Posts Tagged apps

Announcing Story Tracker for PC

Story Tracker for PC

Since the launch of the iOS version of Story Tracker in 2009, I’ve had requests for bringing the app to other platforms. Last year I released Story Tracker for Mac after a prolonged development cycle. The release on a desktop platform naturally led to questions about when a PC version might be coming along.

Wonder, no more! Today I’m announcing my plans for a Windows PC version of Story Tracker.

I’ve considered and discarded the idea in the past. I moved away from PC development over the last decade as I focused on my fiction writing and iOS app development efforts. As a result, my knowledge in this area is quite out of date. However, I consider my iOS and Mac development skills to be quite good, having launched and maintained several apps for sale since 2009. The existence of viable platforms for sale (the App Store, and later, the Mac App Store) meant all the messy details had been taken care of: license management, payment processing, handling updates, and most important of all, an audience.

Microsoft has recently launched their own online store for Windows 8 apps, but at this stage my impression is that it’s a bit of a mess, and Windows 8 itself isn’t doing as well as expected. For now, that means all the aforementioned messy details still exist on the PC platform. There’s also the matter of costly development tools and multiple operating systems to support. Until recently I believed development of a PC version of Story Tracker would be a costly and frustrating exercise. I no longer believe that to be the case.

The free Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop product should meet most of my development needs, and as far as I can determine, it seems to have no limitations on commercial distribution of applications developed with it. This set of tools also covers targets from Windows XP through to Windows 8 desktop. If it turns out this edition of Visual Studio is a little too limited, there’s always the Pro version which isn’t prohibitively expensive.

Is there a market for a PC version of Story Tracker? That remains to be seen. However, I believe there is, if you consider the size of the PC market in comparison to that for Macs. While Mac sales seem to be on the rise in recent years, the Mac user base is still dwarfed by the huge numbers of PCs out there. While Macs are popular amongst writers and other creative folk, they still make up a comparatively small slice of the overall market.

How about the other thorny issues mentioned above? In my investigations in recent months, I’ve identified several services and packages that should address those concerns. The biggest one, payment processing, is well covered these days. I’m already using FastSpring to handle payment processing and license generation for direct sales of Story Tracker for Mac via my website. I’ve been very impressed with their service, and I think they’d make a great fit for direct sales of the PC version, too.

When can you expect to see Story Tracker for PC available for sale? I’m currently working on Bonsai Album for Mac, which I’m targeting for a spring 2013 release. Once that’s done, I’ll be diving into development on the PC version of Story Tracker in a big way. I’m hopeful it’ll be available for sale sometime later this year. I can’t pin down a more exact release date, since I expect there to be a steep learning curve, and I still have updates to work on for my other apps.

If you’re interested in learning more about Story Tracker for PC as development progresses, visit the Story Tracker Facebook page or sign up here to be notified via email when the app launches.

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2012 Retrospective

As 2012 draws to a close, it’s time for another retrospective blog post!

Personally, I don’t have too many complaints about 2012. I accomplished some of my goals for the year, fell short in others, and learned a whole bunch. Work at the day job was interesting and challenging, yet I still managed to carve out time for my after-hours hobbies. I finally released my first Mac app, released a heap of updates for my iOS apps, learned even more about Bonsai than I’d hoped, and came to terms with some truths about my writing. I’m disappointed I didn’t accomplish some of my goals, but that just gives me something to strive for next year.

For many years I’ve drifted in and out of fiction writing, since my first efforts in 2003 where I changed from a mindset of writing for my own enjoyment to writing for publication. Over the past 4 years my efforts have dwindled to the point where I’m really just keeping stories in circulation, and not actively writing much new material. I spend most of my spare time working on apps these days, leaving little time for fiction writing.

Last year I took part in my first NaNoWriMo and learned a lot about the craft of novel-writing, despite not reaching the 50,000 word goal. What I ended up with was two-thirds of a novel and a decent outline for the rest. It was the longest single piece of fiction I’d ever written, and I was understandably chuffed and looking forward to finishing it in 2012. Due to apps eating my spare time, I never got around to it. As November approached, I again decided to participate in NaNoWriMo, and in keeping with the spirit of the thing, I planned to work on my 2nd novel. Unfortunately I didn’t get started until a few days into November, and progress was painfully slow. It took a further week before ideas started to gel, but by then I’d begun to get discouraged and felt little motivation to plow ahead for the rest of the month. It didn’t help that I still had some urgent app updates to work on, along with a strong desire to get started on a new Mac app.

