Mobile Evolution - Thoughts, insight, and experiences related to the mobile software industry

My brother is always calling me with app ideas. One day, way back in late 2003, he suggested writing a calculator that took recipe ingredient amounts and adjusted them by changing the serving size. My husband, our developer, is an avid cook, so the idea intrigued him. He wasn't satisfied with just a multiplier, so he started creating a complicated algorithm for the Palm PDA that would also factor down the result into the simplest amount of steps. So, if you size up a recipe calling for 1-1/2 teaspoon from 4 servings to 14 servings, the little app would tell you “1 Tablespoon and 2-1/4 teaspoons”. He wasn't satisfied with just that, so he displayed the result also converted into metric. Thus Serving Sizer was born and released in February 2004, at the inexpensive price of $9.95. We've since 'ported the app to iOS, both for iPhone and iPad, learning many lessons along the way. Being able to react quickly to market realizations, potential for features, and more, has helped us along the way. This post will cover some of those lessons learned on the road to making Serving Sizer a successful app.

UPDATE: We took 3rd place! Thanks to all who voted for us!!

We're ecstatic that Serving Sizer Pro Recipe Cards on the iPad made Finalist in the 2010 Best App Ever awards. Thank you to all who nominated us! Our app is in the Parenting category for iPad. We've got some tough competition, so please take the time to enter your vote for us. Voting ends Tuesday, January 25. Thank you for your support.

Recently we released phase 1 of Trip Boss travel manager for iPhone. We've been working towards its release since the AppStore opened 2-1/2 years ago in 2008. Although we released other iOS apps prior to Trip Boss, with each app we learned something new that we could use in Trip Boss. Full time focus on Trip Boss took about 7 months and we expect another 3-4 months to release the remaining phases, or “modules”. In comparison, Trip Boss for the PalmOS, the initial release, took over a year to write. Some of the subsequent additions and enhancements (such as itinerary) took another year each to release. This post will show you some of the history behind Trip Boss' design and some of the insight behind the design decisions for the iOS release.

Trip Boss travel manager, Expense & Budget edition, will be on sale on the AppStore on November 10th, 2010. To see a preview, please visit our website.

Recipe cards for your iPad! Creative Algorithms is pleased to announce our first iPad app: Serving Sizer Pro for iPad - recipe converter cookbook now available on the AppStore.

Lots of screenshots available on our main website, along with a walkthru on how it works. It has all the goodness of the iPhone version: scales by serving size, easy entry of ingredients, no website access required (save directly to iPad), but in a whole new custom format for iPad.

Date Wheel is not your usual date calculator. While it may have been said that "anyone can write a date calculator," not everyone can write a GOOD one, and we like to think ours is the best. Date Wheel has won awards in the past and has been recently nominated in the 2009 Best App Ever Awards, sponsored by 148apps, in the category of "Best Time Management". This post was inspired by Dan Grigsby's challenge over at Mobile Orchard and will spell out some key features and design insight in an award-winning app that has celebrated a decade in existence. Read on to see if you agree and, if so, please nominate us by Dec. 31, 2009, and/or vote for us in January if we make the cut. Thanks!

During design of our Date Wheel and Serving Sizer iPhone apps, we wanted to include an "about" page with information and links for contacting us, sharing our apps, and upselling. We considered several options, but found using html to this end was the best solution for us. Since it worked well, we thought we'd share the method. This post will describe the steps necessary to create an html "about" page.

To make an html "about" page with Interface Builder, you need to:

Add a View Controller for the "about" page to your project. Then, change the class name from UIViewController to something like AboutPageViewController. Next, add a Web View to the View Controller: