As part of the ongoing testing, we compared the tracking accuracy (on iPhone 4S) with Garmin Forerunner 610 watch. We used extended version of the test path used in previous article. This path is almost exactly 1km long.

Garmin Forerunner 610 tracking

This is from our app:

Go Couch to 5k on iPhone 4S

Garmin calculated the covered distance as 980m. Go Couch to 5k reported it as 1060m.

Pretty good, no? :)

Previous version already had ability to share your best pace to Twitter or Facebook. In 2.0, sharing options are greatly expanded. As before, sharing is available from the run view, so you can brag about your results as soon you’re done running or you can do it afterwards, when reviewing run details. Icon for the sharing is changed to (more or less) official icon:

The share panel is greatly enhanced:

You can choose do you want to share the best pace or the distance covered. Below that, you see the main new addition: ability to share full details of your workout to dailymile.com, one of the most prolific running communities on the web.

dailymile

I wanted to add dailymile integration for ages, ever since I saw one of these gorgeous infographics website can automatically generate for you (I found that linked graphic through random search).

Once you tap the dailymile button, you will see this screen

Here you can edit the message shown, choose how you felt during the run and decide do you want to post the track as well. In essence, you can post full details of the workout in just two taps: one to choose the “felt” and then tap “Post”. Everything else is pre-populated and sent automatically. Easy-peasy.

You are not forced to send the run on the day you did it – you can do it at any time; Go Couch to 5k will send the correct date of the run as can be seen from my dailymile profile.

Facebook and Twitter and…

As before, Facebook and Twitter integration are present and are updated to latest APIs they provide. Twitter integration is using iOS 5 Twitter framework thus make sure you have your accounts predefined (through Settings app). Facebook integration is using their single-sign-on, so if you have Facebook iOS app installed, you will not have to login again, it will pick up the login credentials from there.

If you tap the “more…” button at the bottom, you will see additional ways to share your run details, through either SMS text (or iMessage, depending whom you’re texting) and also through email.

We did all we could to make the sharing as easy as possible and least time-consuming and we hope you will like it and use it often.

How we tested

On iOS, Core Location is the framework responsible for finding and tracking one’s current location. It uses several different technologies to do that, but the most precise one is based on GPS. This is available since iPhone 3G, although our tests show that GPS is usable for walking/running starting with 3GS and on. Current generation – iPhone 4S – goes one step better then its predecessors since it includes the support for GLONASS, which is similar system developed and maintained by Russia.
All together, this makes iPhone 4S the perfect test phone.

We used a straight path in the middle of New Belgrade (Serbia’s capitol), exactly 400m long.

View Larger Map

Before testing each app, iPhone was reset, to eliminate GPS cache influence. Then we went walking the path two times, one test walk after another.
Why like this? Well, as you will see, tests and experience tell us that Core Location updates are wildly inaccurate at the very start, while iPhone is still trying to triangulate user position. The theory says that for a good match, you need to receive position info from at least 3 different satellites. On iOS though, we have no idea when this happens – Core Location handles this transparently and all you get is an object saying: this is your lat/long position and accuracy is +/- 10m or 30m, like that.

So lets see how competition fares. We tested:

• Nike+GPS (currently best-selling app of its kind on App Store, uses MotionX engine)
• Active.com Couch-to-5k (a Top 10 app at the moment)
• MapMyRUN
• RunKeeper
• RunMonster
• Runmeter

All of these are almost always in Top 50 of the Healthcare and Fitness category on the US App Store.

First test walk results

Here are test results for each of these apps on cold-start, after iPhone was restarted. For each one, we waited until they reported GPS signal as maximum and then started the walk test.

As you can see, both from the measured distance and the maps, each of these has significantly missed the target 400m range, reporting values from 1.25km (Nike+GPS app) all the way to almost 3km – 3-7x the actual length!
The one exception is Active.com Couch-to-5K app which was nearly perfect:

Our kudos to their developers, they did a really good job in filtering out the crazy outlier positions.

This test walk was around 4 minutes and for each app, immediately after we got to the end of the test path, we would start another test walk in the opposite direction.

Second test walk results

As you can see, all the apps are very good to perfect. We did test Active.com app as well, but it basically repeated the results from the previous run, thus no need for a screenshot.

What this means is that iPhone 4S probably needs about 2-3minutes to fix the device position properly; when that happens, CoreLocation API call distanceFromLocation: is returning usable values (we suspect that most devs are using this value to calculate covered distance).

How Go Couch to 5k fairs..?