So writing-wise, 2012 was a huge disappointment. That said, a few days before Christmas I received a nice email: an acceptance from an editor of a cool online fiction market for a short story I’d collaborated on with Samantha Henderson. We were both pleased our little tale found the perfect home. I look forward to announcing the story and venue closer to actual publication.

I’d planned to do a lot more reading this year, but this didn’t work out too well, as you can see from the extremely short list below:

Horns by Joe Hill
Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

All were fantastic reads, so I’m pleased that what little reading time I had was well-spent.

I made good use of my daily commutes. I found myself drifting away from the comics podcasts I’d typically listen to, instead switching to a regular dose of short fiction through a wonderful trio of podcasts: Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and PodCastle. It was like revisiting an old friend after a long absence, finding them to be just as delightful as you’d remembered. If you’re an avid genre fiction reader with time for podcasts, I recommend these three wholeheartedly. Not only do they showcase some excellent work, but they’re also free, operating on a donation model. Throw a few bucks their way, if you can. You’ll be helping to fund some of the best short fiction produced today.

No retrospective would be complete without some stats:

2012 Stats:

New apps released: 1
App updates released: 28 (includes Lite and Paid versions)
2012 Word count: 4,382
Stories written: 0 (novels still in progress!)
Total submissions: 3
Total acceptances: 1
Total rejections: 2
Waiting for response: 0
Books read: 3
Comics read: 42

My app plans for 2012 were fairly aggressive. I planned to release my first Mac app, Story Tracker for Mac, along with releasing a bunch of updates to my three existing iOS apps: Story Tracker, Artwork Tracker, and Bonsai Album. For the latter, I planned to localize the app into several languages.

The Mac app took longer than expected, but I finally released it for direct-sale and via the Mac App Store in September. You can read all about the trials and tribulations of Mac app development here and here. It’s already received some good reviews from AppStorm and AppModo. Having gained a good feel for Mac development, in mid-July I announced a Mac version of Bonsai Album. That’s coming along nicely. I’ve posted an early screenshot, and I’m on track to release the app in spring 2013.

From May through October, I localized Bonsai Album into six languages, including Japanese, Spanish, Italian, French, German, and Portuguese. While it wasn’t a trivial exercise, the process was made much easier by using the app localization services of iCanLocalize and managing the translated strings using the superb Linguan app. Feedback from customers was fantastic, which was one of the key reasons behind my decision to bring the app to the Mac. If you’re curious about what localization can do for your app, consider this: over 60% of the sales of Bonsai Album come from outside the US, and over 40% are from non English-speaking countries. The app market is global, and your customers definitely appreciate localization efforts.

In addition to putting a lot of effort into the user interface on Story Tracker for Mac, I tried to improve my icon design skills. I found the Icon Resource videos to be quite useful, and spent many hours translating what I’d learned into designing icons in Inkscape. While it’s by no means perfect, I’m pleased with how the icon for Story Tracker for Mac turned out. I’ve come a long way from my first effort on the iOS version of Story Tracker! I took what I’d learned from the Mac icon and gave the iOS version a much needed update, too.

This year I attended a handful of monthly meetings of the Midwest Bonsai Society, along with the shows they run at the Chicago Botanic Garden. This year I visited 3 Bonsai shows, two of which were at the Chicago Botanic Garden, and one at Morton Arboretum. I attended more workshops than in years past (Satsuki Azalea, Kingsville Boxwood, Bring-Your-Own-Tree, and Ponderosa Pine) and added a new tree to my growing collection (a Brazilian Raintree). I especially enjoyed Andy Smith’s Ponderosa Pine workshop – he really has an eye for great material and knows how to bring out the best in any tree of this species. For the Bring-Your-Own-Tree workshop with visiting master, Peter Warren, I brought along my Bald Cypress, and got some great hands-on tips and styling advice. Peter Warren’s exhibit critique of the August show was interesting and informative, which you can see here. While looking for bonsai pots online, I came across Iker Bonsai Pottery and found some great hand-crafted work. I ordered a nice pot for my new Boxwood there. This is one of those aspects of the hobby I haven’t paid much attention to until now. It’s like a whole other hobby in itself!

