Track Second Gear progress via @secondgear on Twitter
Brent Simmons, Internet superstar and developer of NetNewsWire, recently started tweeting his workday. Brent describes it as coding as a performance.
It’s a fairly good idea, so I’ve decided to use the Second Gear Twitter account to document what exactly is being worked on here in the labs. If you follow right now, you’ll see I’m hard at work on a new release of FitnessTrack. Rather than updating on every single thing I’m doing in a given day, I’m planning to just do one to two updates per day just so you can follow along.
You can follow along by following @secondgear. Hopefully this proves to be an interesting experiment and gives you a closer glimpse of how things work around Second Gear HQ.
Emergency Information 1.1 Now Available on AppStore
Emergency Information 1.1 is now available via the AppStore. This new version resolves a few issues that cropped up with the iPhone OS 3.0 release as well as adds support of creating emergency contacts on the iPod touch. While iPod touch users can’t call their contacts, they can view the contact information on their device should the need arise.
Emergency Information is just 99 cents.Download it today!
Today 1.8: Better Snow Leopard Compatibility
I’m happy to announce that Today 1.8 is now available. Version 1.8 is a minor update to address a few Snow Leopard issues I was running into as I’m starting to use the new operating system more.
The new release also improves the French localization and should launch a bit faster than before. As always, it’s a free update to registered 1.x users. If you aren’t yet a Today user, why not give it a spin? A 10-day fully-functioning demo of Today can be downloaded at the Second Gear site.
FitnessTrack 1.1 Now Available
FitnessTrack 1.1 is now available via the AppStore.
Here’s the highlights:
- You can now filter the exercise list when browsing or adding exercises to a workout
- You can now view exercise information & previous sessions from within any workout
- FitnessTrack will now remember your selected view position on close
- You can now adjust the date of a workout
- Added set of default routines for first launch
- You can now email a specific workout or routine to anyone
- Improved compatibility with latest iPhone OS 3.0 beta
- Miscellaneous performance, stability and UX adjustments
The full changelog is available over here. FitnessTrack is available for the ridiculously low price of $2.99. Check it out!
Emergency Information 1.0 Now Available
FitnessTrack 1.1 is unfortunately still in review with Apple, but I am pleased to announce that a weekend project from a few weeks ago is now available in AppStore for just 99 cents: Emergency Information.
An In Case of Emergency (ICE) card is something everyone should be (but usually isn’t) carrying on them. It contains your emergency contact information, allergies and medications should you ever be involved in an accident.
I had the idea for building an iPhone version on a recent Friday afternoon and wasn’t satisfied with the existing offerings on AppStore. I used it as motivation to spend my entire weekend building what I envisioned an ICE application should look and function like. This is the fruits of that labor.
Be sure to check out Emergency Information for only 99 cents and tell your friends & family about it. Thanks for supporting Second Gear.
FitnessTrack 1.1 Submitted to AppStore
It’s been a little less than a week since FitnessTrack made it’s debut on the AppStore and we can’t thank you enough for the response. We’ve spent the past week listening to your feedback and planning out the next several releases which we are excited to get into your hands.
The first one is FitnessTrack 1.1, which is a mix of features and tweaks we’ve been working on behind the scenes while 1.0 was in review and stuff you have requested and reported. One of those features is search. When you are adding exercises to a workout, you can now filter the list to find what you are looking for quickly. There are several other small tweaks & enhancements in there as well that we’ll highlight in the changelog once the update goes live on the store.
Look for it in AppStore in the next week or so, depending on how quick Apple is at approving it.
FitnessTrack 1.0 Now Available On AppStore!
I’m pleased to announce that my first iPhone application, FitnessTrack is now available on the AppStore.
FitnessTrack is designed to help you keep track of your progress at the gym. Whether you lift weights, run or just want to shed a few pounds, FitnessTrack is designed to replace your notebook or clipboard workout sheets.
