We submitted Fossil 1.3 for review today.
Version 1.3 provides support for French language in Fossil.
We were hoping to pack few features that users have been waiting for sometime now. But in the end, we decided to put those through at least one more week of beta testing.
We expect version 1.2 of Fossil to hit app store any time soon and we plan to immediately start work on version 1.4 to get these features to the users.
Just so you know …
We have submitted a new version of Fossil Lite for review. As you may know already, we renamed Fossil Icebreaker to Fossil Lite.
We are very excited about this release as it provides the support for German localization for the first time.
Also, Fossil Lite 1.2 is built on the feature set in Fossil 1.1, which we submitted for review sometime back and so all the enhancements and bug fixes in the paid version of Fossil are now available in Fossil Lite. We also fixed few new localization related issues reported by the users.
So, grab your free copies as soon as it hits the App store. And of course, do not forget to let us know your feedback and comments.
When I decided to release the free trial version of Fossil, I thought I will come up with an über cool name for it. Most free versions of applications in the iPhone app store have the same name as the paid version with a ‘Lite’ suffixed.
I wanted to lead the way, blaze a trail and break out of this monotony. So I came up with a cool name (or so I thought) for the free version of Fossil and called it Fossil-Icebreaker which I thought will make it stand out in the crowd.
Apparently not! Very few people seem to have gotten the ‘don’t-be-shy. Break-the-ice. Try-it-out’ message that I was trying to get across in the name.
Once Fossil Icebreaker disappeared from the first page of the recently released applications, the number of downloads per day dropped dramatically. That wasn’t totally unexpected. It was only when a couple of users got back to me saying ‘Thanks for the free trial version. I now realize why it is called ‘Icebreaker’ did I realize that there’s probably a lot in a name! When everyone is expecting a ‘Lite’ in the name, my fancy choice of name for the free version of my maiden app was probably working against it!
Now, it is possible that there are other reasons for this downward spiral, and I am no expert in reading the currents or trends in the app store sales. But I think, it’s better to be safe than smart-y!
Fossil Icebreaker will henceforth be called Fossil Lite!
With the uncertainty of the time it may take for an application review, it is becoming increasing difficult for us to have the paid and the free version of Fossil be in sync.
Even though we submitted the first version of Fossil and Fossil Lite together, they were released in the app store 2 weeks apart. So by the time Fossil Lite was released, we were already ready with the version 1.1 of Fossil.
Now that we are planning to release the next version of Fossil Lite, it is already miles ahead in terms of features and bug fixes from Fossil 1.1 (Fossil 1.1 is still under review). All the issues reported by the users for the previous versions are fixed in the latest code base and we are almost done with the support for a new language in the latest version.
If we call this version of Fossil Lite 1.1, it is going to confuse the users who decides to buy the paid version of Fossil and naturally would expect to see the same feature set in the paid version, but instead may have to wait for another version to get their hands on the new feature.
One way to avoid this confusion is to release all new feature updates only in Fossil and that way Fossil Lite always follows Fossil in terms of feature set. But Fossil Lite also provides us an opportunity to release the features faster and get an early feedback.
So we have decided to bump up the version number for the latest version of Fossil Lite and call it 1.2 instead. This way, at any time, we will have a maximum of one version difference between the paid and the free version of the application. But this would also mean that we will skip version numbers between the releases. The user may see version 1.2 for Fossil Lite while Fossil may directly jump to Fossil version 1.3.
I would be interesting in hearing how are you managing the control on the features between the paid version and the free version of your application.
The Cancel button bug turned out to be a simple issue after all. A simple google search yielded the solution.
This article has done great job of explaining the problem scenario. Simple working code snippet was available on stackoverflow.
One of the users of Fossil reported the following issue with the application.
There’s a bug with the cancel button that sometimes just won’t work. It just doesn’t do anything unless you manage to hit a tiny action area on the button and in some sections of the app the only way to workaround this was to set an item as favourite and then remove it from favourites.
This is the pesky little “Cancel” button that does not seem to work once in a while.
There is no special code logic in Fossil for this particular screenshot and the list of buttons shown in the view are created using standard UIKit UI elements. In other words, we assumed it be to a quirk of SDK 2.2.1 and which we thought will be fixed in SDK 3.0. But it seems to be still around.
We are aware of the problem and we are going to chase it with Apple support if there is a workaround for this or if we are using the SDK incorrectly. In the meanwhile, you may work around this issue by clicking on the top part of the Cancel button to make it work. A screenshot below shows the area of the Cancel button which seems to repond to touch.
Thanks for your patience.
A picture is worth a thousand words .. A cliche, but totally apt here.
I talked about customization options for Fossil here. Here are a couple of screenshots to visually guide you through the process.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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:
Bug Fixes : We also managed to squish a few reported bugs in this release.
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!
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