Time for another exciting progress report.
The first Beta build has just gone out to the testers. Its slightly nerve-wracking but I’m looking forward to the feedback.
The few short weeks since my last progress report have been rather hectic. I’ve implemented lots of minor functionality, fixed issues, added Retina graphics, and also made the decision to implement a huge workflow change.
If you look back at my original wireframes, you’ll see that I planned to have both a coffee cupboard to store current coffees and a list to store all of your coffees. My idea was that you would archive a coffee in the cupboard and it would be removed from the cupboard but stay in your coffees list. During development it has become fairly obvious that this is unnecessary workflow.
What I’ve ended up doing is removing the coffee list view completely. All of your coffees are now stored in the cupboard. They’re ordered by the date they were added so that your current coffees stay at the top. Shared coffees appear above those. This has simplified the workflow hugely.
It’s been a fair amount of work involving changing most of the controllers and modifying my core data entities. I also had to run performance tests. I loaded up 600 coffees into the App which resulted in around a 10-20 second load time for the cupboard screen (on my iPhone 3G). Obviously that would have been a poor long term experience so I ran some more tests. The core data selection was fast but rendering the icons to the screen was taking time. I ended up putting a limit in place so that your first 50 coffees are loaded and then you are presented with a tappable icon to load more coffees (kind of like the twitter Apps you see).
There are still a number of items left to complete which I’ll focus on during the Beta. The next post I write is likely to be regarding Beta testing. After that it’s App submission and marketing.
Check back soon!
By Chris | Posted in: App Development, Development Diary | Tags: beta, coffee, coffee app, iphone app design
1 Comment »
Astro Noughts is currently “In Review” and with any luck should be in the App store next week. Whilst I’m impatiently waiting, I though it would be interesting to write up all of the hardware and software I used to create the game.