Maxjournal and more!

iCloud is a HIGHLY advertised feature in the new IOS5.  Apple can’t say enough about it, including the ability for 3rd party apps to use it for syncing app data…

What they can’t say enough about, is how developers can actually get it to work…  iCloud is currently very, very broken and problematic.  Many developers are hanging out asking apple to fix it and make it usable in their own apps, but Apple is characteristically quiet about said Cloud.   It is currently unusable for many app types (though it may be useable for some ‘simpler’ use cases).  There is no word from apple on when they will get these features fixed for developers.

The frustrating thing here is that IOS users now expect that we can add such features to our apps, since it is all advertised as ready!  It sounds like an excuse when we say “well, actually… iCloud isn’t work right yet.”   But it is the truth friends – it’s not ready yet, and it is slowing down our own promises to our users.  (Can we say iphone and desktop app?)

We are currently looking nearly every day for a working icloud API, alternative syncing mechanisms, and occasionally – unicorns. I’ll report back later on which we find first…

So,

We have been developing the next version of Maxjournal – both for the desktop and for the ipad.  The next version for the iPad will be a complete rebuilt from scratch. There are a few reasons we chose to go this route, the primary reasons being that they’re are significant changes and improvements coming in IOS 5 that we want to take advantage of (iCloud!), and second there are still consistent crashing issues for some users. (For most users things seem to work perfectly! But for some, they are still having random crashing even after a reboot/reset of their iPad.)  The crashing, of course, has to be weeded out, and since we are already working so hard towards iCloud and syncing, we’re taking this opportunity to build from scratch and make as many improvements as possible, and at the same time, weeding out the reason for some users random crashing.

iCloud has become our tool of choice for syncing between platforms (and for backup/exporting).  Having the mechanism built into the OS of the ipad or Mac is hard to beat. We’ve tried other services (dropbox, couchbase) but neither are robust enough (dropbox) or stable enough (couchbase – still being developed) to work for us.  The mobile API for Dropbox just wasn’t built for this purpose. Every change to a file requires a complete re-upload of that file – one would expect just the file delta (i.e. only the data bits that have changed) to be uploaded but dropbox hasn’t added this capability to their mobile platform. Even their own Dropbox app for iOS cannot do this.  iCloud on the other hand is well thought out and handles changes just perfectly.

Really it’s a no brainer, the only downside is having to wait for the release of iOS 5, but we decided to be patient and wait for the best instead of jumping into a lesser solution.  Patient Maxjournal users!

Well, it’s been a while since we’ve posted. Our last post indicated that we had been dealing with some major health issues here at omaxmedia, that put the future of maxjournal in question.  I’m happy to say, we are on the other side of that diffulty and continuing development again! (Whew…)

We’re hard at work on both the Desktop (mac) version of maxjournal and the next iPad version.  Both need to be completed and released at the same time.  The goal is to be able to sync journals between both versions automatically.  We are also looking at some (at least basic) Rich Text Editing capabilities.  Audio note recording and geolocation of journal entries are on our list.

Apple, of course, just did WWDC 2011, their yearly and major developers conference. They announced a few things that are key to our maxjournal strategy – the primary announcements being iCloud, IOS 5, and OSX Lion.  There are some exciting tech updates that quite possibly fit the bill on some of our needs for maxjournal altogether!

The iPad version will be re-engineered from the ground up. One reason for this is to fix the frequent crashing issues users are experiencing after first install or updating of maxjournal.  Usually a fresh reboot of the ipad, or a fresh install will fix any issues!  But how annoying for users (and for us) to experience such a thing – and not everyone will read the notes in our help file or app description on how to fix this.  Sad, sad, sad…

As a quick note for anyone checking this blog. If you are having difficulties with maxjournal under iOS 4.2 – constant and random crashing – simply do a fresh install of maxjournal. (Backup your journals to desktop, delete maxjournal from your ipad, and then install again from the app store.  Reboot the ipad as an added measure, and then restore your journals.)  In all cases so far, this has completely fixed any crashing issues.

-omaxmedia

Hi Folks,

Good news!  Apple approved the latest release of Maxjournal for the iPad today.  You should see the update available sometime today in your iPad App Store updates.

This version adds so much to the table, we’re pretty excited:

Multiple Journals – add as many journals as your would like, each for a different purpose (Personal journal, vacation journal, etc… or for different people in your household). Each journal can be individual configured (Title, Password, Cover Photo and Background).

30 photos per day – including the ability to add photos directly to the text.  Text Photos can be positioned, sized and rotated any way you would like, and the text will auto-wrap around your photos.

A new Day Bar (which replaces Day tabs).  This allows you to more easily navigate through the days of a month, and allows you see at a glance which days have entry data.

Swipe Left and Right on a journal entry to move to the previous or next day.

A new App Icon.

A new Full Screen Calendar view which allows you to see a whole month at a time, with previews of the entries for each day. You can easily move the months and years of your journal from this screen, or jump to a specific journal entry.

Better full screen viewing of photos – the last version only gave you a small enlargement of your photos – this upgrade really uses fullscreen photo viewing.  Lightbox has been improved also…

Added a Rating tag for each day.  Rate your day from 1 start to 5 stars. You can search by Rating from the Search Popup.

Search by Text (now with Multiple Phrase capability), by Keyword Tag (now you just select from a list of all tags used), Rating, or by Most Recently Edited.

Change Time Stamps to only stamp the current time.

Better export capability with Simple Text, PDF or Secure PDF.

Backup and Restore has been improved and is much more stable! (the older maxjournal versions had problems Backing up Large journals with many photos.)

That covers most of the new features, though this list probably missed a few things.

We really hope you enjoy this release!  If any problems, definitely get a hold of us – we’re hoping that the upgrade process goes smoothly for everyone, but if you have any difficulty with your journal data converting on upgrade please contact us.  The upgrade process automatically makes a backup of your old journal data before conversion and places it in your iPad File Sharing area (Maxjournal.old).  That way if something goes wrong you can send that file to us and we’ll convert it for you and send it back.

Cheers all.