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BOSW, a big thank you and Open Source on the iPhone

Whew, those were a few interesting and pretty exhausting days.

Open Source on the iPhone @ OpenExpo

The first part of this article is about my morning of that fancy day. I had the really great opportunity to hold a talk at the OpenExpo in Berne. The talk was about Open Source Software on the iPhone and I think it went quite well. Had a few interesting Mails with questions and the crowds seemed to understand the issues and problems coming with Development and Deployment of Open Source Software.

The Slides are available here (english) while there is a video on youtube of the presentation here (english)

Best of Swiss Web

You may have heard about that event called “Best of Swiss Web” – if you don’t, look it up :) It’s an award for the “best” swiss Websites of the passed year.
Thanks to a wizard called Hannes, Liip decided to participate with GottaGo in this event (as well as with the RaiWeb project – which is however not part of this article), 2 categories – Technology Innovation, Public Affairs and was also nominated for the Master – which is the price of the prices.
The night then started not so bad – we won bronze, in “Public Affairs”. The night went on, nice food, a very nice white wine.. after that, “Technology Innovation” was on.. Bronze, Silver.. Silver for SBB and their app.. No word of GottaGo? The light turns up.. Gold! Short before the event I said: I don’t want to win the Master award, but the Technology Innovation award.
Later on, some glasses of wine later – an excellent red wine btw. – the Master was on. Number 1 again.. whooo!
Besides, Liip won 2x silver with the RaiWeb Project!
Now, enough of that. I just want to say “Thank you”, really really thank you for helping me, supporting me, criticising me, trying to buy me out of this project, pissing me off with lame comments, giving me a reason to work and last but not least – let me work. Thank you Liip for never telling me to get up early, never telling me to work afterhours but rather let me work afterhours and let me get up early or late or not getting up at all and of course, pay me enough money that I don’t have to work 100% :)
Thanks to all the Beta Testers who took time to help me improve this software. And then, there are two guys in particular, one, is my not-so-bossy-and-always-play-to-win-partial-boss Hannes Gassert who worked afterhours to kick out a bad ass presentation about GottaGo. The other is, who would have guessed, Stefan Sicher.. I know you don’t feel like you’ve done a lot, but you really made this project a success. A nice idea is nothing without the right presentation.
See here for some pictures, and here for some interviews from that evening. To that Microsoft guy who thought I would wear a suit next year: I wear T-Shirts with heart and soul. And this is why I’ll most probably never work for you :)

Stay tuned for some hot updates to come now..

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Filed under: GottaGo, Information, Transport, iPhone on April 4, 2009 at 11:14 pm by marc.
Tags: iphone openexpo transport bosw best of swiss web open source oss foss gottago

GottaGo takes a day off, or two..

As I promised yesterday on twitter and facebook, today is a fun day for GottaGo..
So why is that? GottaGo is retiring. But its younger brother, Transport is taking over the spot..

So this is the official announcement that GottaGo is renamed to Transport.

There is a new logo, a new name, but the App itself hasn’t changed much. We fixed a few issues and improved some minor things like the hitboxes for the Locate-Button and for the Date-Refresh-Button, as they are now a lot bigger.

But, this is again not the fun part :)
Ever since the NDA was in place, I tried to figure out how to get around it. I posted a tutorial about NSXMLParser, which was meant to help iPhone Developers because usually, you’d use DOMDoc and not SAX.

Through personal requests, I was also able to provide some bits and pieces of code because this was some kind of a request of a customer – where you’re allowed to talk about code :)
Now that the SDK has fallen, we have more or less a little greenhouse where we can play around in almost free nature.

A brief history of GottaGo/Transport: It started off as a free-time project and continued as such ever after. I started it to have an example of a real application to help other developers with their own problems. Usually, in books, they always write about your Car object, which has an ivar with wheels and such. Yeah, thanks, not really real-world :) So it’s always nice to look at real code which is used out there. 
To look at code, there really is no better way as to look at Free Open Source Software.

This is why I declare that GottaGo/Transport shall from now on be Open Source and distributed under a more or less GPL v.2 license. So everyone can create their own Transport App or learn from it or improve it. (The latter would be really nice!)

What does this mean? Not so much for the users, as they are only getting better software :) (Yes, I truly believe in FOSS)

For developers this means: Just drop me a line and help developing the best Transport Application for the iPhone there is. This also means that Android developers and iPhone developers in other countries can adapt Transport for their need and release an equally helpful App for their device and country.

For those who don’t really understand what I’m doing here: I give everyone the right to improve, copy and adapt my code.

The code is available on:
https://svn.liip.ch/repos/public/iphone/Transport

(more…)

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Filed under: GottaGo, Information, Transport, iPhone on October 31, 2008 at 2:00 pm by marc.
Tags: foss, GottaGo, open, opensource, oss, rename, source, Transport

done.

 So much for tonight. Thanks Stefan :)

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Filed under: GottaGo, Information, Transport, iPhone on October 8, 2008 at 1:37 am by marc.
Tags: appstore, GottaGo, iPhone, objective-c, Transport

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