Dan Grigsby at Mobile Orchard is member of the nominating committee for the 148Apps “Best App Ever” contest. He asks iPhone devs to pitch their apps that haven’t got much marketing love for a chance to be nominated. As a long-time reader (and recent donor) I thought this blog post might fit the purpose and provide a status update for our latest app Today Todo Pro.

So Today has been out for three months now and it’s time for a status update. We have started with a quirky idea that quickly became a pretty unusual task management app. Unsual in a good way since it broke with some already established (and to be honest quite boring) usage patterns of common todo management apps. Our intent was to minimize clutter yet without loosing core features. Today’s main selling point is it’s navigation. The user interacts with the background graphics to move through the app. Sliding the sun to switch the main view has proven to be both fun to use and easy to grasp. One of the strict policies we follow (allright, it’s my strict policy and I am annoying the heck out of poor Trung with it – Trung is the other half of Spielhaus – the true coding mastermind) is “No more buttons!”. Today’s abbility to save a new task with 1-2 taps (one tap more if you want to specify a future date) just by turning the device 90° seems to have won the hearts of many folks.
So how is Today doing so far? Well, it was very well received. As I am not very comfortable complimenting our own work, I would like to let others step up to this task. Here follows a small excerpt of (unbiased and honest) reviews from the App Store:

★★★★★ A very iPhone-like app! Beautiful, simple, intuitive and fast. I love just tilting the device and entering my task. One thing I hate about other-4-5 taps to enter a task is unacceptable. With this app, it’s perfect!!! What a way to innovate! And this app is really simple, not like other ones that claim to be, but are just a pain to use. A+++ guys! Date format is now in your local time. Update: the new task ordering feature is something I wanted, but they implemented. So so awesome!

★★★★★ Congratulations to us and thanks to Spielhaus for such an intuitive task app that is FUN to use.  Life is hard enough without boring apps.  I like tilting the screen to get a new screen.  You can set a task for a future date, too.  I thought I read a review that indicated otherwise.  I bought this because so many users say Spielhaus listens.  Yay.

★★★★★ I love it!  Thank you for the new features!  30 days worth of planning. Great job!  The developer does an excellent job of listening and responding to feedback!

We have 24 reviews (most of them five or four stars and a single one star) so far. However with roughly 10 units sold per day and virtually no marketing efforts it doesn’t make a very deep dent in our achievement bar. Yet Today arrived at version 1.4.1 and we are nowhere near to dropping it’s further development.

What is comming next?

Just a few keywords to get you people hooked

• Lists and sub-tasks
• Built-in web server
• iCal sync
• Push
• Mail export/import
• More translations (Spanish is up next – curtesy of my lady)

That is it for now. Let’s hope you have as much fun with Today as we have with it’s development. And rest assured that it will continue to improve for a long time since we are too avid Today power users and nothing is more satisfying than playing with your own toy – right?

More infos: Today Todo Pro
Mighty iTunes direct link: http://itunes.com/apps/Spielhaus/TodayTodoPro

One of the most requested features (even from Trung) was the ability to enter feature tasks. We didn’t want to change the simplicity and elegance of Today too much yet still add this cool feature. A third view (appart from today and yesterday) was needed. Guess how it’s called

After many debates we decided to slightly change the behaviour of the sun. The sun now acts as the slider that switches the views from yesterday to today to tomorrow.

When moved to the left it drags the Tomorrow view into place. We have chosen the spacey theme for tomorrw as a metaphor for the future (like astronomy is somehow connected to foretelling).

The hardest part however was to come up with an unobtrusive way to select a future date while entering tasks. As I am quite strict about my “few buttons” policy altering the existing interface was a pain in the a.. brain

The little clock shaped button hides the keyboard and reveals the date picker. We decided to not build the default calender with it’s month view since the place under the keyboard is quite limited. The new calendar can be scrolled to the left/right.

The entered feature tasks are sorted chronological much like in the yesterday view.

Right now the new version is in the hardcore testing phase and should be submitted to Apple at the end of the week. Tomorrow already won my heart and I honestly don’t know why we havent implemented it before.

Hope you will like it!

http://spielhaus-ftw.com/apps/today

To change the name shown below the app icon on the Springboard, open your Info.plist and change the value in the field named Bundle display name.

That’s it.

Today

Today – Todo management app

Here is a sneak peek.

Turns out that editing pdf files with onboard Mac tools is a no go. Here is my workflow so far:

1. Download Skim and open the pdf file.

2. Open it’s preferences, klick on “Notes” in the tab bar and set the color to white and line width to 0

3. Add text notes and fill your values in for the formular fields

4. Print the file and “Save as PDF”

5. Download Formulate Pro open the new pdf file and select File -> Place Image. I had to do this because the formular needed to be signed. So I signed on a piece of paper, snapped a shot with Photo Booth and edited the snapshot with Pixelmator. Obviously you’d use your image editor of choice here – if you need to.

That’s it. Phew! Wasn’t exactly the Mac way but worked nontheless.

To somehow alleviate this problem Apple now allows the developers to assign keywords to their apps. This will influence the search, which for many is the only way to reach their customers (except those of course who are lucky enough to be featured by Apple). Keywords are set in iTunes Connect. Under “Manage your Apps” -> “Edit Information”. But beware, the input seems to be b0rken for now. Once saved the input field can not be edited any more. There are only 100 characters (sepparated by commas) available.

Let’s hope the keyword stuff won’t be overly abused…

Of course we have updated our apps

Some housekeeping tasks were also completed. The Mindracer Lite page is up.