I have loudly supported jailbreaking, canvassed people to jailbreak and have helped a few of my friends to free their iOS devices. After eagerly embracing all the jailbreak releases for over three years, this time I gave it a pass. There is no major incentive in jailbreaking anymore and I think that Apple has done a great job filling the gaps that existed in iOS.

I jotted down a few issues that drove to me to Apple’s fold again. It’s interesting to see how far the iOS ecosystem has come!

Tethering and Do Not Disturb

For years, iOS didn’t allow tethering the mobile internet connection. This was as ridiculous as not supporting basic copy paste or the ability to take screenshots of your mobile screen out of the box.

Back then, I used to travel a lot and not being able to take advantage of mobile broadband didn’t make any sense for me. I have gotten used to tethering since the Symbian days and it was one of the first things that drove me to jailbreak.

The amazing MyWi app from Cydia helped me stay online when I was out and about. After the launch of Personal Hotspot though, tethering has become a non-issue. Features like Do Not Disturb and better notifications are other examples of Apple bridging the gaps in iOS.

Cydia

Without mincing words, I’ll admit that Cydia is a groundbreaking achievement in indie mobile distribution. But, I’d say it’s also the digital equivalent of a bullock cart when it comes to performance, usability and load times.

If I remember correctly, Cydia existed even before the iOS App Store. But, I wonder how much of it has changed over all these years in terms of user experience. I loved the Rock app store and it was fun till it lasted. Forgoing Cydia for iOS app store wasn’t painful at all.

Performance

iPhone 3GS is a pretty frail mobile phone. It has started creaking and crawling with every iOS release and jailbreaking adds to the strain. Occasionally, I have witnessed sudden battery drains more than once after jailbreaking. I am planning to use this mobile phone for one more year and I didn’t want to take any chances.

Installous

I wasn’t sure about the quality of apps back when I bought my 3GS. For me, Installous was a place to download and try apps before I purchased them. I knew it wasn’t right, but, I never used it for pirating apps. I followed the Android Market (it wasn’t Google Play then) rules. Fifteen minutes to try and then delete it or buy it from the app store.

For instance, I wasn’t sure if a wireless video streaming app will work given the gamut of firewall and security apps installed in my PC. I tried it using Installous, got it to work with my firewall setup and bought a legal copy from the app store.

Over the years, iOS apps have set benchmarks for quality and user experience to an extent that just reading a review is suffice to make up my mind. Frankly, quality apps are the reason I haven’t jumped ship for a big screen Android powerhouse.

Wait Time

Do note that I’m mentioning this at the very end. Evasi0n was unveiled after about four and half months of iOS 6 release. This is the longest it has taken for a jailbreak to show up, but the past couple of versions took a significant amount of time as well.

I do admit that it’s a selfless effort from dedicated volunteers and I salute them for all their time and effort. However, combined with the above mentioned reasons, an extended wait time was just not worth it.

To Close

The one thing I miss dearly though is the SBSettings app. A simple idea, but a brilliant implementation made it the ultimate command and control center. Hope Apple “swipes” this nifty idea in the upcoming iOS releases.

There are few more advantages when you jailbreak and the major one (according to me atleast) is customization. I’m not interested in decking up my mobile phone with unicorns and ponies, so I’m good on that count.

Making a political statement that I’ll do whatever I please with the device I paid for is another. After all this time, I don’t see a point in doing that. At this juncture, nothing short of a mobile Hackintosh would be a worthy enough statement. Let’s all shoot for that!

In a grand ceremony held last week, our founder and CEO Shalin Jain was felicitated by none other than His Excellency Dr K Rosaiah, Governor of Tamilnadu.

The Time Group also came out with a nifty coffee table book chronicling the journey of the ten pathfinders. We are thrilled, humbled and honored!

Activities in Bold

Every activity gets a performance chart – with green and red dots. It shows your consistency with that item, like how good you were in doing that activity over a period of time. The bottom part of that chart shows the days on which that particular activity is supposed to be done. In the below screen shots - “Write an essay” is to be done on all weekdays except for saturdays and sundays.

All Weekdays

Whereas “Go to movies” is to be done only on Tuesdays. So we have disabled the other day alphabets in that section of chart.

Just on tuesdays

We’ll be posting the slides and session notes sometime next week. But, if you are free don’t miss the opportunity to come say hi to us!

Tickets are available online at http://jsfoo-2012.doattend.com/

“Best app I’ve gotten in months!”

“Worth every penny.”

There are another 300 similar reviews in the US App store alone.

In the beginning, We had a very simple idea in mind to achieve goals every day. It was inspired by Seinfeld’s productivity secret but in a different outlook. That is to show one simple colourful chart that can motivate people to achieve their goals every single day.

We started brainstorming on this idea and soon we all had a common understanding on how the app should work like. 

When we looked at other similar apps in the store, we felt they were simply bloated utilities. Such apps overwhelm users with calendars and other unnecessary features. They disturb users with reminders throughout the day. And users end up disabling the reminders from such apps.

We wanted Wonderful Day to stand out of all of them.  

We think an App shouldn’t come in the way of users. It should never disturb user’s privacy. But at the same time, it must add value to users in the simplest way possible. So when we developed the app,  every single design decision was made keeping these goals in mind.

