Wednesday, June 1, 2011

ExerTrack removed from AppWorld

The first mobile app I wrote and released was ExerTrack. I was pretty proud of it. I wrote it in a couple of weeks, and released it in time to receive a free Blackberry Playbook, at a time when they were running a promotion to populate their app store (AppWorld) ahead of the Playbook's release. It is an app that allows users to track their exercises (I'll provide a more in depth description later).

As I said, I worked on this app prior to the Playbook's release, which means that I didn't actually have a device to test it on. I tested it on my desktop, and within a simulator supplied by RIM, and all seemed good. When I released it, I even got a couple positive reviews, so I thought all was good. However, when I finally got my device, almost two months later, I tested things out, and found the app was pretty much unusable. A drop-down selection control that I used was not 'optimized for mobile' which apparently means it doesn't work (but worked in the simulator). I thought I had created a very flexible app, but it turns out most of the flexibility was never realized, because this stupid control only displayed 2 choices instead of the unlimited choices I had imagined. I was very disappointed.

So, today, I removed ExerTrack from the store. I hope to fix this problem, but it is more difficult than you might think. Not only was the Playbook not released when I wrote it, but I was using a pre-release version of Adobe Flex, and it seems the actually release changed so many things that my project files are unusable. This means a complete rewrite, though I can salvage some of the logic. Very frustrating. I really hate leaving my customers hanging, so I will try my best, but it will take a fair amount of time, and the look and feel will be considerably changed.

Oh, and I also need to rename it, as I have since learned that ExerTrack is a name already in use on the web...

No comments: