Where’s 1.7 at?

It’s been over a month since my last post – and in that time Microsoft have officially unveiled the Windows Phone 7.1 “Mango” update to the world – very exciting news for developers and users alike.

But if you’re here I guess more importantly you’re wondering where Springy 1.7 has gotten off to? After all, it was initially meant to be out late January / Early February?

Well, it’s coming, next week! Finally! There’s just one little set of bugs to fix and then it’s off for certification.

But what’s taken it so long? Well, every single page in the application has had major code rewrites, for both performance, memory and aesthetic reasons, as well as code clean ups. Infact, the Profile & Inbox pages have been rewritten over 4 times each in the last few months, with me trying out various ideas to squeeze al those extra drops of performance out of the system! It’s been a lot of effort, but it’s going to pay off… well, even if only ever so slightly!

Hang tight fellow Formspringers, it’s not long now!

Where’s my update?! :D

Sorry it’s been a whiles guys – University life has been busy. Aiming for a First is no pushover job. Anyway, as luck would have it, I’m stuck in an examination / revision period, so not a lot of time to work on Springy right now.

But, fear not – progress on Springy! 1.7 is well underway!

The current list if updates and fixes include:

• Entire backend rewritten for faster downloads and upto 40% less data downloads (typically between 5-15%), saving you time and money!
• Automatic Login
• Haptic Feedback now works on all devices
• Fixed URL parsing crashes
• You can now block users & report spam from the inbox
• Performance improvements to “my profile” loading
• Ability to delete from inbox overview using context menus
• Fixed random crashes with malformed profile images
• Lots of other small things.

Before the update hits, I’m also planning on adding in the following:

• Improved readability of questions & answers with full screen-width reading area
• Image uploading
• Inline image viewing
• Block users from inbox context menu
• “Answer this question” feature, to send any question your friends have answered to your inbox
• Show date on full Question / Answer view.

There’s also the possibility of

Unfortunately, as my examination period creeps into the month of May slightly, be on the lookout update to be hitting your phones some time in early May.

See ya round guys, and enjoy the app!

Johnny.

Coming up–Springy! 1.4, 1.5, & 1.6

It’s been a little while right guys? Well don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about you all! Christmas is here, and I’ve had some free time to polish up Springy! at bit.

First up is Springy! 1.4, which includes bug fixes, performance improvements, new features and a new basic theme, improved touch targets, and improved touch aware responses. You’ll love it (: It’s currently in testing now at Microsoft, and should be on the marketplace in a couple of days.

Next up is Springy! 1.5 – this is actually done – complete, ready to go. It features only 3 changes from 1.4, but they’re still worth a release. First up is to a fix a colouring bug with the new feature introduced in 1.4, when using light theme on the phone. Slipped past me in testing, and unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t let you cancel submissions that have already gone into testing, sooo it’s coming up in the next build.
But there’s more to 1.5 than that, there’s also a nice UI change to improve usability and readability on the profile pages, and a new basic theme, based on one of the old rejected designs. This’ll be put up for testing straight after 1.4 gets approved, so should be pushed to you sometime this week.

And that just leaves Springy! 1.6. What’s going to change in that you ask? Performance. Springy! is already considered one of the smoothest, and fastest Windows Phone 7 apps on the marketplace, but for me as a developer all I can see is massive performance pit holes, and skipping animations. The goal of Springy! 1.6 is to get much improved performance, especially when downloading additional questions/answers and when reloading the inbox after deleting/answering a question. Animation will also be worked on to be perfectly, consistently smooth through the application, no matter how visually complex a page gets. It’s going to be awesome
And what else? Improved themes. At the moment, I call themes “Basic Themes”. They're simple, and sparsely animated. New themes will be greatly animated and dynamic, and far more gorgeous looking, without being distracting. It’s going to be a big update. When can you expect it? No idea. Anytime between now and next year maybe (:

Springing into Action: Springy! 1.3

So guys, it’s been a little while hasn’t it? I managed to find a bit of time over the weekend to polish Springy! a bit, and 1.3 is the fruit of that labour!

So let’s cut to the chase – what does 1.3 bring to the table?

• Auto correct is now present for both asking and answering questions!
• Improved question preview shortening (now turned on by default)
• Native theme is now the default theme choice
• Experimental landscape support tuning
• Improved search results scrolling
• Fixed the animations on the activity feed, pretty!
• Tuned Inbox animations – should be slightly smoother
• Fix for Inbox crashing

Looking for a more in-depth analysis and behind the scenes tid bits about the update, click on to read the rest of the post!

A New Day, A New Icon

So the current marketplace icon is bit… well it’s not exactly pretty is it? So I’ve made another one! It’s not exactly super pretty, but it’s not as ugly as the old one either. You can see below the original icon, and a couple of stages in between showing the iterative process that resulted in the final icon – there were quite a few stages in-between which are missing, but unfortunately I don’t have copies of them anymore. Still, no loss!

  

And finally… introducing the new, slightly improved Springy! icon:

This newer marketplace icon will be making the rounds starting v1.1, if that ever makes it through certification…

A look back at Springy of Old…

Although there’s only ever been one public release of Springy! so far, it’s been through lots of designs and iterations internally. So here for your viewing pleasure is a quick look at just a small selection of the older and rejected designs that ultimately lead to what you see today. Enjoy!

SPRINGY! PRE-RELEASE DESIGNS VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Of course, there are plenty more, but I‘ll save those for another time

Where’d you go Formspring?

If you’re a frequent Formspring user, you may have recently noticed that Formspring was down for quite a whiles, and of course there’s an interesting and technical blog post over on the Formspring blog talking about what went wrong, and how they fixed it – an interesting read of you’re into web tech.

Of course, this presented a new issue for me, with Springy!. When designing it, I had already taken into some error handling methods to make sure you never have to see any crashes. One of them being – before each and every API request is fired, we check to see whether we first have an active network connection. If we don’t, we show an Error Message instead informing you there is no valid network connection. If we do however, the request fires – and from there on in we expect to get a response from the server, and we handle it accordingly. Simples.

What I didn’t take into account however, was what would happen when Formspring itself was down, leading to no response from the server… and through some series of events, basically, we  end up with a crash! It’s a rare occurrence, but it’s still unhelpful.

So, there’s now a fix in place for that! If Formspring is down during login, it will now inform you and not let you login. Not a best fix, but it works, and it’s something you’re never likely to see. But just in case

Another minor change in Springy! 1.1 – there’s now a button to forward you to my Formspring profile to ask me questions on the About page!

(Secret: Clicking on “created by johnny westlake” also does this, and always has!)

Springy! 1.1 will include both of these changes, and some new artwork hopefully, and I’m intending to submit it within the next few days. Till then, enjoy Springy!