Only an hour live and already have an error report! And I’ve already posted an update too…so that’s not so bad. At least, I HOPE I fixed it. Man, it feels hard to go to sleep, because I’d hate for the app to suddenly fall apart and everyone trash it in the reviews before I had a chance to fix it, but *shrug* what can ya do.
I’m building my list of planned upgrades/improvements to the app already. I think that’s important to do…it’ll make for loyal customers (who hopefully tell friends about it) and make the app more appealing to new customers. And some things I definitely WANTED to do, but it was time to get the app out there.
So far I have:
- Allow for sending of alerts to friends (I might add that to both pro and simple, not sure yet)
- Put in a preference for if every update to an alert is considered a new alert, or only new events. This one is hard because the NWS does not put a specific alert ID on each alert….so there’s really no way to know if a new alert is simply an update to an old alert, or really a new alert. But I can at least check and see if that particular event (Tornado Warning, Flood Watch, etc) is already present, and then not notify on that basis. Either way, if I leave it up to the user, then they can deal with it. That’s for both Pro and Simple
- Keep expired alerts, with automatic or manual purging of them later. Pro only.
- Put in GPS-guided alert zones. Pro only.
- Have a little more “grace” when people put in places and locations…so, if St Paul fails (which it will), then I should automatically search for Saint Paul for them. Or, if a direct search fails, I should probably convert it to a LIKE query and try again, and then the user would see “Did you mean?” and give them what comes back. That’s a bit involved, but over the course of 200+ queries in the database, I’m already seeing 12 failures. Most revolve around using ST instead of SAINT (which the error message DOES say Don’t use abbeviations), but some are mis-spellings too. Then again, I don’t know that a LIKE query will fix that.
- I do need to return to them that a location does not exist, as a specific error message, instead of the generic “There was an error”.
- Let users select a ringtone for the emergency and urgent levels, instead of just using default. (Pro version)
Change the alert icon in the status bar to red, and yellow for urgent.Can’t do this, it goes against the status bar icon guidelines set forth by android (http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/ui_guidelines/icon_design_status_bar.html)
We’ll see what else gets in my mind to do.