Archive for September, 2008

The Unofficial Link

Monday, September 29th, 2008

TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) has just posted an entry about Pocketpedia. They already knew our users love the Pedias and now they have discovered Pocketpedia and kindly linked to it on the App Store. They mention the interesting possibility of scanning barcodes on the iPhone instead of typing in the number for a search. We are looking into that possibility. We hope to be able to translate our video open source barcode scanning code for use with stills on the iPhone. In fact so are a few other developers who have contacted us about using our code on the iPhone. The iPhone SDK is a not even a year old and we are already seeing exciting applications on the App Store. Once the development community is allowed to grow I think we will begin to see even more exciting apps on the iPhone.

Pocketpedia 1.1

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

We sent Pocketpedia 1.1 to the App Store a few days ago, trying to time it with our 4.3.1 release of the Pedias. Today it’s been approved for release so check for the update on your iPhone/iPod touch! There are a whole slew of new features in version 1.1, including the most popular requests: internal search and different sorting options. For a complete list of new features and improvements, check out Pocketpedia’s What’s New? page.

There is still a lot to do for version 1.2. For those who sync Pocketpedia from a Mac, it’s a natural extension and a portable version of the Pedias but there are a lot of Windows users now with Pocketpedia. It seems the initial release was strong enough to stand on its own without the desktop programs, something we did not expect given the limitation of not being able to edit items. For those users, Pocketpedia needs to include the ability to edit in order to add personal comments and enter items manually that might not be found online. So that feature along with several others is on the horizon.

Pocketpedia has been an incredible success. In a single month from its July 11th launch to August 11th, it has been downloaded 84,580 times in the US store alone. At the other end is Peru with 12 downloads – not bad for a country where the official iPhone launch happened after August 11th.

A lot of users wrote about a missing feature – not being able to delete. It’s not that 1.0 did not have this feature (swiping your finger across an item presents a delete button) but this gesture is not intuitive yet for iPhone users. Since the iPhone OS allows new ways to interact with applications, we have a dream of physically interacting with the screen. Why have a delete button when you can simply strike an item off your list? But from the feedback for 1.0 we learned that we need to provide a regular button too. Just as Mac OS X applications have 4 ways of doing something (a menu bar, a contextual menu, a button and a shortcut key) the iPhone should have two – a gesture and a button.
Still, we haven’t given up hope on our dream: 1.1 has no “select random entry” button but shaking your iPhone will do the trick.