feedback, i love it: joe.daverin@gmail.com An early post-mortem on Bracket I know the tournament is not over yet and there are still things that could go wrong this year, but as it winds down I'm going to record some thoughts about how this went and how it can be better next year. 1st: copy protection is not worth it. it's not hard to steal apps off the phones, even with copy protection turned on. and it means that i, on my snazzy developer phone, am restricted from seeing my own app in the marketplace, including comments and other helpful things. so why didn't i just turn it off? i did, see below comment about losing people data and making them pissed off at me. next year, no copy protection from day 1. 2nd: for a small independent developer, is it worth it to have a paid app vs. a free app with a paid version? so i've got three apps in use right now, one is straight up free, one is free with an (identical) 'donation' version, and then there's this, a pay-only app. my intuition is that, money-wise, i got probably the same amount for this pay-only app and the donation version app. and with the donation version app i get a lot more users, which means a lot more feedback, which means a better piece of software. what i haven't tried yet is the demo or 'pay for enhanced features' model. there might be a bump there, but the extremes to me seem about equal money-wise, and since offering a free version leads to better applications, i favor that model for next year. 3rd: application specific concerns: unlimited and named brackets (this is not hard i just ran out of time this year), some kind of import/export capability (i tried to use the built-in email activity but couldn't make it reliable enough for release in time), and some way to run a pool off the phone. oh and making sure that saving the picks is closer to bulletproof. 4th: the tapping functionality (when picking teams) could be a lot better. apparently for one person it didn't work at all, though i'm not sure how that happened. but even for me it was flaky. 5th: right now the resolutions and spacing of things is completely tied to the G1, any other phone with a different resolution will not play well with this app. hopefully by next year there will be more android phones and so this will have to friendlier to different resolutions. Special note about potential lost data: So one of the things that sucks about the Android Market is that those of us who have developer phones to, you know, develop things, and then want to publish copy-protected applications, can't actually see them in the Market. Which means we can't see the comments, which I've found very valuable in iterating on an application and finding problems. I originally published Bracket as copy-protected. After a while I got frustrated with not seeing the comments and decided I would risk people making illicit copies of the application (probably a pretty low risk :P). So I did, and almost immediately I got people with problems about lost data despite the update claiming that user data will be saved. My guess is that copy-protected and non-copy-protected applications store data in different parts of the phone, so when I set it to non-copy-protected, it started looking somewhere else for data even though it said it would save the data. Oops. I changed it back quickly, but some people may have lost their picks due to this, and for that I apologize. A brief version history, starting with the most recent: v1.3 (2009-03-19) - Fixed the scoring for Radford, which was set to the wrong spot v1.2 (2009-03-17) - Added Morehead State after they won the play-in game v1.1.1 (2009-03-15) - Tried to make file loading (the picks are stored in a local file) a little more robust as some people were having some force close problems, not sure if it actually fixed anything v1.1 (2009-03-15) - Selection Sunday update, changed the random teams that had been put in to the correct teams, except of course for the play-in game Morehead St/Alabama St. v1.0 (2009-03-14) - First published |