iClone

As you may have noticed, the iClone website’s been given a bit of a makeover, with more integrated support pages, blog and forum. No doubt there’ll be more tweaks to come, but I think I’m at the stage where the site now enhances the app rather than detracting from it by forcing people to interact with a fairly hardcore developer-centric support system.

Shouldn’t I be working on the new release of the iPhone app? Well, I am as well. Refresh performance is much improved, the new data dumps are integrated, and I’m currently polishing the new wallet detail panes, along with keeping an eye on the performance of the wallet queries. This isn’t getting released till I’m happy with the load times on the Worst Possible Test Device(tm) – a 1st generation iPod touch, which (I believe) has the slowest CPU of any of the released iPhone OS devices.

Why a new website then? Well, the key to that is in the word ‘working‘ in the question above. iClone is a personal project, and so fits around my day job, which has to be first priority. At work we use trac for bug tracking, and during the working day I’m a slave to the ticket. It’s efficient, it keeps things organised, it enables the usual cat-herding of programmers to be made less of a pain for the people in charge. However, it has the knock-on effect of making any interaction with bug-tracking software outside of work seem like, well, work. So, over the next few days I’m going to be closing off the old iClone bug tracking pages, and redirecting them to this new site. I’m still more than open to suggestions and feedback, and I think it’s going to motivate me to be more responsive in responding to bugs and feature suggestions – both direct mail and submissions to the contact form will end up in my inbox, and I won’t have ticket admin to sap my enthusiasm. As an added bonus, with the new support pages I no longer have to suffer interact with wiki-markup, so I’m more likely to keep the documentation up to date, which can’t be a bad thing, and the iPhone skin for the pages will make them far more useful.

Hopefully I’ll be posting about 1.2.1 being submitted soon!