OnTrack 1.8.3 Released

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

I have uploaded OnTrack 1.8.3 to the Android market, this is a minor release that widens the home screen on devices with larger screens like the Archos internet tablet.

The other thing it hopefully addresses is an issue a handful of users are reporting with respect to OnTrack duplicating records and deleting certain records. I suspect this issue is related to the Quick Add feature as it is the only spot where records are deleted. The issue is potentially occurring when an error occurs with saving multiple entries in the Quick Add screen, the error will cause OnTrack to roll back the already added records by deleting them based on their identifiers. I've tested this feature backwards and forwards and have not been able to reproduce the issue, I suspect these users might be using one of the newer devices or Android versions which may be causing an unexpected issue. Considering there are over a thousand people using OnTrack I believe this issue is not widespread since some of the regulars who stay in contact with me would have experienced the problem and dropped me a line.

Having said that, this release adds much better exception handling and notification around this area and corrects some issues I noted when an unexpected error does occur on saving. However, since I cannot reproduce the issue I can only be hopeful this will address the problem, thus if you are experiencing this issue please drop me a line so I can better understand where the issue is occurring. The annoying thing with comments in the Android market is that you cannot contact the user to ask follow up questions which makes tracking this issue down difficult, having someone who is experiencing the issue contact me would be immensely helpful.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 9:09 PM | Categories: Android | Permalink |

OnTrack Developer Statistics

Monday, October 05, 2009

I thought it would be interesting to share some statistics with respect to how well OnTrack is doing in the developer market. For those of you not familiar with the Android market, when you release an application on the market you get access to a developer console that shows how many downloads and active installs there are for the application at the current time.

OnTrack was released a couple of months ago around mid-July and the initial uptake was somewhat slow. I think some of this was due to the fact that I initially released it as just 'OnTrack' without the word diabetes in the title. I believe this was a mistake, even though I used the word diabetes in the description and OnTrack would appear in searches for diabetes I think the fact that diabetes was not in the title caused people to ignore it. I added Diabates to the title so it became 'OnTrack Diabetes' and since then the rate of adoption has been markedly better.

At the moment OnTrack has had 2134 downloads with 961 active installs, given the overall size of the Android market and the niche area that OnTrack serves I'm pretty happy with those numbers. There are currently 39 ratings for OnTrack with the majority of them very positive (4-5) and only a handful of poor to fair ratings (2-3). With regards to the poor ratings, one thing I dislike about the Android market is an inability to exchange information with commenters. This is annoying because often when someone leaves you a comment with a poor rating it is often difficult to understand exactly what issues the user had with the application and correct it in a future release.

I expect the number of active installs to increase substantially over the next few months as Sprint and Verizon add Android based phones to their portfolios. I'll try to remember to write an update post at the end of the year to see how things have changed.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 1:59 PM | Categories: Android | Permalink |

Looking for Help in Localizing OnTrack

OnTrack is currently localized for English and German and I would like to expand the number of supported languages, unfortunately a bit of a challenge to that goal is the fact that I really only speak and write English well. Thus I'm looking for help from native speakers who would be interested in seeing OnTrack in their language.

If you are interested in assisting with localizing OnTrack please drop me a line at gnunn@gexperts.com and let me know what language you can translate. In response I will send you a couple of text files for translation along with some basic instructions on how to perform the translation. Ideally you should be able to commit to keeping translations up to date in the sense that as OnTrack is developed and features added new strings that need to be translated will also be added. As new translations are required I'll forward you the text strings to translate and you should be able to turn this around in a few days.

Having said that, even if you only have the time for a one-off translation feel free to let me know and we can use that to kick-off support for that language.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 1:41 PM | Categories: Android | Permalink |

OnTrack 1.8.2 Released

Friday, October 02, 2009

OnTrack has been updated to 1.8.2 in the Android market. This version is a minor update with the following changes:

• Changed the handling of the back button in the edit screen, now if after making changes you press the back button and the changes are not valid the application will warn you before discarding the changes.
• In some locales the comma is used as the decimal separator instead of the period. Unfortunately there is a bug in Android 1.5 that doesn't allow users to enter a comma in these locales for decimal fields. The problem that arose is when editing an entry, OnTrack would copy the value into the edit field with a comma making it an invalid number. OnTrack now automatically changes the comma to a period to workaround this Android issue. In all all other places in OnTrack a comma should be displayed if this is what your locale uses as the decimal separator.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 1:56 PM | Categories: Android | Permalink |