Beat Meier's blog

App ready for download

Our app, Easy Cooking, is available on the App Store since today. If you have an iPhone download it and we appreciate feedback in any form.

Download it from here: http://itunes.apple.com/nz/app/easy-cooking/id400548734?mt=8

App Submitted

After a long process of implementing it was ready to submit our App!

It took ages to create all necessary provisioning files and finally create the binary in xcode, but it's done now.

 

 

CME: Weekly Report (October 25)

What we planned for this week

• Finish conversions
• Think about what to do with the Temperature setting
• Continue usability testing
• Draft final report
• Recipe data put into xml/database
• Clean code according code review
• If no sponsor, implement a direct link to where we found the recipe

What we actually did

• We added 70 recipes to our app, all under a Creative Commons Attribute License
• We finished the conversions (we even added the length and temperature conversions in the steps description)
• We documented the testing and what we learnt from it
• We created a nice icon for our App, made by ingredients
• Cleaned and documented code
• FINISHED THE APP!

Who did what 

• Conversions (Mandy)
• Collecting recipes (All)
• Documentation (Mandy)
• Icon (Beat)
• Cleaned and documented code (Beat)
• Description of App for App store (Chris)

Plans for the following week

• Submitting App to the store
• Holidays?

Re-evaluation of risks

Risk	Likelihood	Impact	Time lost	Action
App not accepted by Apple.	L	H	Hours	Change the things that Apple wasn't happy about.

CME: Weekly Report (October 18)

What we planned for this week

• Get Feedback from Healthy Food a.s.a.p.
• Finish conversions
• Workout a test user plan

What we actually did

• Conversions
  We implemented a second version of conversions. We are currently debugging memory leaks and allocation issues.
  
  
• Sponsor feedback
  Healthy Food has decided to build their own iPhone application and has decided that it wouldn't be in their best interest to provide us with recipes. Jo Segar is not interested at this stage. Tegel?
  
  
• Workout a test user plan
  A basic plan has been developed and user-testing has commenced.
  
  

Who did what 

• Conversions (Mandy)
• Test plan (Beat)
• Sponsors (Mandy)

Plans for the following week

• Finish conversions
• Think about what to do with the Temperature setting
• Continue usability testing
• Draft final report
• Recipe data put into xml/database
• Clean code according code review
• If no sponsor, implement a direct link to where we found the recipe

What needs to be done until Go-Live

• Find Sponsor or collect from internet
• Convert recipes from Sponsor to our xml-version
• Final documentation
• Testing

Re-evaluation of risks

Risk	Likelihood	Impact	Time lost	Action
No company wants to give us recipes.	H	H	Hours	Find recipes online, copy & paste to XML. A lot of work.

CME: Weekly Report (October 11)

What we planned for this week

• Implement the user-defined view for the measurements. Consider the settings made in the plist. Calculate the right amount according to the chosen settings. An additional feature would be to touch a row and change the units
• Add favourite button to Steps View as well
• Better quality images and have a thumbnail of each (will increase performance?). Use thumbnails with suffix "_tn"
• Add possibility to add a minus (-) in front of an ingredient to exclude this from the query
• Add copyright information to single view
• Research sponsor for our recipes
• Think about use of colours in App

What we actually did

• Conversions
  We implemented a first version of conversions. It is working but doesn't cover all cases yet. Weight and volume conversion is implemented. We changed the datatype of the unit to a string so an input '1/2' is possible. We have to work on it that e.g. '1 1/2' is working as well.
  
  
• Favourite button
  Implemented.
  
  
• Images
  All images are replaced by a PNG and we added thumbnails. It is faster now but still a bit lagging.
  
  
• Exclude option
  It is implemented.
  
  
• Sponsors
  We have to talked to 4 possible sponsors. We would like to contact 'Healthy Food' in detail to know if they're still interested. They have the most information how we would like it.
  

Who did what 

• Conversions (Mandy)
• Favourite button (Beat)
• Images (Chris)
• Exclude option (Beat)
• Contacting possible sponsors (Mandy)

Plans for the following week

• Get Feedback from Healthy Food a.s.a.p.
• Finish conversions
• Workout a test user plan

What needs to be done until Go-Live

• Find Sponsor
• Convert recipes from Sponsor to our xml-version
• Final documentation
• Testing

Re-evaluation of risks

Risk	Likelihood	Impact	Time lost	Action
Healthy food doesn't cooperate.	M	H	2 days	Contact Joe Seagar or Tegel. Tegel should be no problem.

CME: Weekly Report (September 27 + October 4)

We are on holiday, sorry.

UITableView and Search Bar

via clingingtoideas.blogspot.com

Good post to see how easy it is to use a search bar with UITableView. This method uses the 'Search Bar and Search Display Controller' item in IB which basically will do all the work for us.

Reading and Writing plists

plists are wonderful for storing small amounts of semi-structured data when you don’t want the overhead of using a full-blown database. OS X, as you have no doubt noticed, uses plists extensively to store configuration data.

via iphoneincubator.com

Great blog post for loading plist, reading from it and writing to a plist.

CME: Weekly Report (September 20)

What we planned for this week

• Customize table view for search results
• Finish Steps screen
• Implement CoverFlow on steps screen
• Add Interactive search (smart search)
• Implement Settings View
• Implement Favourites View (add star button on SingleView), think of storage of favourites (another entity or plist)

What we actually did

• Implemented Custom Cell for SearchView
  We use a another nib-file which holds a custom cell.  We load this nib-file accordingly for every row. 
  Think about what we do if the user doesn't want to see the images in the search results. We wll probably create a second nib-file that doesn't have an image.
• Steps Screen
  Added CoverFlow effect for stepping through steps.  Removed memory leaks in Cover Flow. Added browsing through images (if available).
  
  
• Interactive search
  The search is started as the user starts to type. It is possible to search for multiple words separated by a space.  It will search in the recipe title and ingredients list.
  
  
• Settings View
  Loading basic settings structure from plist. The selected values for each setting are stored in a separate plist which is copied to the applications directory. It works.
  
  
• Favourites
  Added custom button to the navigation bar in Single View.  Changed search query so we can use the the same View Controller.  Added initMethod to distinguish between the Search and Favourites views.
  We store it in the recipes table as an attribute (on or off).
  
  
• Memory Leaks
  We used the Performance Tools from Xcode to detect memory leaks in the Search and Settings views.  They should be gone by now.

Who did what 

• Custom cell for search results (Chris)
• Settings screen (Mandy)
• Started test plan (Mandy)
• CoverFlow effect on Steps screen (Beat)
• Interactive search (Beat)
• Favourites (Beat)
• Fixed a lot of memory leaks (Beat)

Plans for the following week

• Implement the user-defined view for the measurements. Consider the settings made in the plist. Calculate the right amount according to the chosen settings. An additional feature would be to touch a row and change the units
• Add favourite button to Steps View as well
• Better quality images and have a thumbnail of each (will increase performance?). Use thumbnails with suffix "_tn"
• Add possibility to add a minus (-) in front of an ingredient to exclude this from the query
• Add copyright information to single view
• Research sponsor for our recipes
• Think about use of colours in App

Overall progress

We have a working App at the moment but without measurement conversion so far. So we are quite happy at the moment about our progress. We still have some remaining points from last week for further thinking:

• Necessity of searching recipes online
• Usability of the App - is the target audience satisfied?

Re-evaluation of risks

Risk	Likelihood	Impact	Time lost	Action
Hackintosh erased hard drive	L	H	NaN	Set up everything again.
App will not be accepted by Apple	M	H	Immense	Do it all again.
Users don't find App user-friendly	H	H	Weekend	Improve user interface.

Unitec Logo not allowed in documents

I received the feedback from our second Assignment (Design document), where I used the Unitec logo in the top left that it is not allowed or not without permission of the marketing department at Unitec.

I thought this is strange and wanted to double check that fact. I wrote an e-mail to the marketing department to make sure.

I was really surprised to get a negative answer. The logo is only used in official Unitec statements. The logo gives the confirmation of a Unitec held position. And furthermore "... it would be both undesirable and untenable to manage the views of 23k current students are consistent with Unitecs' ".

Well, I stil can't believe it... but I will remove the logo then. Maybe the work has a higher value without the logo anyway. ;)