Players 0.2

Where have I been lately?  Well after a bit of a burn out, followed by a redesign, followed by some slow development, followed by some late nights, and finally some field testing I’ve completed the next major update to my first iPhone App: Players.  If you don’t know, Players is an application used to help track player lineups and statistics in the co-ed softball league that I’m a part of at work.  Read this post to get up to speed if you aren’t familiar.

I’ve been busy working on a ton of new features.  The app which started as a simple way to rotate a lineup between males and females has began budding into a full fledged team tracking application.  It now understands the concept of a team.  A team has games and players.  A game has a lineup of players that play innings and each inning has a score, and outs.  When the team is in the field, the inning has field positions for each person to play.  Right now we use a spreadsheet to do all this stuff and the goal of the application is to replace that.

In order to add all of the new features I had to completely rewrite the data model.  Then I reworked my screens to reduce the amount of code that they required.  After that I had to build a ton of new screens and layouts.  But the most difficult part was actually trying to find a UI layout that wasn’t confusing and putting enough safety nets in the application to ensure that the user didn’t accidentally end the game or advance to the next inning.  So what’s next, well a lot actually.  I still need to create a proper icon and graphics for the tabs.  I need to optimize the code that I wrote for the latest release.  I also need to run the app through static analysis and XCode Instruments to make sure that it isn’t leaking memory or using too much CPU.  Then there are additional features, tons of them.

So there is still a lot more to do and I am certainly not finished.  The next release will focus on finesse, stability, and performance.  And no, it’s not in the App Store yet.  I’m using this entire season as a testing ground to make sure that it actually works.  As with the previous release, there is a gallery of new features;