Comment to this thread or drop us an email at support.

What’s going on in 1.2?

So, we continued to have slow and steady sales so far.  It’s pretty cool to see where our next sale is coming in from each day.  In the mean time, we are working on more improvements to create version 1.2.  These include:

 

  • Disallowing the paste feature – some of our users have been playing with entering text in the rate field.  The good news is that the program will treat this as a value of 0.
  • Better graphics – Our goal is to make the entire application language neutral.
  • Localization of the currency value – Right now the rate is currency neutral, but wouldn’t you like to see your phone’s currency setting?
  • Odometers instead of text – We’d like to have a spinning odometer showing you the values as they spin up higher and higher. 

While each of these seem pretty easy, we will not publish until we have at least the bottom two done (they are the harder ones).  We value your feedback, so drop us an email at support or comment on this post.

 

Wasted Time v1.0

Well, we realized we created the category and then put all our news on the main news feed.  So here it is, we officially went live with Wasted Time 1.0 on July 12th.  It has been an exciting week, and we submitted our first update to Wasted Time to Apple on July 17th.  It hasn’t made it through the review cycle yet, so we are all waiting for that to finish.

A couple of changes are planned for version 1.2, including more graphic enhancements.  Can’t wait to submit.

Welcome to ApApp

We are a brand new group with the goal of providing really cool, fun, and new iPhone and iPad apps. We have a pipeline planned of apps, each more ambitious than the prior one.

Our first app is about to be released to Apple to get on the App Store, if we can figure out all the ins and outs of the submission process. Here is a quick video showing an early development build: