Week 17 - iPad
We're late again with our weekly update. I'd been trying to get it back on at least a Monday so we were only one day in arrears but the release of the iPad on Friday put pay to that. We're both Apple users on the desktop, and prior to Arun's pre-Echelon stumble-destruction we were both iPhone users. So the chance to experiment with a new device that may reshape our industry, plus a little bit of 'new-shiny-fever' meant we formulated a plan to cover multiple locations on Friday morning - in case there was a shortage.
So... we both have one of only the couple of thousand iPads that Apple committed to the Little Red Dot and are already experimenting with the Gameplan experience on the larger touch device. Perhaps the iPad is the ideal device a tournament organiser would use as they roamed around the pitches entering results into Gameplan? Maybe we can claim some work utility out of them after all!
For Gameplan last week was all about taking the specific 16-teams-in-4-groups solution we built for Sports Planet, and generalising it to support cups of virtually any size. This required a good deal of scribbled paper notes and scratched heads. Trying to build the flexibility to generate cups of any size from 4 teams to 64 and ensure that fixtures are scheduled so there are no clashes and that matches are evenly spaced is not a cognitively easy process!
We've also added in-place editing of players within teams, to add a little forgiveness to club managers as they enter their players. We're noticing lots of these 'mini-features' as we use the application more and more.
We see areas that need tweaking all over the app, meaning our issues list is full of much smaller tasks than previously, but there's lots more of them. Which I guess means we're moving into a new stage of our development, our main features are done - now it's time to polish them and sell them.
Outside of Gameplan I've taken on the rebuild of the Neoteny Labs website as an external consulting job to give us a little more funding. They're not investing in us, other than giving us a little bit more bootstrapping cash in exchange for a spangly new site.
The last couple of weeks we've both looked for a less intense environment and taken it a bit more 'easy', so we've only worked together approximately 50% of the time - but as always we've done high quality paired development whenever we're together. I expect this'll continue as we have to do all the 'other' stuff you have to do as a two-person company: marketing, support etc.
Arun even got some sales underway by getting in touch with some football and cricket leagues we've stumbled on as we've been doing our market research. We're not a fan of spamming people so it wasn't a mail-shot, we're effectively 'email cold-calling' one-on-one trying to drum up interest - hard work, but hopefully the league organisers will appreciate the individual effort.
Stats
13 issues closed on GitHub, 1 new feature added, but lots of extra scenarios. 4,800 lines of code and 11,176 lines of test code with a code-to-test ratio of 1:2.3 (the scheduling needs a lot of testing).