Our current live version (1.7) is acting the same as majority of the tested apps. Our new engine – which is still in development – is near the perfect results. We are currently filtering bad position updates so strictly that we calculate the distance under the 400m :) – this is the cold start test walk:

You can see from the screenshots that even though map shows crazy zig-zag line, our measured distance is very close to actual path length.

We intend to get this perfect for the 2.0 release. Stay tuned.

This change has been a long time coming, but I encountered many unexpected obstacles on that road. Luckily, things are looking up. I resigned my previous job at GTECH Belgrade in January and I have few paperwork to complete yet. Once that’s done, the developer trademark name in App Store will finally change from code•aplus to Radiant Tap.

On the development side, first fruits of this change are already in the store. FastContact was developed this winter to address an iOS shortcoming (no caller ID recognition for certain phone numbers in Serbia). I use this app several times a week and it was well worth the work.

A work is underway to update all of the running apps to newer, modern code. Run Mate, Go Couch to 5k and Guerrilla Cardio will all be updated to the same engine but the biggest change will surprise Run Mate customers in upcoming months. Next up after that is Quickie.

It’s worth repeating here a tweet posted few months ago on our Twitter account: all future major releases will require iOS 5 as minimum. There are so many possibilities coming up from this. However, I am aware that some owners of Run Mate or Quickie may still have iPhone 3G or even original iPhone – the app versions you have will continue working. For all others – owners of iPhones 3GS / 4 / 4S and newer iPod touches – please upgrade as soon as you can.

For example, you might need this to quickly look up someone’s contact details during a phone call. Just start it and type few numbers or letters and it will give you the results back. No need to set filters, choose what to search and similar cruft – type in and pick from the results. Each additional character further filters down the results.

Or you might have received a phone-call or text message from someone and iPhone has not recognized the number format and did not display the name. Type-in any part of the number and you will find out who it was.

Clear and readable layout

And the best yet – if you copy the text you want to look-up in another app, just switching back to FastContact will automatically search for it. No need to paste, it does that automatically. The copy/paste functionality is limited to 20 characters; this is to prevent needless searching if for example you have copied contents of an email or some note for use with another app.

FastContact is open to integration with other apps. It uses fastcontact:// URL scheme, thus other apps can choose to offer a helpful service, like “Look-up with FastContact”. We are open to suggestions from developers on integration features – ping us up if you have an interesting idea.

FastContact is available world-wide (from March 9th) for a starting price of just $0.99 (or equivalent in your store) and it will go up to $2.99 after first few weeks. Thus don’t waste time and get it up. We are certain you will find it very, very useful.

Head over to RadiantTweet page for more details.

• English
• German
• French
• Italian
• Spanish
• Japanese

As before, we used good people from LocalVersion.com for the translations. Could not be happier with their communication and speed of work. We are all still just humans though, thus if any of these languages is your native and you spot an error, please let us know.

Apart from the app, we had them translate the App Store app page thus making it even more accessible to people speaking these languages. We hope this update will be well received and that we will have a chance to add more language options.

It’s available now from the App Store, price unchanged.

There’s nothing special to say about it – if you have not yet acquired a flashlight, check this one out, you won’t be disappointed. Simple and very dark interface, specifically made to be used in dark places (dark UI is easier on the eyes in pitch dark).

Available worldwide on the App Store.

The visual style is inherited from previous two apps – Go Couch to 5k and Guerrilla Cardio – and will continue to be developed and fine-tuned in future work.

Main design goal was to simplify multiple conversions as much as possible, between any number of currencies. When I looked at existing currency converters on the App Store (and there are bucket-load of them) most are either converting between two picked currencies or between one picked and a list of others. Thus that is where I looked to take a slightly different angle.
Dozens of iterations later, I arrived at the UI in the shipping version.

Reviews

Initial reviews for the app are very positive.

Preshit Deorukhkar at Beautiful Pixels praises the UI:

All of these [Radiant Tap previous] apps have one thing in common, something that I’m personally a big fan of, and that’s elegant design. There’s no overdone glossiness, no shiny elements. The design compliments the function.

Cody Fink at MacStories is impressed with the UI simplicity:

What impresses me most about Banca is that the one thing it does is pulled off through a simple tap and swipe interface that’s quick to pick up and even quicker to use. Slide the top bar to select the currency you want to convert from (say USD), then the bottom bar to select the currency you want to convert to (probably the Euro).

Both of these reviews touch on the core design aims I had when making the app and this makes me very happy.

