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.