Thirstysea

Very few people touch application settings so it did not come as a surprise to us when we recently received a query from a user who does not use Timer in Fossil and who wanted an option to remove it altogether from the application.

Luckily Fossil already has this option neatly stacked in the Settings app. But there is more than just plain luck in us deciding to support this feature in Fossil. We understand that all the users of Fossil may have different requirements related to time tracking and we allow users to customize Fossil as per their business needs.

We also take pride in the customizations we left out so that it does not look like a case of over design.

Oh btw, this is documented in the “Tips” section of the Fossil, but who (including us) reads help anyway .

Since we are already on the subject, let me jot down what other customizations are possible in Fossil till now. This list will change as we add more features to Fossil.

• Enable/Disable Timers
• Support for Single/Multiple Timers
• Enable/Disable Expense Tracking feature
• Enable/Disable Tags
• Enable/Disable Help and Context Help

We have been working on the new design for the website for the last few weeks now and we are slowly and steadily inching towards that goal.

Now that we are nearing the end, over the next few days, the web site may be in a state of flux, with us experimenting with the new look etc.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you. We will keep you updated on twitter @thirstysea.

Now that Fossil and Fossil Icebreaker are released and are available in the app store, we would like to share our experience with the app review process. This is purely based on the personal experience of going through the review process for two applications Fossil and Fossil Lite.

• Submission to Release timeline: ~ 2 weeks

It takes approximately 2 weeks from the time you submit your application till the time it is up on iTunes for sale. But two iternations for a review are common. Even though you might feel you have thoroughly tested your application make allowance for atleast 2 iterations of the review and release (which will mean appr 1 month after you submit)

• No difference in re-review timelines for developer rejected or apple rejected apps

In case of Fossil Lite, the time taken by Apple to review when we resubmitted the application after wwe realized there was a bug was similar to the time taken after we resubmitted after Apple had rejected the binary. Both took approximately 2 weeks.

• App tested on simulator for 3.0 does not suffice at times

Since I had done most of my app development on Iphone OS2.0, I was reluctant to upgrade to 3.0 when the release happened midway. So I released Fossil after testing it on my 2.0 device and 3.0 simulator. Fossil got rejected because it was apparently crashing on the 3.0 device. When I retested it was very much the case. It continued to pass on simulator but crashed on a 3.0 device.

• App Rejection because Tab bar icon similar to a std Iphone app icon

One of the causes of rejection of the free version of my application (Fossil Lite) was that the icon I had used for durations was very similar to the std iphone app icon for stopwatch. This was the cause of the 2nd round of rejection. It would have saved me atleast 2 weeks, had both these errors been reported in the 1st round of review and rejection itself. Also, the other strange thing to note is that the same error wasn?t reported as a cause of rejection on the paid version of th eapplicaiton. The code base for both these applications are the same and ideally should have been reported for both the applications!

So in a nutshell, Apple app reviewers managed to catch one genuine bug in Fossil during the review process and it took them one month to do it.

It took me 15 minutes to fix the bug and 1 hour to come up with a new tab bar icon.

We are excited to announce that we have submitted  a new version of Fossil for approval.

Fossil 1.1 is not very heavy on features but we still have managed to add few things which will delight a few of you there. Without much ado, here it goes:

Features:

• SDK 3.0 compliance: Fossil 1.1 is fully compliant with iPhone SDK 3.0 and it uses some of the new capabilities in SDK to make the views more faster and animation much smoother. You will notice an appreciable difference in the animation in the editing mode in Fossil.
• New Tab Bar Icons: We have completely overhauled all the existing tab bar icons and replaced them with new “pixel perfect” icons.
• Backend optimizations: We tinkered and tinkered and then we tinkered some more with the backend to make data scrolling faster then ever!
• Inline Mail Composer: Sending Reports over email does not exit Fossil anymore, thanks to the support for new in-app mail composer in this release.
• Carbon Theme updated: Do you know there are more than 1 themes supported in Fossil? You can set the themes from Settings app. We tweaked “Carbon theme” a little bit under the hood to make it even more awesome.

