Proximity Release Announcement
So, nearly five months to the day after my development postmortem on Proximity, it’s finally been submitted to the App Store for Apple’s approval. If you haven’t already read that postmortem, do so now — much of what I’m going to say in this post is going to be comments on what I’ve said there.
First off, I’d like to apologize for the much-longer-than-expected delay in actually releasing Proximity. When I made that postmortem, I said that I expected Proximity to be out the day Apple released iPhone OS 3.0. Quite clearly, that didn’t happen. Between that postmortem and this release, quite a bit has changed in the application.
For one thing, I spent a large amount of time raving about my “design by algorithm” that allowed me to come up with (what I thought at the time was) a fairly decent UI. Yeah, that didn’t work out. I don’t know who I thought I was kidding with the ADA mentions. Fortunately, after that post, I had a designer come out of the woodwork and offer to work on Proximity with me, and I think that the design that’s come out of that has greatly improved Proximity’s usability.
Another thing that has changed with Proximity is the icon. Done by talented designer Jeff Smykil, I think this new icon puts the idea of Proximity across better than the icon by Adam Hosp. That’s not to diss Adam — I came to him with the icon idea, and when that idea changed, he was unavailable to work on it. Fortunately, I managed to track down Jeff and have him do the icon. He turned around great work in a really short period, and I’m glad that he was able to work on Proximity.
Another thing that changed between the postmortem and now is my feelings about MapKit. In my postmortem, I described MapKit as a “really well designed framework.” Ha. If you follow me on Twitter, you may know my extreme distaste for MKAnnotationView that has since arisen. It got so bad at one point, that when Googling for solutions to my MKAnnotationView bugs, I came across links to me complaining about those same bugs. I filed several bugs with Apple over missing features and straight-out bugs. All were pretty quickly filed as duplicates, so I know that I’m not the only one with these problems.
But once again, I’ve gone on too long, talking where I should be showing.
One thing that was completely removed from Proximity between the postmortem and release was the little card tutorial. I’ll have more on that in a later post. I was a little sad to see it go, because it worked well, and eased people into learning the application, but I think removing it was ultimately the right decision.
There’s one group of people essential to Proximity’s success that I haven’t thanked yet — its beta testers. This group of 11 people tested Proximity, finding several bugs and UI glitches in what I thought was already a fairly smooth application. Several even suggested new features that made it in to the final application release. I talked to several of them at C4, and they seemed to really enjoy using Proximity. That excitement is what pushed me to stop waffling and finally ship it. Thanks again, folks.
I don’t know how long it will be before Proximity makes it through the approval process and on to the App Store. Apple seems to be saying most apps are getting on in about 14 days right now, so hopefully you’ll see it sometime in October. I’ll be putting up more information as it gets closer to release, so keep watching this blog and the Cocoatype home page.