When you start using Wonderful Day, you will realise pretty quickly that it doesn’t come in your way at all. It simply lets you add your goals and gives a neat little chart of your achievements. And our users loved the app. Soon after the release, we hit the top charts in USA, India and a few other countries. 

But not all of the users were happy. Few had complaints on the things they didn’t like. And some requested features that would certainly help them even more in their goals. Here are some reviews which requested features or complained about the app.

“This is a simplified tool that easily achieves what it set out to achieve. I would like to see the ability to change the reminder time and frequency. Other than that, solid app.”

“Its helpful, good and simple. What i don’t like is the constant request for reviews, the non ability to re arrange the list”

These requests were repeatedly coming in and so we added these into the new version.

Apart from fixing performance issues and polishing the look & experience inside the app, we built the following things into version 1.4.

• Users can change the order of activities if they want to.
• There is a new “Settings” section through which you can customise the daily notification time. These reminders can even be turned off.
• Last week view is the new default view in Activity list.
• To support those who have trouble identifying colours, there is a new accessibility setting to switch the colour theme of the entire app.

And yes, the app now supports iPhone 5 and the new iPod touch. Wonderful day runs full screen in the new 4 inch Retina display. With this update, we hope the App becomes very useful to all of our users.

Simplicity has always been our goal whenever we develop any Software. And in Wonderful Day, that was “the” factor in every design decision we made.

When others went for custom reminder for each activity, we went for one reminder for all activities. And when others used complex calendars to showcase analytics, we used a simple chart with two colours to show the same data. Like these, we made decisions in the app such that it is simple to understand and easy to get started. 

We hope you love what we make. WonderfulDay version 1.4 is now available in the App Store . Please update and let us know what you think.

There is a very possibility that web design is the one domain that generates so much educational content online. But thankfully, there is no dearth of books catering to web designers too. We have put together a list of books that might come in handy to sharpen your skills, get better at handling customers and running a profitable business.

Read More…

Pycon India

PyCon India is the primary Python conference in India. Brilliant Python developers from India and abroad get together to share their wealth of knowledge with the community. We at Tenmiles use a lot of cutting edge technologies. But the fact that our flagship products HelpdeskPilot and HappyFox are built on Python speak volumes about our love.

Representing Tenmiles at PyCon is our developer extraordinaire Saket Bhushan. He is scheduled to present a session titled “Guide to TDD and Flight to BDD with python/django” on Saturday, September 29.

Do attend the conference and while at it, say hello to Saket! He gave us a pic of his to make it easy for people to find him in the crowd!

Philosoraptor

Except for a beard and a kind voice, the looks are very uncanny!

The rise of WordPress from a nimble blogging engine to a Content Management System powering millions of web sites has been meteoric. In addition to the selfless work by the folks at Automattic, a handful of indie developers were very much instrumental in taking WordPress mainstream.

WooThemes is a massively popular brand in the WordPress theming vertical. But, even before the inception of WooThemes and probably even before people started recognizing WordPress as a proper CMS, there was Adii, the WordPress Rockstar. He was very vocal, opinionated and his work, exceptional.

Shortly afterwards, he founded WooThemes and the history of the company becoming a million dollar enterprise is very well documented online. We asked him about their urge to innovate pushing the limits of WordPress, their business model, customer support practices, bootstrapping and more. You can read all about it after the break!

Read more…

Ilan talked in detail about their marketing strategy, customer support culture, money management, freemium conversion rates among other interesting things. You can read the interview in it’s entirety in our HappyFox blog. It’s an amazing read. Don’t miss it!

Craigslist gives out licences to mobile apps to use their data, but they don’t allow other websites to use it. There is no reason for them to allow some other website to put together something cool for a change (you should check out Craigslist to understand what I mean!), gain traction and steal their users away. So, that decision is justified.

Boxopus is a service that enables people to download torrents directly to their Dropbox account. After approving the alpha build, Dropbox folks banned the web app post launch, stating that the app encourages users to violate copyright. Then why approve it in the first place? It’ll take you less than thirty seconds to point the uTorrent client to use the Dropbox folder to save downloaded files or drag and drop copyrighted files into the Public folder of the app and share with others.

It’s all about perception. Dropbox wants to go with the “Don’t ask. Don’t tell” policy and clearly doesn’t want people to shout from rooftops about taking advantage of the gray area. That’s totally understandable, but, in the process they ended up wasting hours of productive work and money of the developers of the app.

Around the same time, Twitter posted a cryptic post asking developers not to “build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” Sure, it’s their firehose and they built it out of hard labor. But, the real question is, why weren’t they as brazen, outspoken and daring when Friendfeed and Plurk were in play?

I’m not saying all API vendors will end up treating developers shabbily at one point or another. But, there is always that possibility. The knife is always hanging over the head when living under someone else’s shadow.

Suggesting people to lay off from leveraging APIs to build stuff would be foolish and that’s not what I’m putting forth. It’s just that it isn’t wise to bet your career and livelihood on something that you have no control over. For making a quick buck or to come up with a steady revenue on the side while you are working on a cool idea of your own, API based apps are Godsend. They make cool additions to your portfolio too. If your app doesn’t fall under any one of these categories, it’s time to rethink your game plan.

All said and done, developers should treat their API based apps as an oasis in the dreary entrepreneurial desert. A stay at the oasis is nice and dandy, but one cannot live there forever. That would defeat the whole purpose of the journey!