The Future of CountABILITY

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.