Attn: DMs with iPhones/iPod Touch - Need help and feedback.

[Moon_Goddess]

Hey Darwin

I know we're two mac guys, but I know my coder does PC programming, as well. I'm thinking that we're gonna really try and nail this first, and perhaps when we're at 2.0 we'll look to porting it other places; but to be honest, especially if Tycho says something nice about us on PA, we're going to probably devote all our time to the iphone version since that's where the most demand will be. But I will definitely talk it over. If it's simple and he's game, no problem. So watch this space and I'll let you know.

Thanks for even responding, naturally I know the demand is for iphone right now so I understand. Wish 12 new android phones coming out in the next 18 months on various carriers I hoping it might change

As for the port, I don't have any clue how hard it might be as I don't know anything about programming for iphone. Android is just basically java, with it's own SDK.

 

[Timeboxer]

Well, I claimed 94FERKJ7W6AK. Initial comments:

Wow, editing all these text boxes is fiddly. I kind of wish I had the ability to create my own buttons for quick status editing or something similar.

Similarly with changing numbers -- it'd be nice if there were a control that allowed you to easily change numbers, like the timer functionality on the iPhone.

I think that's the main thing for me. It's a good start, but I feel like there's too much fiddliness to deal with when changing states. I'd really love to have something that let me easily track all this stuff quickly; that would definitely get me to replace manual tracking at the gaming table.

 

[balth]

Hjormir: Thanks for the feedback, my goal is to get it to where it will be faster than index cards. HP is totally optional, you don't have to use it if you don't want to, but I thought including it for those who do was better than not having the feature at all.

As for your issue with delaying/holding, I can promise you that is the big feature that Jerry from PA suggested, and my coder is working on that right now.

And lastly, we're totally working on that, too, although that's probably going to be a minor version or two out, still.

Thanks again for your feedback, and do please check the updates and let me know what you think, even if it's a 'still not going to use it, but it's getting there.'

Larinza: I asked about Android. My coder said "Sure! But tell them they need to send me an Android phone so I can program/debug on it, and I'll get right on it."



Hadrian: I am not a full-fledged codemonkey. I'm a graphic designer, and have owned 3 IT solutions companies. More of a jack of all trades, master of none kind of person. I am really good with UI design, testing, and dealing with the public. My coder is hardcore, and he's in charge of most of the back end. It's been a lifelong dream to develop for apple, so even paying the hundred bucks to do it has kind of been worth it. We've sunk probably 200 hours easy into the project (I know, doesn't seem like much to look at it, right?). The dev part is pretty nice, but the uploading to devices/the store is a bit of a pain in the ass (there are a lot of certificates you have to install on each machine/share if you want to both be able to publish). It's a rather klunky way for such a streamlined UI company LOL. But it doesn't matter, I still love it.

 

[balth]

Amy,

Thanks for the feedback. I originally thought to go with rollers, but I ran into a huge problem with them: Time. Monster HP could be up to 10,000 points. Would you want to roll to that? I mean, I could do rollers for 1 digit, tens digit, hundreds digit, etc, but that would be slower than just typing in the numbers. Not to mention negative numbers, like negative initiative modifiers. So if I do that, then I have to have even different rollers for the different sections of the singular program...

Also keep in mind that you have to drill down for those rollers. There's no way that I've found in the UI for the iPhone to have a status display that you can edit right there, rollers or not. you always have to drill down. The timer has no info display, it's just the rollers. But if you go to the alarm, where there's information to be displayed, you have to drill down to change that info. Not to mention that you're only changing one thing (the alarm time). Add six more fields, and that's six times more drilling down and back to change each thing's info. (if you hadn't gathered, I'm not a fan of extra steps for the user to do things in design build, snazzy or not!)

In this particular instance, we figured simple was better. Originally I wanted everything (name, status fx, hp, init mod, init value) on the main info display and to be editable from there. But the iPhone environment doesn't allow for that, hence the drilling down once to set all that info.

But I'll try to keep my eye for a better way to do it; as I'm scouring new apps all the time.

 

[Hjorimir]

Further musings...

1) Maybe you could allow for the HP entry to be blank and thus not display on the main page as opposed to defaulting to 0.

2) I don't know about others, but I don't really like the QWERTY layout of the text editor. If I were actually typing - with two hands - it's comfortable, but searching for letters feels slower than those applications that just have the keys listed alphabetically.

3) As I prefer a single-click wherever possible, I'd like it if you just had next (and probably a previous) button as opposed to having to first hit Next Turn and then hit Ok. (I'd keep the OK confirmation for when selecting Previous or New Encounter, however.)

