Direct Report iPad v1.06 submitted
We have now submitted a fix for the crash to iTunes - last time submission took about 1 week. We apologize for any inconvenience you may experience due to this crash in the meantime. The update also includes a minor fix to the title screen which incorrectly said "demo" on it.
Thom Denick
Direct Report iPad: Crash when changing Time & Date
Unfortuantely, it has just come to our attention that a crash exists in Direct Report if you try and modify the Time & Date of an employee's feedback. We are working on a fix today, and should have it posted to Apple by this afternoon (PST.) In the meantime, please avoid hitting the Time & Date button to modify an employee's feedback logged time as you could lose some data.
Direct Report iPad v1.05 Approved
The only real update with this version is a fix for the crash reported earlier, if it's already not updating in the app store, it will shortly. Please let me know if you are experiencing any bugs, we want to fix them!
iPhone v1.05 Update
Hello,
With the iPad update fix in submission to Apple, we are currently working on our v1.05 iPhone update which will include the following features:
- Password Protection
- Feedback Badges, so you can see how your employee is performing at a glance.
- More smiley options - "Professional" and "Green/Yellow/Red" for the more stop-light oriented person.
- iOS 4.0 support (Direct Report currently works fine in iOS4.0, but this will just confirm that with a recompile in the new OS.)
- Chinese language support.
We hope to have this to you sometime in August! Thanks for your support of Direct report.
Update iPad v1.05
Just a quick update, our crash bug fix was submitted Monday evening, and it's been In Review with Apple for two days. Not sure when it will get through, hopefully by the end of the week. Thanks for your patience!
Bug in iPad v1.04 Update
Hello,
It's come to my attention in the past couple of days that we shipped Direct Report for iPad v1.04 with a pretty bad crash bug. This crash occurs if the app detects device rotation while you are on the Update screen.
You can avoid this issue by locking your iPad while updating feedback. If you still get the crash while your iPad is locked - please let me know at thom@smorpheus.com.
We want to apologize sincerely for any inconvenience this may cause you, we will be posting a fix for this crash to Apple tonight, and if all goes well we will have an updated version in the App store this week.
Thank you,
Thom Denick - SGL Lead Designer
Direct Report iPad v1.04 now posted to iTunes
Here's a complete list of what was addressed in version 1.04
- New Password Setting! Set a password to be required to access Direct Report. You can also change the password once you have turned on password security in the settings. You cannot recover your password, so be very careful you do not misplace your password once you have set it.
- New Appearance settings:
- Messy Desk - try out a more uh.. "realistic" look for Direct Report - iPad exclusive!
- 3 smiley face options - try out the "Professional" and "Green/Yellow/Red" settings.
- New Badges feature: As requested by several users, there is now a badging feature that shows a number relating to the number of feedback each type Employee has registered. For instance, if you have 3 positive feedbacks recorded, the number 3 shows up in the bottom right of the happy face while you are looking at that employee. This new feature defaults on, but can be turned off via the settings menu.
- Fixed a bug where the default timestamp in the e-mail filter was stuck on April 28th.
- Fixed a minor typo on the "Employee Since" screen.
- Fixed a bug where Direct Report might have ignored a tap on an already selected employee if you had the placeholder screen up.
- Fixed a freeze that could occur if you added/cancelled a direct report several times.
- Fixed a crash that could occur if you selected an empty folder and proceeded to edit the empty view.
- Clicking the disclosure indicator (the blue arrow) now does the same thing as clicking the larger feedback entry.
- Per user request, Direct Report now shows the splash screen when it launches, even if you have employees present. You don't have to worry about accidentally displaying feedback to the wrong person at application launch.
- Improved the look of the Date Range GUI in the e-mail Report menu.
There is one minor known issue where Direct Report does not select a newly added employee if you have a lot of employees. Unfortunately, this was caught after submission to Apple, and I didn't want to delay this patch with a resubmission for that one issue. If you have a feature or bug fix request - please leave it here or e-mail us at thom@smorpheus.com.
Direct Report iPad sales for June
Thanks to appFigures.com, I have some nice charts for looking at app sales in June.
Here's the most prevalent one, June sales:
I had a pretty extraordinary start but quickly plateaued out to the average of about 12 sales a day. One thing I have noticed is that your expectations shift drastically when you start getting 50+ sales a day, and all of a sudden 12 sales a day doesn't seem as good as it did 30 days prior. Overall, I am very happy with my results, and I hope I can keep the sales where they are.
The highest I made it on the iPad business charts was #16, which was on June 21st, 7 days after launch. At that time, I was featured prominently on Highest Grossing, Highest Downloads, New & Noteworthy, and New Releases in the iPad business store. This is phenomenal for an app tailored towards a very specific user. I was competing directly with much broader-base apps like Cloud Storage Apps, Art of War Apps, PDF Apps, Office Apps, and Printer Apps.
Originally my goal was to have steady income of about 2 sales a day for each of the apps, I'm obviously above that target on iPad, and the iPad version has increased the visibility of the iPhone version to the point that we've only had a couple of 2-or-less-sales days.
Here's the iPhone sales chart:
The iPhone version was featured on the Daily App Show on Monday and last week I ran a Google Ad campaign which actually was very successful in driving click-throughs. I've been completely unable, to quantify what those CTRs translate into sales for Direct Report. After my sales have stabalized a bit more, I'm going to run some Google Ad experiments with (relatively) very large daily budgets to see how it affects my sales. At the $10/day resolution, it's just way too hard to quantify any increase in sales.
Thanks to the 400+ people who bought Direct Report in June! A nice iPad update is on its way!
Direct Report iPad v1.04 submitted to Apple!
Expect it to update in the next few days. For now, here is a preview image of our new "Messy Desk" feature:
Direct Report v1.04 for iPhone and iPad
Direct Report v1.04 is in the works and will include the following additions:
- The most important new feature is the ability to password-protect your copy of Direct Report. This will ensure no one will be able to look at your feedback if they get a hold of your iDevice.
- Badges - which will provide counts for each of your report's feedback. This will be an optional feature that can be disabled if you don't find it useful.
- More smiley options - if you don't like the way the current smileys look, I have 2 new smileys - Professional, and Red/Yellow/Green in the works.
- iPad-Only: "Messy Desk" which provides an uh.. more realistic desktop
- iPad-Only: Several bug fixes. I've tracked down a few bugs and these will be addressed in the next update.
One issue of note - the iPad version will be jumped up to v1.04 to make it in sync with the iPhone version and to prevent confusion relating to the version number and new features.
I am hoping to submit v1.04 of the iPad version next week, and the iPhone version shortly thereafter.
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