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Nun, Kevin und Alex erzählen von einem bewegenden Vortrag den man da auf Video anschauen kann, auf der TED-Webseite. Gut, Internet ist zwar langsam, aber ich schau mal rein. Also auf die Seite. Ui, da sind ja viele Videos, dann such ich mal. Wie lautete der Vortrag noch mal? “The morning of the stroke”. Gesucht, gefunden. Na ja, also streaming will ich das nicht, diggnation ist schon langsam genug. Also den iTunes-Podcast Download ausgewählt.

Etwas mehr als eine halbe Stunde später ist der 20 Minuten lange Video da. Dann mal los. Wow – ich war sofort gebannt von dem Vortrag. Faszinierend, humorvoll, spannend, ergreifend, bewegend … Schaut es euch an!

Das Internet ist langsam hab ich gesagt? Irgendwie ist das auf einmal nicht mehr so relevant…

I fear you want to make an already very good product perfect

He is probably right with that, I do always find things I want to make better and better and better. So I have to try to stop myself doing that already.

Hey, but I have so many ideas and there are problems to solve, people are having issues!

Well, that said and reading some up to date reviews on the iTunes AppStore about WorldView Live made me rethink, at least.

During the last week I was working on lots of enhancements in the background of the app. We have a new eeasy to use support forum, a bugfix release was made available in a very short time and we’ve been also working on a new design for the website and a new app logo (which will be revealed later the next 2 weeks – and hey, both look sooooo great ).

Today I took another look at the current iTunes reviews and frankly said: it struck me!

I could try to go the easy way, just ignore, but that is not me, I care. But the hardest thing in this case is to understand WHY these people directly write a bad review on iTunes, but DO NOT read the text I provide in iTunes and DO NOT try to use the support forum or DO NOT ask in any other way. Because I do have NO way to react on iTunes. Ok, this is nothing I can blame the users for, that is clearly Apple’s fault. I know a lot of developers being very upset about the (new) voting system and also the way the reviews work. Hey Apple, why can’t I, as the developer, not even send these people a private note to get in touch with them!? I don’t need their email address, just a method of sending them an information. I am not even asking for writing a public comment to every single iTunes review – which reminds me of eBay where the seller even can do that!

Ok … calm down Andreas … But hey, I have a great team of people helping me on the app development part, which mostly is there since the beginning of the app. People around the world test sometimes every day a new version on more than a dozen devices and give me so valuable feedback. Thanks to Alex, Gavin, Rees, Ingo, Karim, Nareharo, Josef, Hervé and Kai!

But still, you never can be sure to find every problem that might occur. I was used to develop desktop and web applications for years and years, but hey, developing for such a device is so tricky. Even with the gorgeous APIs and development tools Apple provides. I would even say, developing a solid rocking app for a mobile device is more tricky then writing a desktop app!

So what is the conclusion? I will probably continue to implement my ideas into the app, and people will download it or even buy it. But on the other side, I will do my very best to make the app rock stable and fun to use and help everybody as good as I can who will use the support forum. The more tricky part for me will be: not to read the iTunes reviews any more, since this way no download numbers make it worth letting these few comments in there ruin my holidays!

Enjoy your holidays and already a happy new year to everybody out there!

(If you find grammar or other mistakes in the text above, I do not care, I am native german and I am allowed to do things wrong)

This is just a small teaser, more to come…

Stay tuned…

All the future versions will be provided on the AppStore (if they will get approved by Apple). Development is going on, to be a little more precise it is a complete rewrite. Completely redesigned iPhone App, completely new Server backend (yes, Locations is running its own server app for e.g. the search functionality), and completely new Administration Tool for the Server backend. So developing Locations is not a small task from the startup. Because of this I teamed up with a friend of mine and Locations will be “branded” under this new team instead of my name. More to be announced when it is time.

Feature wise we got a lot of new things to come up with. We are working very hard to give you the ultimate Webcam Viewer application for the iPhone with some fancy new ideas based on location based services topic. We hope we can implement them. In the past I got lots of requests to support live streaming webcams: Motion-JPEG support will be coming! Made it work just yesterday

Do you have ideas you would love to get implemented? Feel free to write a comment!

See you all soon on the other side again…

Don’t deliver something which is not finished. 

Anyway!

Wil, I love the current version, even I use it rarely (only have about 160 DVDs and 20 Books), but it is a wonderful designed and implemented tool. I even watched happily your speech at C4. I even started to collect some ideas for a iPhone client for DL2 as my next project after Locations. Well, until I saw this comment on twitter:

Maybe I’ll provide you my ideas once DL2 is out

BUT apparently, it seems my friend Alex did suffer even more than I did myself. Since I am writing the same question over and over again:

To get rid of my howling he wrote this to Wil:

All I can say is: I am sorry Alex! And I am sorry Wil. It shouldn’t have come so far. I regret getting on other peoples nerve and will promise not to do any more. Well … I will try at least

I just saw that my first video demo of Locations has been selected as featured video on the Viddler blog for february 14th. Nice