Part of my job is to interact with third-party developers and help them out when they have issues with the Shopify API. This used to be done on our forums and was, in no uncertain terms, terrible.
Mailing Lists FTW
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Category Archives: news
What’s Next For Life Dial?
If you’re not familiar, Life Dial is my Magic: The Gathering life tracker app for android. I initially wrote it for personal use, but have since made it available on the Android Market for free.
I currently have just shy of 350 steady installs (which I’m really pleased with), but that seems to be where things have evened out. As the app is free I don’t want to spend money on advertising it at the moment, so I figure that if I want more people to install it I should work on making it appeal to a wider audience. Here’s how I plan on doing that.
The Plan
Multiple Players
Right now the app only supports a single player – The idea is that you use it to track your own life (and poison) total and let the other player track theirs. This works ok for casual play, but since then I’ve attended a couple of pre-release events that are a little more competitive and realized that you should always keep track of all players’ life. Therefore the first big feature I want to add is the ability to track multiple life totals simultaneously.
Poison and Other Counters
The app was written while Scars of Mirrodin was the current expansion. As a result, it gives equal billing to poison and life. Now that the game has moved on a little bit, infect decks are seen less often. At the same time I’ve had a lot of requests to track other totals: Mainly related to the Commander set Wizards released this summer. To kill as many birds as I can with a single stone, I’m going to be working on a setting that allows the user to display an arbitrary number of totals per player, which can be used for whatever they like. Life, poison, commander damage, or anything else you can think of.
Monetization
Finally, I want to experiment with monetizing the app. The current version will always be free, but the new features I mentioned above (the ’2.0′ features) will probably be made available as an in-app purchase. This is as much an experiment in using the Google Checkout API as anything else, but I’m also interested to see whether people will pay a dollar for a life tracking app.
Implementation Challenges
The big thing I have to figure out is how I’m going to display all this extra information on the screen. The current interface is designed to maximize the size of each of the elements so that they’re as easy to use as possible. If I add more players/counters then I have to either make everything smaller or move some of the data off-screen and have the user page through it. Neither of those is particularly appealing to me so I’ll definitely have to spend some time experimenting to see which one works better.
I’m hoping to work on all these changes over the next month, so with any luck Life Dial 2.0 will appear in the Market early November.
Google+ Hangouts for Enterprise?
Google Plus doesn’t support Apps accounts yet, but that hasn’t stopped everyone at work from adding one another. I have 32 people in my ‘colleagues’ circle (compared to a measly 25 in my ‘friends’). Surely there’s a way to harness this new platform in day-to-day business?
Turns out there is. Since Joey went back to Toronto last month the Apps team at Shopify (Myself, Joey deVilla and Edward Ocampo-Gooding) have been holding our regular morning meetings over Google Plus Hangouts. This has worked surprisingly well so far. The video and audio quality have both been great, even when we did a three-way connection on Friday. I like that there’s no associated contact list hovering in the background (like there would be with Skype) as well as the potential for drop-in, drop-out participants. We can just open the Hangout to everyone in our ‘colleagues’ circle and we’re good to go. The “whoever’s speaking gets center stage” feature is neat, but can get a bit annoying when the speaker changes rapidly. I’d really like to see an option to evenly split the screen between all participants, but other than that Hangouts are perfect for our short morning meetings.
The Flying Developer Moves
No proper post this week, as I’ve just moved into a new apartment and all my time is being spent on unpacking and setting up utility bills. It’s 100% worth it though, as I now live 5 minutes walk from work. Thanks to Dan, Edward, and Kim‘s family for helping me transport all my stuff across town.
Here’s a picture of my new TV :D
The Holy Trinity of Gmail Plugins
First of all: You’re all using gmail, right? Right. Good.
There are three features in the gmail web client that I absolutely cannot live without:
- Auto reply all
- Send and archive
- Undo send
Auto Reply All
I find this to be the most valuable of the three. I used to break untold numbers of email threads by hitting ‘reply’ instead of ‘reply all’. No longer! Especially in a business environment when you have multiple correspondents more often than not, this should be the default. I was using it a couple of years ago when it was mysteriously removed, and I nearly cried.
Send and Archive
The only thing more satisfying than archiving email is archiving it automatically. As far as I’m concerned once I’ve sent a reply to an email the responsibility lies with the other party, so I’m perfectly happy to banish the conversation from my inbox until they respond.
Undo Send
Perfect for when you neglect to remove the placeholders from a form email, or realize that you’ve forgotten to add the links you promised you were going to send.
Others
I also use other labs features in gmail, but I think the ones I’ve mentioned are the ones I rely on the most. Here are the others in no particular order:
- Multiple inboxes – I keep my starred mail visible in another inbox directly under my regular one so that I don’t forget about it.
- Custom date formats – Because the month comes after the date.
- Title Tweaks – Somewhat redundant now thanks to App Tabs, but still useful in some cases.
Food From Vancouver
Gallery
This gallery contains 3 photos.
Two weeks ago I was in Vancouver for HackVAN, which was a huge success. I got to sample a wide range of food while I was there, and the notable dishes are pictured above. From left to right: Guinness & … Continue reading
Apps That I’d Like to Write but Won’t
Like many people in my field, I have the dream of one day starting my own company and making a fortune from it. That’s not happening just yet, but I have no shortage of ideas for when I do!
Citizen-Powered Real-Time Transit Schedules
Basically foursquare for buses, you’d ‘check in’ when you got on a bus and that data would be used to adjust the timetable for anyone further down the route. This is mainly useful where real-time transit data is not available through official channels (e.g. Ottawa).
Seating Advice for Long Trips
You enter the trip you’re taking (train, plane, coach etc.) and the app figures out which side of the vehicle you should sit to get shade and/or see points of interest. Traveling from Ottawa to Toronto on the train? Sit on the left side so that you’ll get a view of Lake Ontario on the way by. Things like that.
D&D Counter Generator
Around the time I wrote this post I was seriously considering creating a Dungeons and Dragons token generator that would allow you to make your own monster counters based on the designs I did and then download them as a pdf. The money-making part of this idea is that you’d be able to order nicely printed versions on pre-perforated card that would last longer and be generally higher quality.
Life Dial Updated
I just released an update for Life Dial on the Android Market. This version has a background gradient and fixes a bug where the dial would overlap the other text on devices with HVGA resolutions.
Life Dial on the Android Market
Street Fighter Blind Boxes
Street Fighter 4 has some new blind boxes, so as a direct result I now own two. Guile (on the right) doesn’t stand up too well, so he’s on his head.
The Flying Developer is Going to Vancouver
Are there any Vancouver hackers reading this? If so, you should come to HackVAN, the upcoming HackDays event in your city. I’ll be there representing Shopify and helping people build kick-ass things with our API. We’re also bringing prizes!
Having attended two of these events in the past as a participant, I’m super-excited to be on the other side of the fence and helping people out. If you’re planning on coming, you should read the article I wrote about How to Write an App in 8 Hours (or Die Trying).
The event is being held on August 20th, which is the Saturday after GROW. The location is TBD, but I still recommend you head over to the HackVAN registration page and sign up. I’ll see you there!