Hello Sigma Lovers!

My name is Rashid, and I am the principal developer behind CountABILITY. As you may have noticed, updates to the site and the app have been few and far between over the last year or so. This app is maintained for free by an extremely small team and unfortunately these types of lulls can happen from time to time. That said, I am writing this post to let you know that the recent lull has nothing to do with a lack of enthusiasm or ideas for this application. As a matter of fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

The project started as a combination of a favor to a friend and frustration with counting apps in general. I am a software developer by trade and most counting apps seemed to be more experiments in entering mobile development — and discovering the bottom bar for app store acceptance — than serious efforts. It is my hope that CountABILITY has come across as a serious, professionally designed app that is differentiated and provides value. If the feedback we’ve gotten from worldwide markets is any indication, that would appear to be the case.

I have spent a fair amount of time working on a cross platform version of CountABILITY which I still hope to have out no later than the end of Q2 2015. In addition to that we have a number of new features in mind that we hope will justify people wanting to pay for CountABILITY. Before you close your browser in disgust, let me assure you that we are committed to a free version of CountABILITY but we’ve got some ideas that will require infrastructure investments and we would like to be able to take this project seriously in order to provide an experience that far outstrips the competition. Making money goes a long way toward sustaining the effort. Our goal with this push is to create functionality to make CountABILITY the undisputed best counting app in the world.

A preview of that we have in store:

• Cross platform clients
• Detailed counter data export
• Cloud hosted counters
• Better sound design
• Counter synchronization across multiple devices
• The ability to increment multiple counters
• Speech and voice commands
• Better analytics

Until then we ask for your patience, and hope that when CountABILITY Pro launches later this year you will find a product that far exceeds your expectations for quality and functionality. Please feel free to send an email to support@countabilityapp.com with your feature suggestions and bug reports.

We dearly value and appreciate your support,

RZM

Hello everyone,

Just a note letting you know that we are still here and committed to CountABILITY. Here are a few quick tidbits to share:

– We have been ramping up on iOS and Android development and have made significant hardware investments to ensure the highest level of quality. Development is well under way and we hope to have versions of CountABILITY out for these platforms before the summer is out.

– A number of new features for the Windows Phone client are planned, right now we are looking for a good way to create Windows Phone 7 and 8 builds as we really want to be able to provide Windows Phone 8 users with functionality that exploits that platform. We are most excited about the prospect of adding voice control to CountABILITY.

– If you like CountABILITY we would love to hear from you. Please drop us a line, our email address is support@countabilityapp.com. We welcome positive and negative feedback though we would certainly appreciate the ability to address negative feedback with you directly before you take it to the app store. Speaking of the app store, please don’t hesitate to let the world know what you think about the app: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/countability/69272196-7650-4c7e-84bb-145ca578ab11

Thanks for your patience. While much attention has been on iOS and Android, we will make a point to get a feature update to the current Windows Phone app out in the next couple of weeks. Until then, may Sigma shine brightly upon your counting!

CountABILITY has been in the Windows Phone Store for a around three weeks now. Most app developers probably have huge expectations for the type of uptake their app will have initially and such expectations are routinely dashed. CountABILITY has had a decent start, and the number of downloads have been increasing pretty steadily. Our work in trying to adhere to the Windows Phone platform standards appears to have worked out as our app has gotten prominent search placement in our category, outranking many more established apps in the ecosystem.

We are not under any illusions about the space in which we compete. There are a large number of counting apps in the store and it is not easy to differentiate and provide a compelling alternative. Taking this into consideration, we’ve been thinking about how we might endeavor to effectively compete.

Obviously features are important. There a a few things we are yet to implement – multiple counter tallys on a single page for one – but, for what we do have, we think we compete very well on features and their implementation. Regardless, our goal is to become a market leader which requires us to deliver functionality above and beyond the competition. In addition, we want to get these features into your hands as quickly as possible. To accomplish this, we are changing our thinking about the CountABILITY release cadence.

Our plan has always been to deliver bug fixes and optimizations as quickly and regularly as possible, but to save the larger feature additions for larger releases that may come out every few months. What we plan to do now is to deliver significant pieces of new functionality every two to three weeks. As you saw in the Future of Countability post we have no shortage of goodies to add so we may as well get them to you as quickly as possible so you can use it and give us feedback.