Things were pretty quiet travel-wise this year. We made some short road trips to Michigan and spent some time in Milwaukee and Door County in Wisconsin. Closer to home, we stayed at the incredible Ravenstone Castle B&B in Harvard, Illinois.

As usual, my personal fitness varied throughout 2012. I was off to a strong start, keeping a regular routine until May or June when I began putting even more time into the apps. I returned to my regular workouts in late November and again learned why it’s always better to avoid long gaps between workouts.

Though I always seem to have trouble meeting my personal goals for the New Year, I just can’t help myself from coming up with more. So here I go for 2013…

I got a bit out of shape later in the year, so I want to try to avoid that in future. I intend to maintain my workouts in 2013, but most definitely do not plan to participate in any marathons or other extreme contests of strength or endurance!

For apps, it goes without saying I’ll need to work on updates for my existing apps. In particular, I have some cool stuff in mind for Story Tracker and Bonsai Album. Bonsai Album for Mac will be my first priority, though. I’d also like to come up with something new. The financial return from my huge time investment in apps is still very modest indeed, and it’d be great to come up with some app ideas that really take off.

I enjoy working on the app stuff, but would like to dedicate more time to writing in 2013. I also need to read more than a paltry handful of books! At this stage I can’t see myself participating in NaNoWriMo next year, since I have more than enough on my plate with two novels to finish. I also plan to write some new short stories and get some of my inventory out into circulation again. It’s going to be a tough juggling act, for sure.

Best wishes for 2013, and I hope you have a happy and productive New Year!

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Story Tracker v2.4 update now available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch

Story Tracker v2.4 is now available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

Story Tracker

This update contains the following changes:

  • Fixed truncation bug affecting decimal number fields
  • Localized decimal numbers on info and statistics screens, and in CSV output
  • Improved data saving behavior
  • Prevent automatic screen-locking during database transfer over WiFi
  • Added iTunes File Sharing support
  • Bug fixes

Note: This update requires iOS 4.3 or higher! The original iPhone, iPhone 3G, and 1st or 2nd-gen iPod touch devices are no longer supported.

If you like what you see, please spare a moment to rate or review the app on the App Store!

You can learn more about Story Tracker at my website or on the Story Tracker Facebook group.

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Artwork Tracker v1.9 update now available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch

The Artwork Tracker v1.9 update is now available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

Artwork Tracker is a must-have mobile app for artists, art collectors, or art dealers. Keep track of artwork and submissions on the go, with access to all your data and full-screen artwork at your fingertips.

Artwork Tracker

This update contains the following changes:

  • Fixed truncation bug affecting decimal number fields
  • Fixed photo grid layout bugs
  • Localized decimal numbers on info and statistics screens, in CSV output, and in artwork reports

If you’re enjoying the app, please take a moment to rate or review it on the App Store!

You can learn more about Artwork Tracker at my website or on the Artwork Tracker Facebook group.

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Bonsai Album v1.8 update now available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch

The Bonsai Album v1.8 update is now available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

Bonsai Album makes keeping track of your bonsai or penjing collection easy, whether you’re new to bonsai, a collector, a dealer, or even a bonsai master.

Bonsai Album

This update contains the following changes:

  • Fixed purchase price truncation bug
  • Added button to view pot information on the Bonsai Info screen
  • Added buttons to view bonsai and pot information on the Log Info screen
  • Bug fixes

If you’re enjoying the app, please take a moment to rate or review it on the App Store!

You can learn more about Bonsai Album at my website or on the Bonsai Album Facebook group.

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Artwork Tracker v1.8 update now available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch

The Artwork Tracker v1.8 update is now available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

Artwork Tracker is a must-have mobile app for artists, art collectors, or art dealers. Keep track of artwork and submissions on the go, with access to all your data and full-screen artwork at your fingertips.

Artwork Tracker

This update contains the following changes:
Note: This update requires iOS 4.3 or higher!