Bug Fixes : We also managed to squish a few reported bugs in this release.

1. Badge count aligned correctly
2. Changed Button Title for Overlay Menu. Previously it showed “Cancel” instead of “OK”.
3. Minor updates in inbuilt help

Hopefully, it should take standard 2 weeks for the updates to hit App store.

We would also like to thank glpyhish and pixelpress for their awesome free tab bar icons that they have made available for anyone. Thank you guys!

We are excited to announce that Fossil Icebreaker is available in the app store.

Fossil Icebreaker is the free version of Fossil. It is a fully functional version and it supports up to 100 entries. So grab your free copy and give it a try.

And don’t forget to let us know what we can do better.

We have been, of late, a bit slow on updates here.

But we were far from sitting idle. We have been working very hard on the next release of Fossil and we hope to submit it for review to Apple soon.

We received few review comments for Fossil. Few folks even took out time to write a detailed mail on what they liked and what they may want us to improve in Fossil in future releases. Thanks to all of you for the feedback.

Some of these suggestions are already going to be part of Fossil release 1.1 while some of them have been marked for the future release.

We will come back soon with the news on the release of Fossil 1.1.

I’m sitting on a rock,
minding my own business…
… when suddenly, they’re onto me.

Hello,

At this time, XXXX cannot be posted to the App Store because it is crashing on iPhone 3G running iPhone OS 3.0.1. Crash logs have been attached for your reference.
For more information regarding crash logs:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/technotes/tn2008/tn2151.html

One look at the document and I have this empty feeling in my stomach.

… resolving stack trace addresses to source code methods and lines – requires the application binary that was uploaded to the App Store and the .dSYM file that was generated when that binary was built. This must be an exact match – otherwise, the report cannot be symbolicated. It’s essential that you keep each build distributed …

Nobody told me before about dSYM files or atleast I did not hear/read about it. And if its a common knowledge in this part of the world, well, before this, I was working under a rock, tinkering with protocols ..

While the good folks on internet here and here have already taken care of explaining in detail the debugging steps, I still required the dSym file.

It turned out, I had the build files after all for one of my app. I was also able to reproduce the problem by just following the instructions given in the mail.

But IMHO, the rejection mail is too late in the process to let me know that I may need the dSYM file. It can probably be mentioned in iTunes Connect Developer guide so that no one misses archiving the build in the last minute rush to release the app.

In case you did not save dSYM files, here are the options for you:

• Try reproducing the problem using the steps sent in the rejection mail.
• Run instruments or static analyzer tool to flush out any errors.
• If nothing else works, submit again, wait for 2 more weeks for Apple approval (or rejection) (of-course am kidding).

I am excited to announce the release of our first iPhone application Fossil.

Fossil is a time tracking application with a simple and very elegant user interface and loads of features.

Feel free  to drop us your suggestions, anything which may help us in making Fossil even better.

Fossil Icebreaker is submitted to app store today.

Fossil Icebreaker is the free version of Fossil. There is no difference in terms of features between IceBreaker (Lite) and the paid version. This version allows only 100 entries though.

The countdown begins!!.

Fossil was submitted for review today.  For a lack of  its own page at the moment, I am putting an inlined brief description of Fossil. Its a straight rip-off from the description submitted on app store

Fossil is an intuitive time tracking application designed keeping freelancers and consultants in mind. It helps ensure that any billable hour doesn’t go unaccounted.

Features:

1. Track multiple Clients, Projects and Tasks
2. Real-time tracking for Tasks using single or multiple Timers
3. Flag data as Favorite, Active, Archived for better organization and readability
4. Filter and view data based on date range
5. Tag entries for easy identification
6. Multiple currencies supported, localization support for dates and numbers
7. Generate Reports and export the data in CSV format
8. Data Validity: Checks done before data is deleted to prevent accidental deletes.
9. Well polished and elegant user interface. Different themes available.
10. Help available at every screen shot apart from FAQs and a ‘Getting Started’ guide.

The lite version, Fossil Icebreaker is undergoing final testing and will be submitted in a day or two.