STORC 1.1 released, now FREE!

The latest version of STORC, my Playbook app for tracking contractions (first tested almost one year ago with the birth of my son) is now live (http://bit.ly/kGNVuw). There are a couple new features including smoother scrolling for the charts, and a feedback link that should help users contact me if they have issues.

The other big change is the price. The app is now free. I didn't put in any advertisements, but I did add a notice about Cord Blood banking, including a referral link that we would benefit from if people use it. My wife and I feel very strongly that Cord Blood banking, while not for everyone due to financial constraints, is something that every expecting parent should at least be informed about.

While we're on that topic, I might as well take the opportunity  to talk about cod blood banking. At birth, the blood in a baby's umbilical cord contains stem cells. A lot of stem cells. These are the same stem cells you hear about in the news, being possible treatments for diseases that are otherwise difficult to treat. And it is not just research for the future. In a lot of cases, stem cells are already being used successfully (leukemia is the most common example). The controversies surrounding stem cell research don't really need to be considered, since the cells from the cord blood already belong to your baby. It is a chance to save stem cells perfectly matched to your child, just in case. But it truly is a once in a lifetime opportunity, as they must be collected at birth, and arrangements need to be made with the your doctor and the banking company ahead of time. The trouble is, not many expecting parents seem to know much about it, and I believe doctors are reluctant to advocate it, due to the costs. 


There are a few different companies that do cord blood banking, and there are fees for collection and for storage, so parents need to do their own research. Even those that choose not to bank, should still consider donation, since this is something that could save a life, but will just been thrown away as waste if no plan is made.

We recently learned that for us, as a mixed race couple, cord blood banking is actually even more important than we first thought. We read an article about a sick child that was desparately seeking bone marrow donors, but because of his mixed race heritage, a match was unlikely. If our son were to need such a donor, he would also have problems matching, but his cord blood could be used to treat that same disease (some form of anemia, I believe).

Anyway, those are my thoughts. If anyone is interested in contacting the company we used to bank our son's cord blood, the Cord Blood Registry, please feel free to use the referral link below (Full Disclosure: referrals will give us credit towards the banking of our son's cord blood).
http://www.cordblood.com/landing/referral?contactid=1-SSKNS4

Negative App review

I while ago, I wished for reviews for my apps, and now one of my playbook apps got its first review, and it is incredibly negative. The app, ExerTrak, is for logging workout exercises, and the customer's complaint is that the app does not allow for new types of exercises to be added. But they are mistaken. Most of my effort went into making the app flexible, and adding your own exercises is central to that goal. I find it very frustrating that the review would have you believe the core functionality is missing.

So, I will take this more of criticism of my UI design, as the customer clearly missed this functionality altogether. It's true that UI design is not something I excel at, so I'm not altogether surprised that the usability needs to improve. I'd really like to reach out to the customer to explain how to use the app, but I guess that is not how app marketplaces work. Instead, I will try to get the review retracted, and see if I can update the app in a way that makes the UI easier to understand, and perhaps add more documentation.

Ironically, this mostly negative review did compliment the app's "nice interface", though I am quite sure it is shortcomings in the interface that are truly to blame here.

ExerTrak 1.1 Released

Just released a new version of ExerTrak, for the BlackBerry Playbook. This one just had a few usability tweaks, including an integrated numeric keypad for entering exercise stats. Using the soft-keyboard proved to be a big pain, from the usability standpoint. You couldn't always see what field you were editing, and it always defaulted to the alpha keypad, so an extra button press was required to get to the numeric. Now entering this information with the integrated keypad is a breeze.

Next feature to work on will be to support portrait screen orientation, and get into the Nook store!

Sales are still pretty slow, but there are now some users out there. I really wish some would post reviews, or send me some feedback.

ExerTrak 1.0.1

Just pushed out the first update to the ExerTrak app for the Playbook in the Blackberry Appworld. I fixed a small bug where the Date selector lists were not scrolling properly to display the current date selected. I also updated the style of the UI. It's actually pretty amazing how much better you can make something look if you spend a little time.

So far, only one person has bought the app (hope you like it, whoever you are!), but I believe it can appeal to many users, and now with much nicer screenshots, it might see some growth soon.

Hopefully the updated screenshots get accepted. The AppWorld vendor site is not very robust when it comes to making these kinds of changes.

Still looking into a release for the Nook tablet. The Nook store seems focused on development companies, as opposed to individuals, so I'm not sure of my chances are there.

exertrak submitted

My first app attempt was a workout stat log, which I called exertrack. But it had some significant bugs that essentially made it unusable, and I felt compelled to remove it from the appworld while I fixed it. However, due to beta software that I had used, fixing it might entirely rewriting it, so I ended up starting over from scratch, and resubmitted it under the slightly new name of ExerTrak (it turns out there was already an ExerTrack out there).

It has been thoroughly tested, has quite a few new features, and of course, it actually works. I submitted it to the app world for approval today, and i'm looking forward to getting it out there. The original app, despite its flaws, actually garnered some positive feedback, and I've tried to incorporate some feature requests for the original in this new release.

So far, only released on PlayBook, but I have plans for other platforms as well. First up, Nook Color.

storc has a customer or two

I just learned that I finally have a couple paying customers for my labor contraction tracking app, storc for the playbook. Nobody has written a review yet, so I still don't know how it was received, but it is nice to know that someone out there might be using it. I look forward to the prospect of some feedback.

I hope that I can release it soon for some more platforms, and hopefully reach a wider audience.

storc gets live test! (now I'm a daddy)

Last week we ran through the live test of storc, my app for the Blackberry Playbook for tracking contractions. It worked as advertised, and helped us to identify when to call our doctor an head to the hospital. No sales or reviews yet, but its out there, and it works!

Oh, and by the way, the next day our beautiful baby boy arrived. That was kinda important too.

storc, my second app, is now available

Yesterday, I released my second app for the BlackBerry Playbook: storc: a Simple Timer of Recurring Contractions. My wife and I are expecting our first child in the next two weeks, and I thought something like this might be useful, both to myself and to others. You can check it out here: http://bit.ly/kGNVuw

storc asks you to press a button when a contraction starts and when it ends, repeating multiple times. Then it will summarize how long each contraction was, and what the time between contractions was. These are questions that we'll need to answer for our doctor to help him decide when it is time to go into the hospital for delivery. You can also see all this data in a history list, and in two different charts.

It was an entirely original idea, but apparently I'm not the first. When I was all done and ready to release, I searched AppWorld, and found several others already in place. It's a simple concept, so there isn't much to differentiate, but I believe my implementation is more complete than others (storc is the only app to include charts), and, in my opinion at least, has the most pleasing UI. Of course, storc is by far and away the best name!

I guess we'll have have to wait and see if Playbook users agree.

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...

Another New Start

Ok, so the last reset didn't really stick. Problem is, while I consider my life busy and fulfilling, there hasn't been much I feel the need to share, outside of my occasional post to facebook.

But now, I have started developing mobile apps (2 so far), and I realize that I have no way of getting feedback from my customers, other than those that write reviews. And even when reviews are written, I have no way to reach out and respond, or ask for details. This has proven to be a big problem. The first app I created, I released even before I had the device to test it on (of course I tested on a simulator), and it turns out it had a glaring flaw (topic for another post), but I only realized it recently, after over 200 people had already tried the app, and probably dropped it in frustration.

So, now I will maintain this blog regularly, both as a way to share my thoughts, but more importantly to give my customers someplace they can turn to for a dialog on the improvement of my apps.