We hope this turns out to be a good move and look forward to getting your feedback. You can always drop us a line: support@countabilityapp.com

After way more time than we initially anticipated, CountABILITY 1.0 is finally released. As is the case with any software release, there was a large amount of functionality we wanted to build in but chose to cut in order to actually get a product out the door. It’s always a painful trade off to have to pare back an initial vision, but it also keeps the project focused on delivering immediate customer value while simultaneously allowing for a steady stream of feature-packed releases going forward. In this post I would like to talk about some of the features we plan on adding in the near future.

Bug Fixes

Since we just released version 1.0 of CountABILITY we want to see what you, the end user, think about the product. At Caravan Nomad we are convinced that we can build the go-to counting app for all platforms, but that distinction can only be held if CountABILITY meets the needs of those who actually value the service that we provide. This is about YOUR counting experience, not our theoretical counting fantasies.

Having said all of that, this is our first release and we expect plenty of bugs that we missed during testing. Please be patient with us as we get them all squashed as quickly as we can.

Better Sound Design

The story of how the current increment / decrement sounds came to be in CountABILITY is pretty lame – we just found a few obscure royalty-free sounds and put them in as placeholders. The plan was always to change the sounds before release but we decided that the current sounds do the job well enough and we would invest in updating the soundscape right in the next release. Since the current sounds are part of the identity of the application they will probably be a future option but, going forward, there will be features that will benefit from a more coherent group of aural stimulus. If that doesn’t work, we hope to give you the ability to record and add your own sounds as well.

More Counter Options

CountABILITY only scratches the surface of our plans as far as counting is concerned. We cut 90% of the counting functions to focus on a simple usable counting implementation. The jury is still out on how well that turned out (you are the jury! please tell us!), but we have a few important enhancements coming soon. Primarily a count down, and multiple simultaneous counters (think of it as score keeping). Also, the ability to set a counter template per Counter Group allowing new counters to be created with preset settings and auto-naming conventions.

Counter Export

A curious limitation of Windows Phone is the inability to attach a file to an email. Instead of just dumping a CSV into a message body (which, to be honest, will probably be the initial manifestation of this feature), we want to use a more robust way to extract counting data from the application. One of those ways is to enable the use of platform storage APIs (e.g. Dropbox, Skydrive, Box, etc) to save the file to a specified location as CSV, XML or JSON.

Improved Counter Graphs

This was a feature that was almost dropped from the first release due to the fact that we were using an outdated graphing control, but numerous people wanted it kept in so we did. The feature is very basic and is limited by the graph library, but there is a lot of potential. Especially by using the counter activity data to do counter analytics by time interval or even using the note field.

Cross Platform Availability

Many people question the wisdom of launching on the Windows Phone platform since it has such miniscule market share compared to the two giants of Android and iOS. The answer is simple: Our primary engineer is a .NET developer by trade and felt comfortable comfortable writing apps for Windows Phone. Also, the fact that there is such small market share of the platform means our apps have a better chance of gaining a foothold due to less competition. Regardless, we are deep into designig the iOS, Android, and Windows 8/RT versions of CountABILITY. Also, while we are not actively writing code for it, we have serious interest in the Nokia S40 OS platform given its status in the developing world and our interest in that market.

Welcome to CountABILITY! This blog is our tool to keep you informed of CountABILITY’s progress and to gather feedback from those of you who would do us the honor of integrating CountABILITY into your lifestyle.

What is CountABILITY?

CountABILITY is an application designed for allowing you to account for everything worth counting in a simple manner. This project rose out of a desire to start developing mobile apps and a frustration with the state of mobile counting apps – particularly on the Windows Phone platform, but the problem is indeed pandemic across all platforms.

Most counting apps require

Here are a few features that differentiate CountABILITY from most other counting apps:

• Unlimited counters – CountABILITY uses a database system allowing you save as many counters as you would like.
• Counter organization – Give your counters context by naming them and organizing them into named groups.
• Designed for Windows Phone – CountABILITY leverages the Windows Phone user experience by providing a minimalist gesture-based counting interface and the ability to pin your counters and counter groups to your start screen. Your live tiles will keep you up to date on your current counter values.

Countability Features (for version 1.0):

• A simple user interface
• The ability to organize counters into groups
• Audio and haptic (vibrating) counting feedback
• Graphing of counters in groups
• Live tile shortcuts to counters and counter groups
• The ability to add and change counter steps without navigating away from the counter page

CountABILITY is currently available for free on the Windows Phone 7.5, 7.8 and 8.0. Windows 8, iOS, and Android versions are currently under active development and will be coming soon.

Thank you for visiting! Also, be sure to drop us a note with any questions, comments or suggestions:

support@countabilityapp.com