Banca is $1.99 until Aug 8th, after which it goes up to $3.99. Feedback is more than welcome, as always.

I’m putting the finishing touches on the technical aspects of the design, going over each page on various devices (desktop, iPhone, iPad) and fixing as I find issues. In upcoming weeks, all apps will be updated to feature new branding and logo.

The driving idea for the re-design was simplicity, simplicity and clarity. Overall design is grayish, making the app icons and screenshots really stand out. Each app is represented with a short feature list and lots of screenshots. Nothing else. Also, web page for each app will have a video demo, making it easy to check the app in a matter of minute or two.

With hope you will like the new face, a bright future is still ahead – expect some exciting news in next few weeks and months.

• You can now start any running session in Go Couch to 5k, regardless of the order. Not so in Guerrilla Cardio, since all the sessions are the same, thus no point to enable this in that app.
• Redesigned overview screen, to reflect the previous change
• Non-destructive Stop run button: now if you stop the run, the running data up to that point are always saved
• You can now re-do any session you already attempted and even if you finished it. This goes along nicely with previous change
• You can skip back and forth between the pace units. This is useful if you want to skip the warm-up part when you have already warmed up and just want to hit it full speed. Make sure that you don’t actually skip warming up, especially before the Cardio runs.

So, there you go, hopefully you’ll like it. Keep the suggestions coming.

At the end of the program, you’ll be able to run 5km for about 30minutes, without stopping. Interested?

Go Couch to 5k has the same feature set as Guerrilla Cardio:

• near real-time speed and distance tracking
• animated display of pace changes
• automatic highlight of the maximum achieved speed during the run
• full run history with extensive details about each run
• plot of the each run on Google Maps
• voice feedback during the run
• ability to choose music inside the app, even construct a playlist just before the run
• share the best pace on Twitter and Facebook

This is a perfect starting program for new runners . It takes off as lightly as possible, gradually increasing the pace, but nothing really major. And what’s even better, it can be perfectly combined with Guerrilla Cardio. Don’t do it from the start, but from say 4th or 5th week of Couch to 5k program.

Then you can do:

• Mon/Wed/Fri – Couch to 5k
• Tue/Thu/Sat – Guerrilla Cardio

Start this in the spring and by the summer you would be as it as you ever hoped to be.

Go Couch to 5k is available worldwide on the App Store, for $2.99.

Guerrilla Cardio implements the best known HIIT training program developed by Ph.D. Izumi Tabata and his colleagues from National Institute of Health & Nutrition in Tokyo, Japan. This is ”the ideal“ aerobics training protocol and Guerrilla Cardio makes it easy to follow and complete the program.

Real-time speed updates during the run

This is challenging program, aimed at people in good shape who want to get rid off that stubborn belly and/or thigh fat. This is possibly the best known high impulse interval training (HIIT) program ever made.

App features are designed to motivate you to improve through-out the program:

Program overview shows the best pace - it challenges you to beat it

We invested a lot of thought and time into this app and can’t wait to hear from you. Don’t forget to read more on the app page.

It’s available now on the App Store, worldwide for $2.99.

There will be opportunities to discuss this more, but for now, here are icons for the two of the upcoming apps:

More details soon.

If you have previously read the About page, you’ll understand all there is to know about the new name. Wine and vineyards are wonderful hobby of mine and when I went looking for a new name, vine-related words quickly gained prominence. Trouble is, most of the good domains using the word ”vine“ were already taken. Hence I went through Wikipedia looking for good synonyms.

Radiant came to me when I was looking through the hundreds of photos from my vineyard — I stumbled on the one you see here and it just clicked. I originally wanted Canopy – it has many meanings, but in this context it refers to part of the vine tree above the ground. However, a simple Tap is more appropriate.

The logo is the work of Miloš Radojević, a talented designer from Serbia. Check out his portfolio on the Genius Logo web site.

Improvements

The old site will forever be up, it will simply 301-redirect to this one. The emails coming to codeaplus.com will be accepted but responses will go out through the new domain name: radianttap.com.

I took the opportunity to re-do the whole site. The main goal was to make it much more mobile-friendly, enlisting the help of the Less Framework 2. No matter what device you use, from iPhone to 30″ desktop display, the site will re-flow to fit the device as best as possible.

Another aim for the new site was to finally make good of my purchase of the Typekit portfolio plan. I adore Adobe’s Myriad Pro font and when Typekit added it to its service, I immediately signed up.

