AppyBack2School

Wow, it's been 9 months since my last post, and so much has happened since then.  It's been so busy, and I find myself so caught up in keeping track of other sites like my facebook page, the Parents with Apps forum (a 'child' of Moms with apps), various review sites, and promotions such as the AppyBack2School even being run throughout August by the Technology in (Spl) Education website.

This all started out as a hobby for me.  I wanted to keep my hand in some contemporary development, and I've always loved working with Apple products (and that goes back more years than I care to admit).

After my last post, back in October 2011, I came to the realisation that kids are getting through primary school without learning some basic skills. I went to a parent information evening at the school which turned out to be all about parents needing to help their kids with their math skills.  Kids entering this school at Year 7 come from all over, and the range of abilities/knowledge was apparently quite diverse.

So I set out to write what was going to be a simple Times Tables app to do my bit.  My kids were not having any trouble, but it highlighted to me that there was a need.  Looking at the app store, I could see that there was plenty of competition, but it seemed that there was still room to move as people seemed to want something more.

Thus, Tap Times Tables was created over the next month or so.  Both of my kids got involved with it's design and interaction, and whilst it hasn't broken any records, it's done OK, certainly better than I had expected given the flooded market.

Soon after it's release, I was asked to write a similar app for addition and subtraction, and Math Plus Minus is the result.

So, for the next little bit, leading up to the end of the Australian school year, both apps were out there, and were quite a celebration of having done something positive.  I could see that the apps were being used on a daily basis, and from some of the feedback emails I was receiving, I could also see that they were being used within school environments.

Then the school holidays hit, and sales took a bit of a dive.  Even today, although I have never specifically targeted Australia, my sales here have far outweighed those overseas.  Not having any sort of marketing ability, I just accepted it and waited for school to go back.

Now, recently, the northern hemisphere has gone on holidays, and it seems that the entire education app developer community is spending a great deal of time trying to keep the sales happening during the break.

I've been so busy with new app development on the side that I've not had time to join in the marketing in the way I probably should have.

In an attempt to rectify this, I've shelved my other app work and am currently adding some really great features to both math apps that will make them far more useful in a classroom environment.   My hope was to have these released by the 1st of August to coincide with the AppyBack2School promotion during August, but I'm running behind.

What have I been doing?  Well, to start with I've added the ability for a teacher to, via a Google Docs spreadsheet, enter a roster of student names for an entire year level and import this into the apps.  This means that for a school which has a bank of iPads or iPod Touches with my apps installed, they can hand them out to students and allow the students to use the apps, recording their results against their name, and reporting it back to a teacher via email.

A sample spreadsheet for this would look like the following:

In this example, we have a roster for Grade 4, comprising 4 classes of students where the name of each class includes the name of the teacher.

In addition to this, I've added the ability to create a lesson.  Each lesson consists of one or more questions that can be played in the main game of the app.  The beauty of this is that the teacher can now take control of what questions the students are answering.  They can even specify what incorrect answers will be shown so that all students are presented with the same options on screen (thus levelling the play field).

Combining this with the roster, it becomes easy for the teacher to distribute a "test" to students within the app that they can sit, and then submit results for.

An example lesson for Tap Times Tables is:

In this example, we have 12 questions for a lesson called "Mixed tables".

I'm really pleased with these changes to the apps, as they really represent a move from being what started out as "simple" learning aids, to becoming real classroom aware tools. 

It is my sincere hope that with the beginning of the school year in the northern hemisphere, my efforts within the apps, and the efforts of people like Siva at Technology in (Spl) Education that I'll see the apps being used more and more.

I never went into this to get rich (although my family wouldn't mind), but if I can bask in the inner glow of knowing I've helped some kids out, and made a little on the side as I do then that would be great.

iWeb Duplicate Image Optimization - an update

A friendly user has noted that my optimizer tool was being a little severe.  Any menus created within iWeb with rollovers would end up not working after optimization because the rollover images were being optimized, placing them where the javascript Apple provides can't find them.


I've just uploaded a new version of iWebIO that should address this.


Have fun.

uAlertMe v1.2 and v1.3

A few days back, uAlertMe v1.2 hit the app store.  This version added a browse function for setting up a bonjour connection to your Mac, plus a history of location in the map view.  It also fixed a number of issues relating to the way uAlertMe stored images in your camera roll.


Since the release of v1.2, I've noticed a small (<10) number of crashes from the new version that seem to be happening when people try to use the new browse feature.  I haven't been able to reproduce them here, no matter what I do, but I think I can see what might be happening.


To this end, I've submitted v1.3 to the app store, which I'm hoping will address these issues.


If you are having trouble with uAlertMe, please use the support email address (support@pkclsoft.com) so that you can let me know what you were doing when you had the problem.


Likewise, if there are features you'd like to see, email me or post your suggestions here.

iAlertU v0.75 Released

I have just released a new version of iAlertU.  This release does two things:

1. It adds support for Korean.
   
2. It attempts to correct the problem people have had when they haven't configured a disarm password, and restarted having enabled arm-at-login.

