These last few weeks I’ve been busy designing and implementing a new look for the app. I think the current version looks pretty awful and the way you interact with it isn’t super well thought through. Most of the design work I did two-three weeks ago and now I’m implementing away. Some of the stuff is a little tricky to get right but I’m really liking the way it’s turning out. I’ve been reading up on the android design guidelines which is helpful. I don’t know if the app is the perfect ideal of an android app by any means but it’s closer than it’s been at least.

As of maybe 10 minutes ago the app is now available in the google play app store, here. Yay!

The version I’ve released is actually from yesterday – almost – and I could in principle have released it then. The problem was, I saw my icon next to citymapper’s and they were just incredibly similar. See,

(That’s citymapper on the top, mine on the bottom). So I had to make a last-minute change. I ended up changing the color, mainly, and making the arrow head larger. So now it should look less similar. I’ve gone through a lot of icon changes along the way. The images above show some of the steps along the way, ending with the current one,

I expect it to keep changing for a while yet – I’m not completely happy with the current blue but it’ll do for now.

Anyway, point is: the app is now available in the app store, here!

This last week I’ve spent most of my time on the user interface. I’ve rewritten a lot of the existing code and implemented a number of new features. I’m still set on getting a public release out before the end of May, which is in two days, so I’m in a bit of a hurry. But even though there’s a lot of work left, even after I’m at the point where I’m okay releasing the app, I feel like I’m getting closer to something I’m happy with.

New features of note are: new cards on the main screen for stops and trips. The new button that lets you add new cards from the main screen which includes searching through all stops. A new send feedback mechanism using instabug so you can take screenshots and draw on them when sending feedback, which is super useful.

Besides this I’ve been tweaking the icon and the color scheme of the app. I was getting pretty sick of the red icon I’d made initially. Now it’s a simpler symbol for A to B: two different place markers with an arrow in between. I’ve experimented with what feels like 100 different nuances of green, maybe 5 of which I actually released version of, and I’ve landed on one I’m pretty okay with. Paletton.com was really helpful in that process.

Finally I’ve started working on the intro pages that I want to show when you first open the app to give you a basic idea of what the app is meant to be able to do for you. I’ve only drawn some sketches in the sketch app so far but I think I’m pretty close to something decent that I can use.

My parents have been beta testing the app and over the weekend my dad gave me a bunch of feedback, including a couple of crashes. Those are the first thing I want to work on this week. Then I’ll spend some more time testing the app myself and see if I can shake out some more problems which I’ll then fix. And finally, Wednesday, I should be ready to spend some time on the app store listing for the app. And towards the end of the day I’ll click publish and publish the app as a public beta on the app store. Then probably nothing at all will happen because nobody will notice. We’ll see.

I’ve been doing a lot of work on the user interface lately – reworking existing features, adding new ones. Most visibly I’ve changed the color scheme from red and blue to just green. It does start to feel like a complete app, though it does crash a lot more often that I’d like.

This last week has been spent mostly working on the new cards structure. The old app showed the nearest stops with one card for each but that was never the plan. The original plan was to have one card that shows the nearest stop and then the other cards are one you’ve saved. So now I’ve started implementing that. It’s been a lot of work and I’m some way from being done but I’m getting there. The video below shows the current state.

You may notice that the video cuts out after clicking the card. That’s because the app gets stuck there for a long while and then crashes. I’m pretty sure that’s because the current set of schedules I’m showing have become too old so it keep searching and searching for the next departure but there are no more and it doesn’t realize that. I’m building a new bundle of schedules that covers from now and until August. That should fix it.

Otherwise this week I’ll be working on finishing the nearest stop card and adding the two other types of cards, probably I’ll only have time to add the one.