Am I the only one who sees a linguistic significance between "buy in the app store" and "download in the app store?" I've always felt as though the latter implied that the product was free. The act of downloading doesn't necessitate relinquishing money, so I tend to think that "purchasing" is a more appropriate verb when linking to paid apps.
"Downloading" is a fairly specific verb that generally doesn't involve money, which is why it feels so jarring when I see it used in relation to making a purchase.
Does anyone else feel as though "purchase" would be a more appropriate verb for their copy?
I hate not having any other comment to make but I think you would benefit from trying to optimise the size of the main banner image [1]. It's currently clocking in at just under 800KB, and loading it was like downloading an image on dial-up on my very reasonable 30Mbps. Even after reloading a few times it took me 16.8 seconds to download.
Good luck with your app and congratulations on shipping.
"Requires iOS 6.0 or later" - one of my least favourite phrases. I'm curious - what specific features require iOS 6? Why is so much iOS software backwards-incompatible?
and they decide to write for iOS6 only. They could support iOS 5, but the work is not worth the reward with the adoption rate of iOS6 being as high as it is.
For developers with existing customers, it is a different story.
Even if you're not explicitly taking advantage of new platform, supporting iOS 5 increases your testing burden. For an indie dev (or a pair of developers), this can be a significant burden for minimal payoff, given how few users are on older versions of iOS.
The Reminders and Events panels both use EventKit which only added reminders support in iOS 6. Also the high adoption rate of iOS 6 makes it not worth while to support older versions.
I've spent many hours on other applications, mostly Mac, where the time spent making something backwards compatible was never really worth it. Example: I worked on getting fancy animations in an app that had to support Panther, which didn't even have NSAnimation support. However at this time Leopard had just came out and had all the new Core Animation hotness. Needless to say I would have saved countless hours if I didn't try back porting new features to older OSes no longer supported by Apple.
Thanks for the answer - I fully appreciate what you say. I'm just a bitter iPad1 owner whose £400 toy became obsolete barely a year after purchase. It's a shame there isn't a native equivalent of progressive enhancement.
To be fair the iPad shipped with iOS 3.2 and has seen upgrades through 4.x and 5.x. My iPad 1 from 2010 saw a good few years of use, rather than just barely a year.
Without having a chance to download it yet, how does the to-do list part work? Is it pulling a to-do list from one of my current to-do list apps, or do I need to create another one for this?
Any future chance for support for a Twitter feed or possibly an RSS feed?
Am I the only one that wished this is what the iOS 7 lock screen looks like?
The to-do part is pulling them in from iOS' built in Reminders app. That means you don't have to have yet another to-do app and it syncs via iCloud to your Mac and other devices.
The same goes for the events/calendar panel. They are both using Apple's EventKit API.
The news panel supports RSS feeds and Twitter is a possible option in the future, I'll look into doing it.
I really like the idea and I will be checking this out, particularly since I have a long-ish commute to the office.
I will say, though, that I think for the way my morning routine tends to go, it would be more useful to me as a Mac app. I almost always look at my MBP in the mornings before leaving for work, but rarely make a point of checking my iPad, so I could see this being really useful for me as a full-screen Mac app, where I can just leave it running on a space. Any plans in that direction? :)
I've thought about a Mac app version of it, just haven't had the time to mock it up and prototype it. I can you keep you posted on that front, but the next thing on the list is iPhone support.
I wake up every day around 5:30am and try to get up and going as quickly as I can.
You nailed some of the key things I already do in the morning:
- check the weather
- figure out what meetings I have for the day
The other thing I look for is if there was anything interesting for me that happened while I was sleeping. The best example is how I check to see if there are emails from specific people or internal monitoring services.
I could give you about 10 email addresses that I care about and get a digest of emails just from those email address.
Interesting idea. Are you thinking something along the lines of Mail.app's VIP feature where certain e-mails are propagated to the top or are you just talking about the content of mailing lists you subscribe to?
I would love to have an API I could push information to. If I could have our systems send dashboard updates it could alert me to system issues. That would /own/.
I was just discussing personal dashboards last Friday specifically I was looking for something to run on a Pi. Probably a web dashboard. I didn't really find anything (Kipfolio seems to be the business one) so I ended up registerding some domains. I was thinking of exploring it as my Startup Engineering project.
Hi - would be useful if I could have two instance of the weather app and be able to specify locations.
Add to that a tile with flight status - ideally tied in to flightstats/flightaware/triptracker, or even better, my airlines based on frequent flyer logins
Would be great if commute could be either public transport or by bike - I don't have a car, which in Denmark isn't very uncommon for city people. Otherwise great app - now I just need a way for it to be on my TV when i eat breakfast :D
Walking estimates too? Actually... I mean, I know how long it takes me to walk to work, but it'd be good to just be able to punch a number in. (Maybe automatically multiply by 1.1 or 1.2 when it's raining).
This reminds me a lot of windows live tiles, but in an app. I think the concept is great, but it would be better if this could somehow integrated into the lock screen.
I'm not an iOS user, but I agree. This reminded me of the sort of one-screen dashboard I get from my Windows Phone home and Surface start menu.
It looks really clean and professionally designed. Bravo to the OP for a job very well done.
Not being an iOS user, I'm not sure how readily you can extend the lock screen, but I agree with joeblau. It's really handy to have a subset of these data points on the lock-screen. I'd like to have TSLA right there before I even swipe the lock screen away. :) That's not possible (to my knowledge) on Windows.
For something similar on Android, the Google Now home screen widget has some of the same functionality and (presumably) philosophy, albeit with a more minimal design.
Google Now is basically the same idea, but even more interesting/extensible. Maybe not quite as "Morning" oriented UX-wise, but it satisfies the same needs for me. I can look at it in the morning and see the weather, commute time, tasks, calendar events, etc on a dashboard. Works great!
We are mainly Mac and iOS guys and probably wouldn't be able to do an Android tablet version as well, since we don't use the platform. And yeah, making the iOS version was enough work as is.
We plan to make it a universal app sometime in the near future. We just wanted to focus on making it great on the iPad first, where we thought the concept worked best.
It looks like you're using Paperfold (https://www.cocoacontrols.com/controls/paperfold). Mind adding it to the list of apps that use it on Cocoa Controls?
Also, I'd love to know if you use any other OSS components. I'm always looking for apps to highlight as my 'app of the week'.