There have been no other changes in this release.  The next release, I'm hoping will add some new features.

uAlertMe v1.2 Submitted to the app store

It's done.  I've just finished updating the webpages for uAlertMe, having submitted v1.2 to Apple tonight.


v1.2 brings with it a number of corrections that should address some stability issues that people may have been experiencing, especially on older versions of iOS, or on devices with large videos in their camera roll.


v1.2 also adds two new features:

1. When a location is sent to uAlertMe, it is now kept as part of a history, unless it is the same as a previous location.  This way, you can see a history in the map view, of where your Macbook has reported it's alarm going off.  As a part of this, the annotations that popup when you tap a pin, now sport a button (right arrow) that allows you to navigate through the history, and an iAlertU icon that when tapped will retrieve the photo taken by your Macbook when the location was reported.
   
   These pins may be deleted from the options screen if you desire.
2. Some people reported that it's too hard to configure.  As a step to help out with this, I've added a browse button next to the hostname field.  Tapping this will cause uAlertMe to scan the local network for any Macbooks running iAlertU that have their internal server running, and configured to use Bonjour.
   
   Any Macbooks found will be listed in a picker for you to choose from.  If there's only one, then it will automatically be put into the hostname field for you.

I hope that this version of uAlertMe proves to be more stable for those of you having had problems.


If you like uAlertMe, please review it in the app store.  If you have problems, please, before you make a negative review online, contact me and I'll try to help.  As some people know by now, I'm very responsive to help requestes.

iPlay iSpy Footy Released in the App Store!

Today sees the release of iPlay iSpy Footy, the latest in a series of 'find the ball' games for the iPhone.


Like the earlier 'golf' games, iPlay iSpy Footy incorporates a number of great action photo's from the 2011 season of footy Melbourne Australia.


Specifically, this release of iPlay iSpy Footy has photos featuring shots of players from the Northern Bullants team at their home oval in Preston.


iPlay iSpy Footy has been integrated with Game Center, so scores will be recorded on a leaderboard allowing players to rank themselves against others. 


See www.pkclsoft.com/pkclsoft/iplayispyfooty for more details.


When I first started on this game I thought it would be a simple matter of taking the 'golf' code and applying new photos, and a few changes to images.


Footy is a very different game to Golf in the real world, and this translated into the iPhone world as well, even with these game.  What was originally going to be a simple task took on new life as the scoring, animation, game play, and general behaviour of the game changed to suit football as a game whilst still maintaining the original concept.


One simple example of this is the shape of the ball.  A golf ball is spherical, and as a result it's easy to wrap a texture around it to get a nice animation of the ball.  No such luck with a football.  I had to find a way to respect the shape of the ball, move it around the screen, and still use it effectively.

iAlertU v0.74 Released

OK, so as I've said previously, version 1.1 of uAlertMe added support for Push Notifications.  All it needed was for iAlertU on the Mac to send them


Last night I released v0.74 of iAlertU which adds the required functionality for all of this to work.


Getting all this to happen was actually not all that hard; Apple have made it fairly easy for us.


Originally, iAlertU was going to act as the actual provider, connecting to Apple's APNs directly.  I had the whole thing working, with the entire push notification provider written in Objective-c.


The only problem was that doing it this way meant including my private certificate for the SSL connection to Apple in the iAlertU bundle.  This as my conscious and several helpful souls pointed out was a great way to ask for trouble if someone decided to misuse that certificate (although I had gone to some lengths to make this harder).


So, the next step was to add to the pkclSoft web server a provider that iAlertU could then interface with.  This all looked too easy as there is a great package called easyapns that does just this, and it would have worked fine except for one thing.  My web host blocks outgoing connections on the ports that Apple use for connections to their servers.


This effectively killed my ability to use easyapns which was a shame, but there were other options in the form of Push service providers.


The first I looked at was UrbanAirship. They looked great, but there is a potential cost as only the first million pushes per month are free.  Although I thought it unlikely that the users of iAlertU would end up using more than this, I didn't want to take the risk; after all I get nothing for my time on iAlertU, and uAlertMe doesn't do well enough to pay any bills.


So I looked for another alternative, and found Xtify who offer a straight out free service to developers.  I then set out to spend the next couple of days getting iAlertU to talk to Xtify, but found that whilst their service was great, and the customer support was excellent, being able to send a notification payload that could be localised by uAlertMe so that the notification can be displayed in the appropriate language was too hard.  Basically, Xtify get you to send a payload in their format that is then translated into Apple's format.  This just wouldn't work.


Back to UrbanAirship for me.  Whilst they do something similar (so that you can send a single push to both iOS and Android devices) to Xtify, their interface is much more natural, better documented, and supported by packages of code that are easily obtainable via their website.


What about that cost-risk?  We'll I've decided to test the waters so-to-speak.  I figure that with only a few thousand users out there, and that normally, the only time the push will happen is when the alarm goes off, people would have to be triggering their alarms hundreds of times per month.  Given what iAlertU is, I don't see this as likely.


We'll see I guess.  I've read blogs where people have bemoaned the cost of push notifications.  If there does turn out to be a cost, then I'll revisit how it's done.


I hope to get my original objective-c push provider into somewhere like github soonish.  Let me know if this is of interest.


For now, I'll keep an eye on UrbanAirship, and hope that everyone finds the new functionality helpful.