Gerald Nunn's Blog

OnTrack 1.8.3 Released

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:09:21 -0400

I have uploaded OnTrack 1.8.3 to the Android market, this is a minor release that widens the home screen on devices with larger screens like the Archos internet tablet.

The other thing it hopefully addresses is an issue a handful of users are reporting with respect to OnTrack duplicating records and deleting certain records. I suspect this issue is related to the Quick Add feature as it is the only spot where records are deleted. The issue is potentially occurring when an error occurs with saving multiple entries in the Quick Add screen, the error will cause OnTrack to roll back the already added records by deleting them based on their identifiers. I've tested this feature backwards and forwards and have not been able to reproduce the issue, I suspect these users might be using one of the newer devices or Android versions which may be causing an unexpected issue. Considering there are over a thousand people using OnTrack I believe this issue is not widespread since some of the regulars who stay in contact with me would have experienced the problem and dropped me a line.

Having said that, this release adds much better exception handling and notification around this area and corrects some issues I noted when an unexpected error does occur on saving. However, since I cannot reproduce the issue I can only be hopeful this will address the problem, thus if you are experiencing this issue please drop me a line so I can better understand where the issue is occurring. The annoying thing with comments in the Android market is that you cannot contact the user to ask follow up questions which makes tracking this issue down difficult, having someone who is experiencing the issue contact me would be immensely helpful.

OnTrack Developer Statistics

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:59:07 -0400

I thought it would be interesting to share some statistics with respect to how well OnTrack is doing in the developer market. For those of you not familiar with the Android market, when you release an application on the market you get access to a developer console that shows how many downloads and active installs there are for the application at the current time.

OnTrack was released a couple of months ago around mid-July and the initial uptake was somewhat slow. I think some of this was due to the fact that I initially released it as just 'OnTrack' without the word diabetes in the title. I believe this was a mistake, even though I used the word diabetes in the description and OnTrack would appear in searches for diabetes I think the fact that diabetes was not in the title caused people to ignore it. I added Diabates to the title so it became 'OnTrack Diabetes' and since then the rate of adoption has been markedly better.

At the moment OnTrack has had 2134 downloads with 961 active installs, given the overall size of the Android market and the niche area that OnTrack serves I'm pretty happy with those numbers. There are currently 39 ratings for OnTrack with the majority of them very positive (4-5) and only a handful of poor to fair ratings (2-3). With regards to the poor ratings, one thing I dislike about the Android market is an inability to exchange information with commenters. This is annoying because often when someone leaves you a comment with a poor rating it is often difficult to understand exactly what issues the user had with the application and correct it in a future release.

I expect the number of active installs to increase substantially over the next few months as Sprint and Verizon add Android based phones to their portfolios. I'll try to remember to write an update post at the end of the year to see how things have changed.

Looking for Help in Localizing OnTrack

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:41:51 -0400

OnTrack is currently localized for English and German and I would like to expand the number of supported languages, unfortunately a bit of a challenge to that goal is the fact that I really only speak and write English well. Thus I'm looking for help from native speakers who would be interested in seeing OnTrack in their language.

If you are interested in assisting with localizing OnTrack please drop me a line at gnunn@gexperts.com and let me know what language you can translate. In response I will send you a couple of text files for translation along with some basic instructions on how to perform the translation. Ideally you should be able to commit to keeping translations up to date in the sense that as OnTrack is developed and features added new strings that need to be translated will also be added. As new translations are required I'll forward you the text strings to translate and you should be able to turn this around in a few days.

Having said that, even if you only have the time for a one-off translation feel free to let me know and we can use that to kick-off support for that language.

OnTrack 1.8.2 Released

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:56:06 -0400

OnTrack has been updated to 1.8.2 in the Android market. This version is a minor update with the following changes:

Changed the handling of the back button in the edit screen, now if after making changes you press the back button and the changes are not valid the application will warn you before discarding the changes.
In some locales the comma is used as the decimal separator instead of the period. Unfortunately there is a bug in Android 1.5 that doesn't allow users to enter a comma in these locales for decimal fields. The problem that arose is when editing an entry, OnTrack would copy the value into the edit field with a comma making it an invalid number. OnTrack now automatically changes the comma to a period to workaround this Android issue. In all all other places in OnTrack a comma should be displayed if this is what your locale uses as the decimal separator.

