Pull

The trouble with forums generally is that they’re not designed to push topics to you; You have to go to them to get updates. This is great if you’re a casual user but when you’re an administrator who needs to read everything that gets posted, it’s a hassle. I had to remember to check the forums constantly. It also meant that regular users weren’t engaging one another as much as we wanted: More often than not initial responses were provided by admins rather than other users.

Push

That’s why we ditched the Shopify developer forums and redirected them to a new Google Group for developers. Mailing lists are by design inherently push-based, so now the messages come to me. There are options to reduce or turn off notifications all together but judging by the number of times a community developer comes to the aid of another it seems that they prefer to get notified immediately.

User Land

I recently had the opportunity to see things from the other side when I delved into the Dropbox developer forums. It only supports RSS updates (boo!) so once I’d posted I had to remember to go back and check for updates. That took me 3 days. The responses I found on my return were great, but if I had been able to track the thread via email I’d have known a lot sooner. I also find myself with no desire to go back and read through topics to answer them.

Alternatives

Google Groups are fantastic, but they’re not for everyone. The Ottawa Android group that I attend uses Libre List which is a far lighter weight solution. A quick google search reveals many more possibilities.

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 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.

Here’s a picture of my new TV :D

There are three features in the gmail web client that I absolutely cannot live without:

1. Auto reply all
2. Send and archive
3. 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.

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:

1. Guinness & Steak Pot Pie from The Irish Heather
2.  Bratwurst Terimayo hotdog from Japadog
3. Papa Burger meal at the fanciest A&W I’ve ever been in!

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 on the Android Market

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!