4) While I recognize that you have the character acting at the top of the round in red, I find it distracting (my eye is constantly drawn to the top of the round character as opposed to the character with the current action). Maybe a line between rows indicating a new round or - better yet - a round counter in the upper banner.

5) I don't even know if this is possible, but I'd LOVE an application I could use on my PC to prepare an encounter group and then just upload it to the iTouch/iPhone. I got huge hands and I fumble a lot with the small buttons on my iTouch.

 

[balth]

Hjorimir: let me hit these in order:

1. No prob! I think that's not a problem, especially since another high priority is a 'duplicate this' button so those that want to use hp won't have to mess with it as much. blank is a good idea.

2. I... I dont' think I've ever seen a non-qwerty keyboard on the iphone? do you know of an app you can refer me to? I'm wondering if they had to build it from scratch, as I'm fairly sure the qwerty is the only one I know of.

3. I've got a request in to actually put a 'Next Turn' button IN the dialog, which would do the same approximation as you are looking for (hence you only go in to edit anything if you press 'ok') otherwise you just move to the next dialog. I think this would approximate what you're suggesting. That's in the cue and is midway/lower on the priority list, look for it in a few minor version updates.

4. I TOTALLY went down this path of logic myself. And here's the problem. Top of the round is always determined by the highest initiative. Which is great, most of the time. But what happens if the person at the top of the initiative holds their action. The items aren't in some sort of 'container' like that, it's a fluid list that depends on who has the highest initiative order (hence the red). If they move initiative, then the program would have no way to know where the end of the round was/beginning of the next. This is something I want to revisit eventually, but as of right now, I may look at some other way to designate the top of the round person; but I do want to keep it fairly easy to see where the new round starts.

5. Hmm. That is something I hadn't thought about before. I think it will not be hard once we get the backbone for loading/saving encounters into the app. I'll definitely add this to the revision list (we'll have to make one for both mac/pc)

Thanks for the awesome feedback!

 

[Hjorimir]

1. Great.

2. Ignore me...I was confusing the iTouch with the nav systems my friend and I have on our cars...one is QWERTY, the other is Alphabetical.

3. Looking forward to it.

4. What if you created a row for 'Round' and just treated the row of having an initiative of 99 (or whatever)? This way, regardless of how somebody may delay or ready, the indication of a new round would be it's own animal. Hey, you could even place the counter (that I suggested you put in the banner in an earlier post) and move it to where you currently display the initiative count. So the Row would simply read ROUND X.

5. Groovy.

 

[Timeboxer]

But I'll try to keep my eye for a better way to do it; as I'm scouring new apps all the time.

Well, how about this:

In v3 of the OS, you can scrape through songs by dragging a slider bar around. But the new feature they added is the ability to use smaller sliding quanta by sliding your finger down -- horizontal represents increase/decrease, vertical defines the degree of change.

So, let's imagine that you can set a "max HP" for a monster. You can then scrape the HP down, decrementing the number, but you can get more fine-grained precision by using verticality.

Doesn't fix the drilling down problem, but I figured it would be food for thought.

 

[resistor]

I have not... Without getting into too much of a derailment, I was quite insulted when the first thing I saw after plugging my brand new iPod Touch into my computer was "Pay us $10 to upgrade to the newest version of our OS," and I refuse to buy it on principle.

Despite the fact that we've publically explained this, people still don't that we actually really don't charge that to spite people.

We got in a lot of trouble a while for "suspicious accounting practices" where we accounted for a sale at time of sale (duh), but then put money into providing upgrades/new features that were accounted for after the sale. While support/maintenance expenditure is obviously kosher, apparently upgrades/new features after accounting for the initial sale is not.

For the iPhone, we account for the sale over a two-year period. As in, you pay $X up front, but we actually account for that sale as a sale of $X/24 for each month over a two year period, so we're OK on providing upgrades/new features post-sale on it. However, this screws with our quarterly financial reports, because it hides the influence of (say) the holiday sales surge, or the sales rate of new releases, which can negatively impact stock performance, etc. As such, we simply can't use that trick for our entire product line, in addition to the fact that it just doesn't make practical sense for a product that really is buy-once like the iPod Touch, in contrast to a subscription-based product like the iPhone.

So the nominal fee for feature upgrades (not bug fix/maintenance updates) really is necessary from a not-getting-in-legal-trouble perspective. Trust me, we wouldn't do it if we didn't have to. The income from iPod Touch upgrades isn't nearly enough to offset the real development costs, and it's a huge pain to audit every free release to make sure it's not too featureful or whatnot.

 

[Trevalon Moonleirion]

I'm just gonna pony up two bucks for the thing and I'll send my feedback your way--I'm intrigued already.