The application was an idea I’ve wanted to pursue for quite a while. It started as a side project for the Mac a few years ago, but was given a new breath of life with the release of the iPhone. It became obvious that it would and should be on the iPhone.
FitnessTrack features the following:
- **Workouts: I tried the other fitness applications on the iPhone and none of them worked the way I thought when it came to actually being in the gym and keeping track of what you are doing. FitnessTrack is my spin on how I think this should happen. Add your exercises, set the number of sets and adjust your weights: all in a beautiful and intuitive interface.
- Exercises: FitnessTrack includes over 65 professionally designed exercises. I’ve partnered with Custom Fit Personal Training here in Evansville to design the exercises and give detailed, easy to follow instructions on how to perform them. You can also create your own exercises should you need to supplement the list.
- Routines: Have a workout you repeat often? Save it as a routine that you can use to populate a new workout. Routines store the exercise and number of sets for each respective exercise.
- Fitness Profiles: Fitness Profiles is designed for those that are trying to reach a certain weight or inches goal. I tend to put myself in 6-8 week cycles where I have a certain goal of trying to put on a certain amount of muscle in the timeframe, losing a certain percentage of body fat, etc. I designed Fitness Profiles to allow me to keep track of that information via the iPhone.
- Gorgeous UI: One of the things I’m most proud of in the application is the look & feel of the app. Thanks to the work of the awesome William Wilkinson, FitnessTrack looks like it belongs on the iPhone. I’ve tried to ride the line between a completely custom UI and the iPhone standard (striped table views = yuk), and I think it looks tremendous.
FitnessTrack is available right now for the low introductory price of $3.99 on the AppStore. I have quite a few features planned for the future and I hope you’ll come along for the ride with me.
Happy 1st Birthday Today!
It is hard to believe that it has already been a year since we announced the release of our flagship product, Today. Since that initial release, we have done 14 minor and point releases that have added the features you’ve requested.
I opened up Today 1.0 this morning just to reminisce and I can say I’m quite proud of how the little guy is growing up. There is some great stuff happening with Today for the next major release. Stay tuned!
Today 1.7: Printing, Task Sorting and Classic Date Formatting
I’m happy to announce that Today 1.7 is now available. Version 1.7 of Today adds following:
- You can now print your daily list of events & tasks
- Rewrote the task sorting algorithms to be more reliable when sorting by due date or priority
- Improved verbage and sizing issues in both French & German localizations
- Reverted to iCal-style date selection in place of natural dates
The full change list is listed in the release notes.
I want to touch on the last bullet point I listed. With Today 1.6, the big feature was the support for entering dates using natural language instead of the traditional date picker. I thought this was a great way to enter dates and was quicker for me than using the date picker in iCal. I think some people also agreed with this, but the majority of users found this incredibly confusing.
How do I know this? The support queue for Today 1.6 went up over 300% with people not understanding why they couldn’t create events. In many cases the problem was built around the idea that people didn’t understand what that blank text field had to do with a start/end/due date.
Given the high level of confusion this feature caused my non-geek users, I decided to pull the feature and revert back to the standard iCal-style date picker. The lesson to take away from this for other developers is don’t over engineer for the sake of geek cred. The iCal-style date pickers worked great and I’m sure Apple did plenty of testing to determine they were the best way to work with.
If you were a fan of the natural date selection, I’m sorry to take it out of this release, but given the choice of keeping Today easy to use and accessible to as many classes of users as possible, I think this change is for the best. I may try a hybrid of the natural date entry and date picking down the road. I have some ideas, but I’ll make sure to do a wider beta test before putting it out in the wild.
Thanks for supporting Second Gear and Today.
Get the forecast in Today with WeatherCal
Today is a great way to see what’s on your daily schedule of events and tasks, but with WeatherCal, a new utility from Bare Bones, it can also be an instant way to see what the forecast is.
WeatherCal creates a new calendar in iCal that has the daily forecast as an all day event in iCal and subsequently Today.
This is such an ingenious use of iCal that I can’t believe no one thought of it until now. Great job, Bare Bones!
