MyGreatiPhone App – What You Can Expect In The Next Update

Today the developer of our MyGreatiPhone App that is in the AppStore posted on his site Ravenatic.co.uk some new features and fixes that you can expect to see in future releases of the MGiP App.

So here they are..

Crash on loading when not on Wifi – This is pretty much because it’s finding it takes too long to load the data due to slow or intermittent connection (Mainly if you don’t have a 3G Connection). Currently the app loads from the feeds right away. I am changing this so that the app loads into a home page so it actually gets to load. This will stop the app crashing when the internet isn’t available. What this homepage will contain isn’t yet decided, but at the moment it’ll be a start screen.

Refresh not working – This is quite simply because I’ve not hooked it in correctly. I’m working on getting this fixed. Most of the time you don’t have to reload anyway but it needs to be in place in case of connection failure. This will be coming in the new year as its a pretty low priority.

No network activity icon when loading feeds – This is a bug that I am currently working at squashing. Currently, the loading indicator only shows for less than a second. For some reason, even though i’ve told it to show before it starts getting the data, it doesn’t show until after, at which point it is too late to show it because it’s already done what it was meant to show it is doing. This is where Obj-C is confusing my nut! I should have this fixed very soon.

These bug fixes will be in for Christmas before iTunes Connect closes as I hope to get it submitted next week and ask Apple to consider pushing it up the list to stop crashes.

There has also been a bug where the app crashes within 1 second of loading if you are jailbroken. Where as i’ve only had one person report this to me, there may be more. If you do have this issue please get the crash report and send it to me! (Tweet me for email). It seems to be something that the user has which is interfering with the framework the app wants to use. App doesn’t like it and so crashes. But as I know some users are JBers, I want to try and fix this!

Whats coming?

Now that the app is out there it has had a great response of its current use and how it can be used in future. Things I want to work on in the new year are;

Push Notification on new article/video/podcast. – You get notified when there is something new to see. A badge on the icon will show how many are unread. The tabs within the app will each show how many are unread (e.g. 2 unread articles, 1 unwatched video, 1 unheard podcast). And yes, this will be customizable!

Video page to show description and thumbnail instead of going to youtube.com – This is a tricky one, but one I want to get done from a user experience point of view. You should be able to view the video info and then view it right from the app, insead of use more network bandwidth to head over to youtube or where the feed is coming from.

Articles and Podcasts to show article image and descripton – as above really. Description or small section of the article before you go to view it.

The Whole MyGreatiPhone team would like to say a huge thanks to Ravenatic for all his hard work with this app, so go follow him on twitter now @Ravenatic

Go and get our App now for Free in iTunes – MGiP App