This site is now using Myriad Pro with Light weight as the default for the text. The headers and few other prominent elements use Myriad Pro Semi Condensed, which is a perfect match for it.

For the blog, I customized free WooThemes’ Skeptical theme and as such, the theme may not re-flow properly as the rest of the site, but I hope to remedy this in the future. It’s a great theme though and a great framework that WooThemes have built it on. I have probably also missed to re-design properly parts of the theme, will fix those as I find them.

I hope you will like the new site. And soon we return to what this is all about: great iPhone apps — we have a brand new app currently in ”Waiting for review“ status.

A 57cm, 3.95kg cute little package has been delivered, with both mom and the baby boy (no name yet) doing just fine. To celebrate, I have dropped the prices of all my apps down to $0.99 for the next week (until Aug 14).

Please share and re-face, re-tweet and whatever else:

When you install, you’ll notice few changes. The UI is streamlined and more consistent. Top bar is now working as identical as possible, both on lists and on items view. This is lists view:

And this is items view:

The UI is also working consistently and enables / disables buttons as needed. Thus now, when you’re in Edit mode, add-new-list or back-button are inaccessible. This lessens the available workflow paths and allows you to focus on singular tasks.

Import / Export

That new button next to Edit is where the main 1.4 feature is. Tap it on lists view and you’ll see the options slide down:

Here you have the option to add lists in, from another device (more on this later). Tap at least one of the local lists and then the other two options become available:

Of course, you can still import lists, regardless of what is locally selected, thus middle option is not disabled.

On the items view, this is almost identical, with the difference that all 3 options are always available, except when list is empty.

So, how this works?

Mailing

If you mail lists, it will open the mail controller inside the app, including all the lists you have selected. If you do this on items view, it will naturally add items from that list. This is how the mail contents looks:

- - - - [only to do items] - - - -

Coffee for the office

2 large mochas

1 large late

- - - - [only done items] - - - -

Coffee for the office

*1 small late

- - - - [all items] - - - -

Coffee for the office

2 large mochas

*1 small late

1 large late

The layout is pretty clear; list items are shown in 3 groups:

• only to-do items
• only done items
• all items

This corresponds to the three tabs you see on the items view in Quickie. The * in front of the item denotes a done item. In order to get this into Quickie, select whatever group you want and copy/paste it into Quickie’s Add new list (+ button on lists view) or Add more items (+ button on the items view) screens.

If you mail out multiple lists, their contents will simply be added to the mail body, one by one.

Of course, you can also copy this in the mail controller screen before sending, then close that screen, switch to Messages app and send the list over SMS. From then, copy/paste into Quickie on receiving end.

Bumping

Bump™ is a service that exists for quite some time, but which recently got a big stamp of approval when PayPal implemented it in their iPhone app.

How it works in Quickie:

1. Select some lists in Quickie that you want to transfer to another iPhone. Tap Bump lists out
2. Tap Bump lists in on the other iPhone
3. On both devices, the Bump connect screen will show up. Once you see this screen

   
   then simply bump one device with another. You don’t have to bump the devices themselves, it’s enough to bump hands holding the iPhones (as the Bump logo shows).

4. You’ll be asked to confirm the transfer on both devices and after that, the magic happens. Data will be transfered, Bump screens will go away and you’ll see the lists on the target phone.

You can bump any number of lists you want. The common way I use this feature is when I get home from work and my wife bumps me the list of things I need to fetch from the store; pronto. :)

So happy with this. Version 1.2 should be on sale soon, bringing better performance and some new features to play with.

Run Mate 1.3

Run Mate 1.3 is out on the store for a week or so. It features two new programs included, tailor-made for people that have never, ever run before. You can now set a difficulty level for each program. Program level is shown with an icon in front of program and all its sessions.

The great new feature are completion checkmarks. Those new icons have another use – once you complete the session, it will automatically be check-marked so you can easily track your progress.

More settings are added – you can now turn off voice alerts for sequence repeats and finishes, leaving only pace changes announced.

Our first iPad app

Did you notice all the frenzy in tech press around the April Fools Day? code·aplus has an app right from the start — Animated Mood Lamp. It’s a simple application, showing great animation, best experienced in dark rooms. It also doubles up as a really large map/flashlight when you need one, with the choice of thousands of colors. I hope you will like it – when you get your iPad, please write back how it runs as I don’t know yet when I’ll be able to get an iPad for myself. :)

Quickie

Quickie is not forgotten, 1.3 version is almost complete and will feature some nice improvements. Stay tuned.