TimeTracker 1.2 has just been submitted to the App Store. Depending on how long the review process takes this time it will be available as a free update at the end of this week or the beginning of the next.
Archive for September, 2008
TimeTracker 1.2 submitted
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008TimeTracker 1.2 finished
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008Work on TimeTracker 1.2 has just been finished. Currently, we are in the final testing stage. If no defects are discovered the application will be submitted to the App Store tomorrow morning.
With this new version TimeTracker will bring one of the most frequently requested features: invocations can be edited now. You can modify the start and/or end time of an invocation in one-minute steps. Furthermore, single invocations can be removed from the history as well.
Additionally, much time has been invested in implementing tests for the core functionality of the application.
Collecting App Store Reviews
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008Once your application is on the App Store users can leave comments to let you know what they think about your product. That is a really great thing to get in touch with the users in an easy way.
The only drawback is that the developer is not able to access these comments in one single place. Instead you have to switch to each single country in iTunes, go the the App Store and open the product page of your application. Then you are able to read the reviews for this country. This is very time consuming of course. It gets even worse if you have more than one application for sale.
I always thought about writing a little script to access the product page of my application for each country and get the reviews directly. Because the communication between the iTunes frontend and the backend systems at Apple is based on XML I thought that this should be possible to do. Unfortunately, I never found time to actually work on this idea.
This morning I browsed the Apple Developer Discussion forum and came across a thread which discusses this topic. And there I found a blog post written by Erica Sadun which describes a Perl script which does exactly the thing I wanted to have. I have not tried it yet but it looks very promising!
Using NSDateFormatter
Monday, September 22nd, 2008When I was working on TimeTracker and another iPhone application which is not released yet – and may never will be – I struggled with the usage of the NSDateFormatter. Although I think the documentation Apple ships with their development frameworks is pretty good in general I could not figure out how to use the formatter correctly. (more…)
The road to version 1.2
Monday, September 22nd, 2008After TimeTracker 1.1.0 has been released work has started on the next minor version. This version will bring a feature many users have requested: the possibility to edit invocations of a project manually.
Additionally, I plan to extend the functionality of the history view. Currently, it is only possible to show a list of previous invocations. This whole list can be cleared already. With the next version it will also be possible to remove a single invocation.
Furthermore, the history will also show the invocation of an active project. I’m also thinking about adding controls for starting and stopping a project from this view.
I’m planning to get the version ready for a release in mid-October. As always, it will be a free update.
TimeTracker 1.1.0 available
Sunday, September 21st, 2008I just visited the German App Store. A look at the product page of TimeTracker revealed that version 1.1.0 is available now after it was submitted a week ago. Watch out for the automatic and free update!
The new version fixes an annoying bug with the computation of the duration. It also brings a history for the first time. Just tap on the detail disclosure button and see all of the previous invocations of a project. The history for a project can be cleared, too.
Please let me know if you find any bugs or have any feature requests. Work on the next version has been started.
Thanks for the comments
Monday, September 15th, 2008On the weekend I visited the App Stores of several countries to see if there are any comments on TimeTracker. I found some nice and insightful comments which show me how the users use the application and what they like to see in a future version. I’d like to thank every user how left a comment! This is very helpful and motivating.
For some of the feature requests there are workarounds available in the upcoming version of TimeTracker which was submitted to the App Store yesterday. Nevertheless, I will think about better supporting some of the use cases mentioned in the comments.
Unfortunately, there seems to be no way for the developers to access the comments of the users directly in one single place. If anybody knows a way please drop me a note.
Working with gzip compressed files on iPhone
Sunday, September 14th, 2008Recently, I had the requirement to unzip files downloaded on my iPhone. Luckily, the iPhone supports zlib for doing compression and uncompression. Unfortunately, there is no elegant and easy to use Objective-C wrapper. So you have to fall back to plain C programming. (more…)
TimeTracker 1.0.1 available
Thursday, September 11th, 2008Since September 7th version 1.0.1 of TimeTracker is available in the App Store. Unfortunately, I discovered a bug in the computation of the duration after submitting that version.
In the meantime the bug has been fixed. Additionally, I added the history for each project. This way you are able to see detailed time information for each project.
Version 1.1 of TimeTracker will be submitted to the App Store on the weekend. I hope it will show up as a free update next week.
TimeTracker available at App Store
Thursday, September 4th, 2008After submitting my first iPhone application to the App Store about a week ago I was surprised to see it available at the store today. Without any notification Apple has made the little application public on Monday, September 1.
Now that the app is available I were able to submit its first update. Some minor bugs have been fixed and the performance and reliability were improved. I wonder when this version will show up on the store.
Aditionally, I also started to work on adding some major new features. A rough prototype of the history is already working. I’m also thinking about how to export the data.
More information about TimeTracker is available here.