  • Added iOS 6 support
  • Support for new high-resolution iPhone 5 and iPod touch displays
  • Improved data saving behavior
  • Added database integrity check and repair if database corruption is detected
  • Prevent automatic screen-locking during database transfer over WiFi
  • Added iTunes File Sharing support
  • Bug fixes

If you’re enjoying the app, please take a moment to rate or review it on the App Store!

You can learn more about Artwork Tracker at my website or on the Artwork Tracker Facebook group.

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Bonsai Album v1.7 update now available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch

The Bonsai Album v1.7 update is now available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

Bonsai Album makes keeping track of your bonsai or penjing collection easy, whether you’re new to bonsai, a collector, a dealer, or even a bonsai master.

Bonsai Album

This update contains the following changes:

Note: This update requires iOS 4.3 or higher!

  • Added iOS 6 support
  • Support for new high-resolution iPhone 5 and iPod touch displays
  • Greatly improved app startup time with large databases. The app will take longer to start the first time after updating to this version, but will start faster thereafter. This is due to the database upgrade
  • Added Portuguese localization
  • Improved German localization of bonsai terms
  • Updated German CSV template
  • Improved data saving behavior
  • Fixed non-Retina iPad tab bar texture
  • Added database integrity check and repair of database corruption
  • Prevent automatic screen-locking during database transfer over WiFi
  • Added iTunes File Sharing support
  • Bug fixes

If you’re enjoying the app, please take a moment to rate or review it on the App Store!

You can learn more about Bonsai Album at my website or on the Bonsai Album Facebook group.

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The Road to Story Tracker for Mac

Story Tracker for Mac is now available for direct download from my site. If you’d like some background on the development process, read on. If not, skip to the end of the post!

Story Tracker for Mac

After an epic development cycle spanning many months, today I’m pleased to present my first Mac app, Story Tracker – a submission tracking tool for writers. Story Tracker for Mac brings all of the features of the iOS app to the Mac platform, with some nice additions including enhanced search, and printing capabilities. If you’ve got one of those fancy new MacBook Pros with the Retina display, you’ll enjoy how Story Tracker looks in high-resolution, too.

Shortly after the Mac App Store launched in January 2011, I posted some thoughts, including an announcement I’d decided to work on a Mac version of Story Tracker. Things didn’t go quite as smoothly as I’d hoped!

You’d think writing a Mac app would be a fairly trivial exercise for someone used to developing iOS apps, since the development environment is very similar, and a decent amount of code can be re-used between the platforms. That certainly seems to be the case where you’ve got something like a game where you’re blasting pixels to a fixed viewing area and don’t have to deal so much with the native Mac user interface. Apologies in advance for the gross over-simplification! It gets a little more complicated when you’re writing productivity apps taking advantage of the Mac user interface and all the exotic paradigms and attention to detail that entails.

So I spent a few months of nights and weekends working my way through the Aaron Hillegass book, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (3rd Edition). Having a background in Objective-C and iOS programming definitely helped with understanding the basics.

Meanwhile, I continued to maintain all three of my iOS apps (Story Tracker, Bonsai Album, and Artwork Tracker) with regular updates. Updating all three with interface updates for the new iPad Retina display and adding new features was more work than anticipated. Keep in mind my development time is limited to nights and weekends! Development of the Mac app went slowly as a result, and the arrival of OS X 10.7 Lion threw a spanner into the works, since I only had one development machine and couldn’t afford a second until later in the year. I could’ve upgraded to Lion on my old Mac Mini, but then I wouldn’t have had a test machine for Snow Leopard.

It wasn’t until Spring 2012 that I was finally able to devote a significant amount of time to working on Story Tracker for Mac. The looming mandatory sandboxing requirement for Mac App Store apps was a source of much stress and frustration. More than once I wondered if I’d have to abandon the app entirely. As it turned out, I found a solution for making SQLite databases play nice with sandboxing (hint: you’ll have to use bundles) and didn’t have too many other difficulties with sandboxes. That was until the app was rejected last week for a misunderstanding of the sandbox entitlements!

A complete and total disaster, you might think. Well, it felt like it at the time, but I was able to re-submit a new build that evening after some quick testing and unchecking two checkboxes in the sandbox configuration. I got back to work on the Lite / trial version of Story Tracker, resigned to being sent to the back of the review queue and having to wait another few weeks.

