Showing posts with label background. Show all posts
Showing posts with label background. Show all posts
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Conflicts and setbacks
So, ran into a few challenges recently.
I have mentioned that I work at Microsoft, but here it becomes relevant that I specifically work on the Windows Phone marketplace: the experience you have when you install an app as a user. As part of my job, I was involved in investigating and diagnosing <a href="http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone/archive/2012/08/14/can-t-download-an-app-here-s-why.aspx">the recent problem installing app updates</a>, and I also know the team involved in managing app certification, so I was well aware of the subsequent <a href="http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2012/08/14/app-publishing-temporarily-on-hold.aspx">delays in app publishing</a>.
This was pretty inconvenient for me personally, as I submitted the PAX Digital Assistant update for Prime to the marketplace only the day before certification was temporarily halted. I waited for my app to make its way through certification once everything resumed, and kept waiting. I checked at work and knew there were major delays catching up with the queue of apps that had built up, and so it wasn't unbelievable that mine hadn't made it through yet. I knew that I could contact the guys who ran the process and have my app fast tracked, but I couldn't decide if that was reasonable or not. In hindsight, I think it would have been: I had a good justification with the event actually happening, and other developers do contact a developer evangelist for similar deadlines. However I decided that it felt a little unfair to use my internal position like that, so I didn't do anything, and my app didn't make it through publishing until September 6, well after the useful moment had passed. Now I feel like I inconvenienced a bunch of people and made myself look flaky and unreliable, all for no good reason. Damn.
On the worse side, four days before PAX my apartment was flooded by a burst pipe, and my laptop was destroyed. As detailed in my last post, I did have a remote backup for the PAX app - but I hadn't done incremental uploads to the server of the last couple days of work I'd done before finishing it for Prime, so that work is now gone forever. The Flashcard app I'd created is also completely gone, as I hadn't bothered backing it up to the server at all (not a huge loss, but a foolish mistake). Could have been worse, of course: a month earlier the entire PAX app was stored only on my local machine and would have been gone. But could have been better as well. I need to make the incremental backup to the server as easy as the local incremental backup.
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Flashcards app
I recently got the Telerik controls for Windows Phone (free in a deal for MS employees) and plan to use that to improve my Pax app - specifically I need the jumplist
to replace the third party implementation I have now, which doesn't
work for a 7.1 app. Before going in to replace everything in my Pax app, I thought I'd create a new app to get used to working with them.
I
have vague aspirations of doing a little more concentrated data
structures and algorithms revision this year, and working on my french/icelandic, so I thought I could build myself a flashcard app. I used one of the Telerik default app options, which was nice and clean. I found the couple of controls I added quite simple to use: the basic info is all easily available at http://www.telerik.com/products/windows-phone/overview/all-controls.aspx, but I'd love that page to contain the dll
each control is in, rather than looking through the 6 options. Or
ideally to link to a page for each control with the full docs for it
(I'm sure I found full docs, but I've forgotten where - I mostly worked
by looking controls up in the Object Browser in VS).
The
first version of the app is super basic: one set of cards, can
add/delete only, can move through sequentially or randomly. No option to
enter the answer to keep yourself honest, no option to edit cards. What
took the most time was creating the icon, which is still totally crap -
all Paint no talent. Overall it took me two evenings, (probably about 8
hours) to get a working minimal version ready to submit to the app
store. I didn't actually write any tests, which is bad. But it was
pretty satisfying to get that done.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
PAX Digital Assistant: up to now
My plan for this blog is to be mostly about my app development work - building, testing, designing, using toolkits and frameworks and so on. I have one app under development and ideas for more. This post gives the background of my current app.
In the beginning - conception, ambition, scaling back, release
Late 2010, when the SDK for Windows Phone had been released and I was all excited about building an app, I realised that I should build an app for PAX. I began, but didn't get anything done in time for PAX of that year. Then I bought tickets to PAX East 2011, and decided that I would have an app out for that. I looked into MVVM programming, and got pretty much my first taste of actually using an MVC pattern (big props to Laurent Bugnion's toolkit). I was practicing all my (underdeveloped) project management skills, creating user stories, sketching out the interface, etc. Shockingly, I didn't give much thought to testing it (pretty egregious oversight, given that I'm an SDET).
