iPhone App Release 1.3

Took us a while but version 1.3 of audioboo got sent off to Apple at 4.30pm on the 8th January. Based on past experience, we thought it wouldn’t be okayed for 3/4 weeks. We were then pleasantly surprised to receive an email at 11.17pm the same day saying that they had approved the update. Kudos to Apple for really updating its review process. I think the last update took 3 weeks to be approved and that was with some major behind the scenes hassling.

Anyway. Audioboo 1.3. There’s a whole bunch of stuff in there which won’t be obvious to the naked eye. Most of that is preparing for a future paid version (don’t worry; there’ll always be a free one) but I’ll try and list the major changes you may become aware of.

1. Welcome Georgia
In keeping with the next version of the website, we’ve introduced the font Georgia into the app. We think it gives a little bit more personality. Hope you agree. The pink was a bit of an experiment but we kinda think it works!

2. Not just recent boos
You can now choose to listen to followed, featured and popular boos. They are also boos near you, although this is somewhat experimental at the moment. We’d hoped to have a few weeks while Apple approved this to fine tune this but looks like we’ll have to issue a minor update instead in a month or so. However, we personally find these features quite ‘sticky’ and browsable and hope you do too. Boos near you is a big server update, rather than anything to do with the app, so that means we can start to do some interesting location stuff on the web when we get a bit of time. If you have any great ideas, get in contact.

3. Detailed view
If you click the arrow next to each boo, you can now view extended information whilst listening, like the full title, tags, photo & location. We love this. Adds real context to the listening experience. We’ll be adding comments, follow, reply with a boo etc.. to this over time. Bear with us as we try and work out how to add functionality with simplicity. Thank you to those that helped us with this.

4. Accessibility
Some of the first people who contacted us after launch in March 09 were partially sighted. A number of them gave us valuable insight into which bits of the website worked with screen readers and we did our best to engage with them to make the site as accessible as possible. In this release, partially sighted or blind users with the 3GS iPhone now get a fully accessible application which will speak them information on 99% of the functionality

5. Quit & then append
In the previous versions, if you quit the app with a recording unpublished, that was it. All you could do was publish it when you next launched the app and start again. In this version, you can continue to record once you’ve relaunched the app. This was part of some bigger file structure changes but might have some interesting uses for people wanting to wrap up short daily updates into one boo every week, for example.

That’s a small selection of the new stuff. Some amazing things that didn’t get into this release but maybe next time. Rest assured that this one though cements a really solid server/app relationship that we should be able to mimic with other mobile platforms later this year.

You can download the updated App via iTunes.

Development, News