Got a mail today: "I'm a Marketing Assistant for Wiley Publishing, Inc. I’m writing to let you know that Strip Designer was selected to be featured in our book, Incredible iPad Apps For Dummies, and was chosen as one of the Top Ten iPad Apps in the Art & Artistry category by our author, Bob “Dr. Mac” LeVitus. "

So apparently, Strip Designer made it into the "Incredible iPad Apps for Dummies" book (link). I regularly get questions related to books, but I don't think I got contacted by For Dummies before, so this was a bit surprising.

Strip Designer has had the ability to share photos on Facebook since the first release. However, a couple of weeks ago, I added the ability to download photos from Facebook albums directly within the app. The update came out Friday, and today I wanted to see if people started using it via Facebook's app statistics ("Application Insights"). I couldn't really tell if people were using the new feature (I suspect it isn't reflected in the statistics yet), but since this was the first time I looked at the statistics, I got a bit surprised when I looked at the demographics chart:

Facebook gave me the chart in Danish ("Kvinde"="Woman", "Mand"="Man"). What is interesting is that the majority of male users are generally quite old (35-44) is 23%. I expected my users to be mainly male in the 15-25 year range. I also expected that the male/female ratio would be closer to 50%, since that was the impression I got from the relatively few support-emails I get.

Now, I cannot tell if chart also applies to my general users, since this is only Facebook upload, but quite a surprise to me.

Strip Designer was chosen as staff favorite again. This time in the US iPad app store. It jump from a spot in the 30s to 10 in Photography, and it even managed to squeeze itself into spot 152 on the iPad top paid apps chart at the same time. This little (40000+ lines) app is doing quite well at the moment.

Update: I noticed it got a little higher later, and according to Top App Charts (http://topappcharts.com/) it got to spot 119 of Top Paid yesterday, although it dropped today. I also noticed that 3D Brain was at spot 151 of the top free one month ago. That app has been downloaded more than 400,000 times.

Lifecards 1.5 got released yesterday. It took exactly 7 days for Apple to approve the update. Most of the time the updates are approved within a couple of days. I guess the review team is busy.

Besides all the features that came along with Strip Designer (stickers, cutouts, iPad support, auto font-sizing, etc.), there are three major new features: Undo/Redo, "multipage" cards, and hand-writing.

Undo/Redo was horrible to implement. Lifecards was never designed with that in mind, so it was put on top of the existing code base. The implementation isn't pretty; Each user content object consists of two types of data; settings and current state. Settings data reflect the settings the user has applied to the object and the current state contains cached data, like the current texture id for photos/stickers and the balloon path for balloons (things that can be rebuild). The setting data is pushed onto the undo-stack at specific points in the code. Undoing an action means that you have to restore the settings of the specific object and rebuild all cached data. It sounds straight-forward, but since the objects were not built with the cache/setting division in mind, it looks a bit messy in places. For future projects I'll think about undo/redo from day one. It would have been easier if that part of the code was also more clearly divided between model and view, but when you build iPhone apps you don't want to overcomplicate things from the beginning.

I actually planned undo/redo for the last two releases of SD, but decided to disable it about 2 days before both releases. In both cases because I didn't felt like I had the time to test it properly and finish the last remaining bits. I didn't cut it because it wasn't stable. I cut it because I wasn't sure it was stable. When you start to see your planned deadline slip 5-7 days it is time to cut features.

Multipage was added to better support backs of postcards and the inner side of a greeting card. When I started multipage (after the last release of SD) I was very ambitious. I wanted to have the ability to create photo books. Each page can have its own independent template. However, I realized that having multiple pages visible at once presents a lot of issues when you can drag e.g. balloons from one page to another. While most of the code for multipage documents is there, I decided to simplify everything for this release to avoid introducing too many bugs. So the current code is limited to having all pages visible at the same time. People are begging for SD to become multipage, so I may have to get everything working properly soon. I am still divided between building on top of the current code-base or starting over.

Handwriting was also added to enable you to draw a signature. It is a funny little feature. The drawings are stored in vector format -- Basically a set of paths, with pen width and color data. That way they don't take up too much space and they render nicely in PDFs. Unfortunately, erasing parts of vector paths is somewhat tricky. I implemented a small algorithm that removes anything that intersects with a line of some width (the eraser). Basically, given a path and a convex polygon (made from the line and its width), I can remove those parts of the path that intersects the polygon. There are still a few glitches in the algorithm, but I decided it was stable enough to release.

I think the keywords of this release were "priority" and "good-enough". Some planned features didn't make it into the release, and some are just barely implemented "well enough". The whole update took about 21 days and the deadline slipped about 5 days -- That is a lot of underestimation considering I didn't finish everything I planned for, but at least it got out.

There has been several reviews of Strip Designer lately. I haven't really paid much attention to them, and I only stumble over them when I do an occasional blogsearch on Google... Anyway, today I found a video review (although it starts about 2 minutes in): here.

I am really amazed with how professional many of these reviews are. Everything is cleanly cut and the voice-over fast and well timed with the video. Seems like the reviewers spend a significant amount of time on these.

Also, great review! She really makes "Strip Designer" sound good (I've never been completely happy with the name)!