tigerbears!

After over six months of off-and-on development, Tallies, my first public iPhone app, is available on the App Store!

Details about Tallies are available here, or you can go right to the App Store. It’s $2.99.

On the surface, it’s a fairly simple app that, surprisingly, lets you keep running tallies of pretty much whatever you want. There have been a number of similar apps in the wild for a while, but they were all missing a critical ingredient: history.

What I really wanted to be able to do with these apps was to not only know the current total for a tally, but I also wanted to know when it had changed, and by how much. I also wanted to be able to start a tally over, but not throw away the old information. For example, I wanted to keep track of my various medications – how much I’d taken so far that day, and at what times I’d taken them – on a day-to-day basis and compare one day’s results with another’s.

I figured I couldn’t be alone, so, well, now there’s an app for that. Customer feedback has already been absolutely fantastic, and I’m looking forward to the next releases!

Big thanks to all of you who have used Tallies. Please don’t be shy about sharing your thoughts. I don’t think it’s possible to write great software without great user feedback, so any ideas you have would be a great help.

Cheers,

Bill

Development Notes:

Early on, I made the decision to go with a SQLite database rather than just a bunch of plists. This added quite a bit to the development time, but I think it’ll be worth it in the end. I have a lot of ideas about how to evolve the history features of Tallies, and the database should make that go a little easier. Plus, hey, it was good experience.

I’m sure a few folks would look at the development time involved and wonder how a counter app isn’t just busted out over a weekend. The answer, my friends, is iteration. The release version of Tallies is probably the fourth iteration of the app! This may be a holdover from my time as a web developer, but I’m a big believer in rapid iteration, and I applied that approach to Tallies. It’s assuredly cost me sales (it would have been nice to release months ago!) but I traded that for a much higher-quality release and learning some great stuff.

Hey everyone,

tigerbears.com is rising from the dead! Is it the Solanum virus? Did an asteroid pass too close to Earth? Are we in the Matrix with George Romero and Max Brooks at the helm?

No. But after working on Tallies for iPhone (and iPod Touch, natch) for the last several months, and with its imminent release, I wanted to update things here. I also have a few things to share about that development experience that I hope will be helpful to other developers.

I’ve taken the opportunity to update the About page. Just to save you a click, here’s the contents:

After a brief burst of activity in 2007, this blog fell into disuse. “There are many like it, but this one is mine.” 

Once upon a time, I was a primarily a front-end web developer. Javascript and Java, all day long. I spent about nine years as senior UI engineer at Netflix and quit in late 2006 to do the indie consultant thing. Unfortunately, after just a few weeks, I ran into a few medical snafus that slowed me down for over a year. (Don’t let your neck get screwed up, kids, because collecting MRIs sucks.) 

Now, nobody *really* likes the old lemons-into-lemonade spiel, but this is one case where it came true. It was a great opportunity to put things into perspective and look for a new path.

Apple provided that path by releasing the iPhone SDK in 2008. 

Not having a C or Objective-C background meant that I had some catching-up to do, but I have to say I haven’t been this excited about slinging code since my first forays into Java back in the day. (That was using the Cocoa-Java bridge, even … maybe on OSX 10.0 DR3? Later?) Learning Cocoa was something that has called to me for a long time (when it was NeXTStep, even) and I’m stoked to have finally taken the plunge.

Now that Tallies, my first public iPhone app, has been submitted to Apple, I hope to have a little more time to share some of these experiences. *cough*

Besides code, I’m into film, zombie fiction, and motorcycles. My bikes may be trapped in the garage for now, but your spirit never really leaves the racetrack.

Cheers,

Bill

Day One at Laguna is done; I won’t be back until Sunday for the main event, but thanks for putting up with a few fairly sorry photos, a sketchy post format and a lot of noise if you’re not into the bike thing. I wanted to get some practice with my mobile-fu before TAE next week, when the pendulum will swing towards geeks with stars in their eyes, closures on their minds and drinks in their hands.

Mobile posting with my iPhone via Postie worked out pretty well for quick ‘n dirty stuff, though I made a few mistakes while trying to post to multiple categories. The iPhone’s camera isn’t exactly a swanky Nikon, so it took a lot of practice to time my shots to compensate for shutter lag. Not easy when your target’s only visible for a couple of seconds before your shot, and is often at a very different speed from the last time you saw them!

With the crowd at Laguna, I think the cell towers were pretty overwhelmed, at least from an data standpoint. I talked to the guys at SanDisk, who were having trouble with their broadband cards, so I wasn’t alone. I had plenty of signal, but it took a while before I could get the messages sent. Fortunately, I was able to grab a seat in the shade at the Ducati Island hospitality booth so I could geek out for a few minutes in comfort. Bonus: I can type much better while I’m sitting; walking just sends my fat fingers everywhere on that keyboard. Don’t even mention the jostling or risk of knocking over a $20,000 custom bike. OK, so I missed the fashion show, but I’ve seen bored two-bit models prance around awkwardly on a makeshift stage before. I’ve even done that myself, once, so call it professional courtesy.

One frustration was that it took the iPhone a while to decide that it couldn’t send an email, and couldn’t try to send another one while it was making that decision. After iPhone realizes it can’t send, the first outgoing message would be placed in a queue for later transmission. It’s only at that point that you can try to send your second message. It’s easy to understand why actually trying to send that second message while the first is still outbound wouldn’t work. It would be much nicer to at least be able to add that message to the outbound queue and, thus, save your work.

The messages managed to arrive at their destinations out of order, which was a little unusual. Otherwise, the process was fairly smooth, and I like that it’s simple to send a picture via email.

To get the iPhone to sync its onboard Camera Roll with iPhoto, I had to connect the iPhone while iTunes wasn’t running. (iPhoto was, but I didn’t check to see if that was a requirement.) I don’t understand the reasons for it, but that seems like a good candidate for streamlining the user experience.