For those of you who follow a rather witty and clever chap on Twitter by the name of Matt Gemmell, you would’ve seen his quite-possibly mind-blowing post about releasing your Mac apps outside the Mac App Store. Gemmell walks through the process he went through in releasing his new Mac app, Sticky Notifications. In his post he talks about the pros and cons of releasing apps on the Mac App Store and outside it, in the process demystifying many of the scary things like payment processing, handling licenses, updates, and so forth.

I’d read Gemmell’s post the week before my app rejection. At the time I thought he made an excellent case for simultaneous release of apps outside the Mac App Store, but I didn’t think much more on it. It wasn’t until last week’s unpleasantness that the true value of that post sank in. Not only did I now have all the tools necessary to release an app outside the Mac App Store, but it would also make for an elegant solution to the problem of having only a feature or time-limited Lite version of the app available via my website.

Over the Labor Day long weekend I began the process of augmenting the Lite version of the app, turning it into an unlockable trial version incorporating license validation and payment processing. By Monday night I had a fully-functional version of the app, and I spent the past few days on some final polishing before today’s release.

Before winding up this post, I’d like to take the opportunity to thank all the wonderful Beta testers who helped refine the app into its final form. The feedback I received was excellent, and having a bunch of other people supplement my own testing helped me identify some problem areas I would otherwise have missed. So, thanks.

I’d also like to thank Craig Hockenberry for his great Mac App Store guide, Andy Matuschak for the immensely helpful Sparkle updating system, Andy Kim and Matt Gallagher for LetsMove, Bit Stadium GmbH for HockeyApp, Gleb Dolgich for the fantastic CocoaFob, and FastSpring for their customer service and handy FastSpring Embedded Store. All of the above are great assets for the Mac development community.

And now for some administrivia…

You’ll need either Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.6), Lion (OS X 10.7.x), or Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8.x) to run Story Tracker. The free trial version starts off in an unregistered trial mode, limited to 5 stories, 5 markets, and 5 submissions. In this mode you can only have a single database window open at a time, and database import is disabled. You may purchase a license either within the app or via the Web Store to unlock the app’s full functionality.

You can find more details including screenshots and the full list of features on the Story Tracker for Mac page of my site. I’m running a launch sale on the app, so be sure to take advantage of the provided coupon code anytime during the month of September, 2012.

What about the Mac App Store, you may ask? Well, Story Tracker is still in the queue at Apple, but I’m hoping for an approval sometime in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, feel free to download the trial version here and take the app for a spin while you wait. Note that the version available on my site includes an updating mechanism, so you’ll get early access to new features and bug fixes.

I hope you find Story Tracker a useful addition to your Mac writing toolbox, and I welcome any feature suggestions or comments you may have. Likewise, I hope you Mac developers out there found this to be a decent read.

Enjoy!

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Announcing Bonsai Album for Mac

Bonsai Album

Ever since Bonsai Album was released last year I’ve had people wondering when it might be coming to other platforms. I’ve always said I would consider a Mac version if there was sufficient demand for it. There was also the small matter of not having worked on any Mac apps previously.

Here we are just over a year since I started working on the iOS version of Bonsai Album, and I can now say there seems to be demand for such an app, and I have the ability to create it. Bonsai Album will soon be coming to the Mac via the Mac App Store!

I’m currently putting the finishing touches on one of my other Mac apps, Story Tracker, so once that’s complete I’m planning to get rolling on Bonsai Album for Mac. I’m aiming to have it completed by early in 2013, if not sooner.

If you’re interested in learning more about Bonsai Album for Mac, visit the Bonsai Album Facebook page or sign up here to be notified via email when the app launches. I’m keen to get started on Bonsai Album for Mac, and I look forward to providing more information closer to launch!

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Bonsai Album v1.6 update now available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch

The Bonsai Album v1.6 update is now available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

Bonsai Album makes keeping track of your bonsai or penjing collection easy, whether you’re new to bonsai, a collector, a dealer, or even a bonsai master.

Bonsai Album

This update contains the following changes:

  • Added French localization
  • Added German localization
  • Existing Species and Events can now be edited

If you’re enjoying the app, please take a moment to rate or review it on the App Store!

You can learn more about Bonsai Album at my website or on the Bonsai Album Facebook group.

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