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.

Or you can watch on Vimeo or YouTube, possibly in larger resolution.

When designing Run Mate’s integration with iPod music library, my main goal was to be a good neighbor in the iPhone OS and to not impose unnecessary actions to start the run. Thus, if you had any music already started — regardless is it playing or paused, it is enough that iPod app with its library is in memory — Run Mate will go along and re-use that.

If that is the case, then when you get to the Sequence screen this is the display you will see if the background music is playing:

With background music is playing, Run Mate shows pause and stop controls

or this one if background music is paused:

With background music paused, Run Mate shows play and stop controls

If you now tap “Start run” that music will be reused.

If you tap the red Stop button, you will effectively clear out whatever playlist is in memory and thus no music will be available to Run Mate, so the screen will change into this:

No background music available, "Pick music" buttons shows up

Thus now you can tap “Pick music” button and the iPhone’s music picker screen will show up:

The standard iPhone's music picker

Here you tap any number of songs you want (or just tap “Add All Songs“) and then tap “Done“; you’ll be returned to Run Mate which will again show the appropriate interface with play/pause and stop buttons.

I hope this helps.

Editing sequence in Run Mate

I first heard about the competition through this post by Dan Grigsby of the Mobile Orchard fame, when I started reading blogs again after finishing initial Quickie development.

What

I nominated Quickie in the Best Productivity Enhancer category and Run Mate in the Best Outdoor Use App category. These are the links for nominations:

Quickie nomination
Run Mate nomination

If you like our apps, please visit these links to help us spread the word.

Why

Since its inception in July, Run Mate is still (to the best of my knowledge) the only running trainer app that allows you to fully customize your running plan and individual sessions. As such, I can say — with no faked modesty — it’s a welcome change in the sea of similar apps that offer hard-coded single plans. With the planned feature upgrades in the next several months, I aim for the Best running app on the store, period.

Lists view in Quickie

Quickie on the other hand is as simple as simple can go. Combining beautiful interface with simple and fast execution, Quickie is (again) a welcome refresh in the sea of GTD-monster apps. Experience tells me that most people don’t need full GTD productivity and only need a simple list of items that can be checked off and possibly an alert (n.b. alerting feature is coming in future upgrade). Quickie is a young app, but already indispensable in my daily routine – I built it because I needed it. I’m certain there’s a bunch of people that would also find it extremely useful.

One small new feature is the ability to prevent the screen lock during the run. So if you like to visually check your progress, turn this feature on in the main iPhone Settings app.

Voice and sound alerts toggles

The main new feature is ability to independently toggle voice and sound alerts. You can do this:

Setting options for all sessions or sequences

• for one sequence
• all sequences in particular session
• all session in program
• all programs

This feature is also handy to setup your preferred defaults before creating new items.

There’s only one sound alert in the app – it’s that ping sound at the end of each pace interval. Voice alerts are various spoken cues during the run. Important distinction is that sound alerts are mixed with the background music – they don’t interrupt the music. Voice cues however pause the music while they are on then continue playing it when done.
If you prefer to not have the music interrupted, turn off the voice alerts and leave the pings on and you’re good to go.

New edit sequence screen

On the other hand, if you use carefully crafted music background, like music mix prepared for HIIT type of training, you’ll probably want to turn both off and use your music changes as cues.

Along with this, cooperation with iPod is thoroughly re-tested and improved, as well as interruptions like phone calls. Application will pause when you answer the phone and continue when it’ over.

Google Analytics

This feature is useful only for us here. :)

This allow us to anonymously track the way Run Mate is used and plan the features, possibly spot problems etc. This tracking will not interfere  with the way app works and you’ll not even notice it. If for any reason you don’t want this to be on, it’s easy to turn it off, again through the Settings app.

With hope you’ll put Run Mate to good use, wish you good weather and clean tracks.

In the meantime I have completed the feature set of the 1.2 version and I’m tweaking the UI, not really satisfied with what I have now – too cluttered, too easy to make a mistake and change you might regret as user of the application. That’s all general regular work.