OnTrack 1.8.1 Released

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 12:44:04 -0400

OnTrack 1.8.1 is now available on the market, this release addresses a bug in the export feature that prevented it from working correctly. As well it makes some minor changes to the German localization.

OnTrack 1.8 Released

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 21:20:45 -0400

Version 1.8 of OnTrack has been released, the following changes have been made:

Added a Quick Add feature
Records can now be exported in HTML
Added a graph for Weight records
Fixed a problem with the Today filter on graphs being one day in the future
Now localized for German thanks to Andreas Heilek

As usual you can get the update from the Android Market.

OnTrack 1.8 Coming Soon

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:22:18 -0400

The next version of OnTrack will be released this weekend on the Android market. It will have a couple of new features of which the biggest being the new Quick Add feature. For diabetics that take insulin like myself we typically have to enter three records with every meal: Carbs, Glucose and Medication. Entering these records one at a time in OnTrack is a bit of pain at the moment since you have to do each record individually.

The Quick Add feature in the next version of OnTrack will allow users to enter multiple records simultaneously from a single screen. The way it works is that when you select the Quick Add option a dialog will appear showing all of the types that can be entered (Glucose, Food, etc) along with a checkbox next to each one. Check the boxes for the desired records and then press OK and a new screen will appear. On this new screen, the date/time and category are at the top, however under that are individual input boxes for each record type that was checked. Set all the values, as well as subtypes, and press save, one record for each type selected will be saved with the same date/time, category and note.

The other cool feature is the ability to export to the HTML format, this will give you a nice logbook style output that can be easily printed and shared with your doctor. You can view a sample of this export here export_sample.html. I'm hoping in a future version to expand this further and include some of the graphs and reports in the export as well to give your doctor a really good overview of how things are progressing.

OnTrack 1.7 Released

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 13:26:13 -0400

OnTrack 1.7 has been released and is now available on the Market. This version is an incremental improvement but well worth upgrading to, see my previous blog post for details on what has changed.

Next Version of OnTrack

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:33:34 -0400

Sorry for no updates for the last month, work has been pretty busy the last few weeks and I haven't had time to get to everything on my list. Having said that, I do have a new version of OnTrack in the pipes that I am planning on releasing towards the end of the week and I thought it would be good to post some information about the forthcoming changes.

This change is largely focused on improving the useability and look of the application by cleaning up some of the details I missed on the last release. Here is a list of the changes I have made so far:

Prompt the user on first load to use mmo/l or mg/dl measurements
Added an option to view home screen by day in addition to weekly and monthly options
I did some work on the graphs to make them more attractive
Reworked the preferences and home screen filter as seperate menu items
Moved the management of categories and subtypes to preferences from the home screen menu
Added support for exporting to XML
Added "id" field to XML export for synchronization purposes
Add supported for showing and hiding lines in graph so it can appear as a plot graph
Added a pie chart for showing number of glucose values in range
Fixed a few miscellaneous bugs
Added a graph to show the total number of carbs consumed per day
Added a report showing the average amount of carbs consumed per category
New on-line help pages with in-program menu option, view current state here.

So has you can see nothing earth shattering but I do plan on adding a couple of key features in the near future as follows:

Add the ability to add different entry types on the same screen. For example, allow a user to enter a glucose and medication entry at the same time to make data entry more efficient.
Add a report that shows a monthly view of glucose entries at a glance
Support graphing multiple items simultaneously and create a graph showing glucose values against medication
Support graphing for medication

Anyways, work progresses so look for the new version later this week. Here are some screenshots showing the changes in appearance along with the new pie chart.

OnTrack Upgraded to 1.6

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:51:56 -0400

OnTrack has been updated in the Android market to version 1.6, some key new features include:

Ability to record weight measurement in either pounds or kilograms.
Ability to set target glucose range and highlight out of range values in the main screen as well as the graphs and reports.
Save graphs to an image file.
Two new reports, Glucose By Category and Medications By SubType
Internal re-architecting to make future additions easier.
Now formats the date and time using the phone settings.

The one downside of this upgrade is that the application is now Android 1.5 (Cupcake) only as I needed to leverage some newer APIs to correctly format the date and time using the phone settings.