Unsurprisingly, my first ideas were ridiculously ambitious - it should interface with twitter, allowing you to follow all the pax-related accounts, and to tweet, and it would automatically append a #pax tag to any tweets you sent, and you should be able to view the map and zoom in from a suburb level right to a room level, and make notes on the map and share them with your friends in realtime. I handwrote the events into a custom, simple-as-possible xml format, then saved this schedule into the app itself (easy at the time, but meant that a full update was required for any schedule changes). As the dates got closer, I started cutting features. I actually got the app through certification about a week before PAX began, and then had to create an update with the full schedule that made it to the app store the day of PAX East 2011. I was unbelievably proud, and seeing the (mostly positive) reviews and getting a few emails from users was an amazing feeling.
version 2 - poor design bites back
I planned to improve it for PAX Prime, August, but in the end didn't really make any changes - my clunky overall design meant that simply updating all the content to be relevant for Prime was an effort. At PAX Prime I had some new users, but still a few bugs. In particular, some users complained it was crashing frequently, which I couldn't repro. Eventually one of the users figured out that if he switched his region format from Canada to the USA, it stopped crashing - I thought I'd covered all my bases by randomly testing in region formats like french, two cyrillic languages and an asian language, but no. Immediately after PAX I was still motivated enough to do some work, and I fixed this bug as well as implementing a search feature among all the events.
doing it all right this time, for real
Coming up now we have PAX East 2012. I am in the process of redesigning the app under a test driven framework, so that I can add some major new features like exporting your scheduled events to your calendar, sharing them with friends on an associated website, and updating the event list from a website rather than releasing a new version of the app each time the schedule changes. I created a Trello board to track what I'm doing - I have mostly been pretty consistent at keeping all my notes and sketches on my ipad (I use NoteTaker HD), but a dedicated task tracker seems like it'll make life easier. I decided that it would be useful to get more feedback from users (related: I'm taking a User Centred Design Certificate) so I wrote a survey, piloted it on three friends who used the app, and then published (well, submitted for certification, so far) an update that adds a link to this survey in the about page and a notice the first time the user opens it asking them to go take the survey. I also have some feedback in email already from users who contacted me through my about page.
Next few posts will probably cover
- how I'm building the test framework for my app, and problems I've run into where my design isn't test friendly
- installing and beginning to work with the Skydrive API
- setting up the website for the schedule to update from
In the beginning - conception, ambition, scaling back, release
Late 2010, when the SDK for Windows Phone had been released and I was all excited about building an app, I realised that I should build an app for PAX. I began, but didn't get anything done in time for PAX of that year. Then I bought tickets to PAX East 2011, and decided that I would have an app out for that. I looked into MVVM programming, and got pretty much my first taste of actually using an MVC pattern (big props to Laurent Bugnion's toolkit). I was practicing all my (underdeveloped) project management skills, creating user stories, sketching out the interface, etc. Shockingly, I didn't give much thought to testing it (pretty egregious oversight, given that I'm an SDET).
Unsurprisingly, my first ideas were ridiculously ambitious - it should interface with twitter, allowing you to follow all the pax-related accounts, and to tweet, and it would automatically append a #pax tag to any tweets you sent, and you should be able to view the map and zoom in from a suburb level right to a room level, and make notes on the map and share them with your friends in realtime. I handwrote the events into a custom, simple-as-possible xml format, then saved this schedule into the app itself (easy at the time, but meant that a full update was required for any schedule changes). As the dates got closer, I started cutting features. I actually got the app through certification about a week before PAX began, and then had to create an update with the full schedule that made it to the app store the day of PAX East 2011. I was unbelievably proud, and seeing the (mostly positive) reviews and getting a few emails from users was an amazing feeling.
version 2 - poor design bites back
I planned to improve it for PAX Prime, August, but in the end didn't really make any changes - my clunky overall design meant that simply updating all the content to be relevant for Prime was an effort. At PAX Prime I had some new users, but still a few bugs. In particular, some users complained it was crashing frequently, which I couldn't repro. Eventually one of the users figured out that if he switched his region format from Canada to the USA, it stopped crashing - I thought I'd covered all my bases by randomly testing in region formats like french, two cyrillic languages and an asian language, but no. Immediately after PAX I was still motivated enough to do some work, and I fixed this bug as well as implementing a search feature among all the events.
doing it all right this time, for real
Coming up now we have PAX East 2012. I am in the process of redesigning the app under a test driven framework, so that I can add some major new features like exporting your scheduled events to your calendar, sharing them with friends on an associated website, and updating the event list from a website rather than releasing a new version of the app each time the schedule changes. I created a Trello board to track what I'm doing - I have mostly been pretty consistent at keeping all my notes and sketches on my ipad (I use NoteTaker HD), but a dedicated task tracker seems like it'll make life easier. I decided that it would be useful to get more feedback from users (related: I'm taking a User Centred Design Certificate) so I wrote a survey, piloted it on three friends who used the app, and then published (well, submitted for certification, so far) an update that adds a link to this survey in the about page and a notice the first time the user opens it asking them to go take the survey. I also have some feedback in email already from users who contacted me through my about page.
Next few posts will probably cover
- how I'm building the test framework for my app, and problems I've run into where my design isn't test friendly
- installing and beginning to work with the Skydrive API
- setting up the website for the schedule to update from
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