Main issue I have is that enduring this long wait times is really hard and discouraging. I can’t possibly send 1.2 for approval until 1.1 is live. Then I need to wait at least few weeks after 1.1 is live, in case there’re bugs and issues I missed, so I can include them in 1.2. And that means that anyone actually having issues could potentially wait over a month for a fix – unless he/she contacts me and I give him ad-hoc build to install (this is an option, please contact me if you have serious problems running the app).

So, I have not forgotten you nor abandoned the app. Things are largely out of my control here and can only further test my patience with the App Store.
Hoping for good news in the following days…

Update: 1.1 is approved on 30th day. Feedback more than welcome

New icon

New icon :)

Not really a feature, but it will be a relief to me. New icon is a bit unusual, in that it does not have a background at all and no shine that Apple is adding by default. Hopefully you’ll like it too.

New pace types: warm up, cool down

Needed before and after each run, they can be anything you like or are used to: brisk walk, stretching, jumping etc. There are no rules, do whatever you feel like doing for warming up or cooling down.

Time intervals definable in seconds

We opted for the 5s increment, mainly to prevent too much scrolling when setting pace interval. I wanted to do this in the first version, but Apple time picker has only hours and minutes.

New pace types and new interval picker

This time I wrote my own, it looks rather fine. Upgrade will update anything you might already have defined.

Ability to clone entire session

This allows quicker setup of the weekly running programs where sessions are often repeated several times in one week with few or no changes at all.

No music required

If you want to run in silence – maybe you want to hear your breathing rhythm – now you can. Run Mate will fully work with no music, even with screen locked.

Access iPod library from Run Mate

This removes the need for switch into iPod app and back into Run Mate – access all your music and pick individual songs, albums or playlists. Through iPhone’s default Settings application, set your preference should music start as soon as picked (this is default) or when you actually touch the “Start run” button.

Of course, there’s inevitable bug fixes. I have fixed few that I have found and some reported to me and all that have shown up in iTunes Connect as crash logs. Hopefully this will also help with issues few of the people that left a review on the App Store had. As I don’t know what the actual problem is — I can know this only if I receive the crash log — I can’t be sure. And App Store does not have any means of contacting people that left the review. Frustrating, but that’s how it is. If you do have a problem, of any kind, please contact us, I’ll do my best to help.

Now, off to working on 1.2 :)
I hope to have a shorter period between updates, adding few features at a time.

In-app music access

No more switching apps, all conviently accessible from the Run Mate. Working hard to bring this up.

New in Run Mate 1.1: interval picker now allows time resolution down to 5s

This is laying foundation for many things in the future, like HIIT training and for the famous Couch to 5k running plans from CoolRunning.com.

No crashes reported through iTunes so far, which is fine. Run Mate was extensively tested before going on sale but experience tells me that some obscure corner always gets un-dusted in software development.

Regardless of this, if you do have problems with 1.0, please let me know — the sooner, the better — so I can fix them before 1.1.

This has been an interesting week, to say the least, with each day of the week my sleep time was around 4am. Main reason was that Run Mate went on sale on the App Store last Sunday, while I have not yet finished the web site. Thus 24 full hours of working later I had a passable site live. if you have visited the site in the last several days, you could see the design coming along, day by day, to its current form.

At the same time, I needed to get the word out. Contacting blogs, review sites — that took a lot of time, just doing the research. Opened an account with prmac.com which does press release distribution – great service, very quick. Writing a good press release is seriously hard job — it took an entire day of writing, re-writing, editing and re-editing to get to the point of being acceptable.

At the same time, the sales took off. This was really surprising as I did not expect any, until I get the word out. But the very first day Run Mate sold few dozen copies! Big thank you to all of you who bought the app, you made those long nights more than worthwhile.

And with sales comes feedback, with some really good feature suggestions. Feature request list is growing steadily, along with work progressing on the 1.1 version.
Keep the feedback coming, either here in the comments or through the feedback form.

I’ll write more, when 1.1 enters beta stage.