Summary of changes
Update 1.5 contains the following improvements:
Below you can find more extensive description…
ChartFlow – navigable pie charts for reports (full version only)
Pie charts for reports can be displayed by tapping on the top-left button or by rotating iPhone/iPod to landscape position on Reports view. You can go back to reports table by changing device orientation to portrait mode. Charts represent times in the same way as you have them configured for reports table (against, interval, total time, parent).
So you can go back and forth just by rotating your iPhone/iPod. But I’ve added the chart button for the sake of discoverability. To avoid angry emails (“You promised pie charts! Well, where the frig are they?!!!”) and for users who don’t really have time to check what’s new in the latest update :). The spot was free anyway, so why not use it.
But the chart itself is not all. You can go to chart for previous/next interval by swiping right and left. You can also switch between daily/weekly and monthly modes by swiping up and down. And when you go back to Reports table, it’s in sync with your last chart. Cool, isn’t it :)?
For those who don’t have time to read silly blogs, there are instructions under the ‘i’ button.
Why pie charts? It wasn’t the most requested feature, but:
- One picture is worth thousands of words. Many people (including me) digest data much easier when served as pictures, not text.
- Many users exported data to spreadsheet just to make pie charts. Now they can use that time for something else :)
- It’s an eye-candy and everybody loves eye-candy :). After all, we bought our iPhones/iPods because they are nice and shiny, didn’t we (“Nope! Actually I’ve bought mine to develop life-changing apps bla, bla, bla” – yeah, sure
- Pie charts are not rocket science really, but I had to learn some new iPhone development tricks to implement them. I also had to rewrite some reports-related code to make reports faster (you should generally notice that reports are calculated faster, export quicker and even scroll smoother now. Especially when you have data from many months). So there was a challenge and some new things to learn. Two most important ingredients of a fun project soup.
- Developing Eternity I wanted to use standard GUI frameworks as much as possible. It makes development faster and the app consistent with iPhone user expectations. But the standard controls delivered by Apple frameworks, as nice as they are, have their limitations. It became obvious to me when I developed auto-adjustment functionality. The wheels-based time controls with separate, independent months, days, hours, minutes and AM/PM settings just don’t work very well in that context. I need to learn some lower-level tricks to go beyond standard controls in such cases and pie charts project was a good one to start from.
- I don’t follow competition that much, but I hope it will differentiate my app a bit. When I first get requests for adding pie charts I was not convinced at all. “The report screen is crowded already. How do I present the data, the charts, the legend and all the controls.” (I’m not sure now, but I might have been influenced by a picture of another app I’ve had seen on App Store). But then I thought “Why not get rid of the legend, the controls and draw everything in landscape mode so there is more space for labels?”. Eureka (gee, it’s sad that I have to discover the obvious in such pains ;) ).
Easy date switching for logs and reports
This is a no-brainer. Interval labels are tappable now. I made them more button-like looking to make it discoverable. You can pick any date and switch to today with one tap.
Manual reordering of activities
When you tap on Edit activities, the editable rows have standard reorder controls on the right side. You can also sort activities alphabetically with one tap.
In addition, activities editing/deleting/reordering can be cancelled now if you’ve done some mess. The ordering you set here is respected in reports too.
Text editing settings (capitalization, auto-correction) for activity names and notes
Go to Settings->Text editing to switch auto-correction and capitalization ON or OFF for activity names and notes.
Easy data migration from Lite to full version
Now you can upgrade from Lite to full version without loosing your data. In three easy steps:
- Install full version on the same device
- Open Lite version, go to Settings->Full version, tap on “Migrate data to full version”
- Full version is opened and asks for confirmation. Confirm.
Enjoy :) !