codesofa » 2008 » September

Alea iacta est.. almost.

Well.. Imagine.. You name your child “Bryan” and your wife/husband is from let’s say Iran.. To make your child getting the iranian passport, you’d have to name him/her “Ali” or something (this is actually true.).
Then you know how I feel now :)

Imagine as well: You are Opel.. They made some not so good cars back then – they had a few bugs. Then they brought out some better cars (I heard so..) but now, nobody – except the few who are really interested in those things – buy Opel anymore. Why? Because they had a bad experience or missed something.

Recently I heard something like this from a former PHP programmer:
I gave him some piece of code.. like this: “$a = new foo_class(); $b = $a;” He was pretty upset that I was going to post him a code which included object copying – and that’s exactly what he hates about PHP. Well this might be true for PHP4 but not for PHP5..

What am I going to tell you.. Well, the recent numbers of “GottaGo” made me think. We had an enormous loss of users after the 2.1 update and those are not coming back – probably never. So even if those hardcore fans who sticked to “GottaGo” over the time have updated so far (we only have about 5% v.0.0.1 users) those who missed something in the first version are not comming back – and they are not trying it again. Sad but true :)
As mentioned in an earlier blogpost, I’m not quite happy with the name “GottaGo” anymore. And even less with the logo. (Not the design itself, which is great, but with the message it sends..)
Besides that, “GottaGo” plays only a siderole in the new version, which kinda makes it not being “GottaGo” anymore. Rather a Schedule/Timetable app based on GottaGo. (To talk a bit of the coding side: almost 75% of the code was rewritten for this release – and of course every pixel was redesigned..)

What I think is that “GottaGo” deserves a new release – with a new name. Unfortunatly I can’t go with a cool name – although there were a few very good suggestions – but all geek names again :)
This means, we are most probably going with “Transport” and some other minor changes.. I hope you don’t mind if I rename this and me being an attention whore – but I think those who supported me in this new release deserve it.. And I think those who are not happy with “SBB Fahrplan” deserve it as well.

Let’s see, how this pays out.. It might be a horribly wrong decision, but since it’s a free-time project, I can only learn. :)

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Filed under: General, GottaGo, Information on September 26, 2008 at 1:16 pm by marc.
Tags: apple, appstore, GottaGo, iPhone, naming, Transport

heissi Maroni! – marrons chauds! – marrone caldi! – hot chestnuts! GottaGo in the App Store

Here we go, after two weeks of waiting, Apple released our beloved GottaGo to App Store last night.
Get it here: liip.to/gottago or just update :)

I’ll keep you posted about further development and experiences with an updated app vs. a new app.

I keep it short now – just enjoy.

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Filed under: GottaGo, Information, iPhone on September 24, 2008 at 11:25 am by marc.
Tags: annapurna, appstore, GottaGo, released

The big naming issue.. a.k.a mv “GottaGo.app” “Transport.app” ?

Well, maybe the most of those who read my blog on a regular basis know the problem with “GottaGo” already.

One week after I released “GottaGo” (release in the sense of ‘appeared in the App Store’), another company called “WindyStudious” released an app with the same name. No big deal – I thought. Pretty stupid, but no big deal.
Problems started later. First of all, it became confusing for my users. Some (I only know 2 who told me) bought the app from “WindyStudios” cause they thought it’s my GottaGo.. So this is not so funny.

Ok, 3 weeks ago, I got a mail from Apple, informing me, that I should update my app because it features non-functional standard iPhone interfaces – the phone interface. Uhm, well yeah, so I searched through my app to find anything resembling the phone interface – no I didn’t, I knew it :)

Long story short: they were talking about the other GottaGo. Great Job! If even Apple is confused, how should customers feel?

Then I wanted to update the information about GottaGo – did not work because there was another app with the same name. So when I sent the form with the new information, it checked if that name existed already – so it did. How friggin stupid is this?
It gets even better: 3 e-mails to Apple – no response.
Alright, so what are we gonna do about it? Renaming.

Of course, geeks like the name. It’s not something like “Maps” or “Calendar” – it’s the philosophy of the app “GottaGo”.
But I noticed some comments in the SBB-Fahrplan app, from people telling that they were waiting for a mobile timetable app for the iPhone. Well – GottaGo was out there 2 weeks before.
Now with that issues with Apple and the “not so obvious name” issue in my neck, I started to think about a new name.
For now, I changed it to “GottaGo!” (which seemed to get around the duplicate name issue) – But that’s not the end of the game, I guess.

What is the real problem with an easy name? I think, that people on the App Store don’t have a subtitle or an abstract of an App when they browse through the Apps. Just a name. So your name must be informative and eyecatching. “GottaGo” is eyecatching only with a philosophy information – which, I think, only 2% care about.
Compare this to desktop software: You can release it under any name, as long as the information is right and Google finds it, as soon as you got the geeks on your side, you’re set.. Not so on the iPhone. Actually, quite a bunch of people using the iPhone are a) not even using the AppStore or b) only downloading games – most of them are non-geeks.

So what we “useful application developers” are trying to do is getting the attention of those who occasionally browse through the apps, and don’t care much about what’s behind an app.
The others, who download your stuff anyway are the “geeks” (not all of them are real geeks, though). They download everything that is free – or they read information or they search for something they want. So, with a good information and a good app, you’ll get them anyway. (the quality maters effect)
But those who browse occasionally through the App Store are the most fascinating. Not only do you have to deal with getting their attention. Your App is your only way to talk to them. They won’t follow the comments of your app, they won’t read your blog, they won’t write you an e-mail, they won’t file a bug – they write a comment, that’s it. Sometimes, they don’t even update your app for weeks.. If you’re lucky and they wrote a comment with a complaint you understand (which is about 30% of all complaints) you’re even in a worse situation that you can’t response to them. You don’t get the e-mail addresses of those anywhere, and there is no reply-to-this-comment method – which is very sad.

But we’ll discuss this later on, as soon as we see what happens with GottaGo and a much improved version. I’m very curious about the change in the numbers of API-calls from the new and the old version. I’ll keep you posted :)
Back to the name. There is another issue with the name now – publicity. I had that interview with Blick am Abend and so users know the name “GottaGo” now – changing the name now would be very confusing. But nevertheless, what to do?

On one side, there is that bunch of people who don’t use GottaGo because they don’t know what it is because they only read the name and nobody recommended it to them. On the other side, there is that bunch of people who are waiting on the new release of “GottaGo” and might get confused by a change of the name.
I’m actually thinking about changing it to “Transport” (because it’s more or less language neutral, eyecatching and informative) – “Transit” was also for discussion, but “Transport” sounds better.

I’m asking for your input. What do you think – should GottaGo be renamed to “Transport” or not?

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Filed under: GottaGo, Information, iPhone on September 18, 2008 at 5:59 pm by marc.
Tags: advice, fahrplan, GottaGo, iPhone, sbb

Time for big changes..

It’s been a while.. since my last blogpost. If you’ve read it, you know why.

No, there is no change on how codesofa is organized or what I do here.. Just big changes in GottaGo – don’t worry, it’s still free.

Let’s take a look back.. A month ago, I released GottaGo and it was a huge success. Even though I knew it was far from perfect – I was quite surprised :)

This gave me the chance to get a lot of feedback which resulted in a lot of thoughts. The biggest issue seemed to be the translations. As I mentioned in an earlier blogpost, this has been fixed – or is beeing fixed right now. Those are actually the easy parts of an update when you had success. Fixing the things the users complained about. Finding things the user will notice only when he sees it, is another thing :)

So another bunch of thoughts.. Soon it was clear – a big change was needed on how GottaGo works internally. Maybe I’ll find time in the future to write in detail about it – or let’s say as soon as Apple lifts the NDA.

I’m now just going through all the features we have now – to wet your tongue a bit ;)

Live Search:Search through your contacts and stations as you type
New Locator:Set your desired accuracy and start/stop it whenever you want.
Setting your travel time:Set the time you want to arrive or travel from.
Transparent offline mode:Load your old trips without any internet connection
Station validation:You’ll be prompted, when your station was wrong
Use addresses or locator for nearby searching:You can even set both to nearby and it will cross-connect them
Keeps Application stateWherever you close GottaGo, it will come back to that point
Favorites with one value onlyDefine your favorites for your from only, or your to only or both
Very nice UIA lot easier to read and find your way through

This is quite a bit, I’d say – And that’s why it took me so long.. Or let’s say “us”.

So, who is this “us”:

Stefan Sicher – Had a lot of work, arguing with me about design, usability and the like. But every time he’s more or less excited again to provide me some fine art – Even if that means that he has to do the same view 10 times until it fits. (Like the places view..)
The local.ch guys – Providing me an API which makes GottaGo so damn cool ;)
The liip.ch guys – Providing me with time and a lot of support through testing and contacts.
Memi Beltrame – Doing the translation for our “ragazzi”
Joel Bez and Jakob Bohnacker – Doing the translations for our “amis”

Does the future look any bright? I hope so. Even though I don’t have any plans for further releases.. Just issue fixing probably.

I think we’ll start some new projects soon. I kinda need a change :) So don’t expect any big updates on GottaGo. Just as the rule no.1 in software engineering: ”Release often, release early”

If anyone’s interested in some new cool apps, just drop me a line :)

When does it come out? Somewhen in the next two weeks. Beta testing will end as of sunday evening, and I’ll release it to the AppStore by then. And then it’s up to Apple :)

So here are just a few Screenshots and there is of course a video!

Here’s the video: http://couch.codesofa.com/static/ggo_010_streaming.mp4 (About 50mb, h.264)