The Dossier

The Dossier an "iPad App for Moms on the Go"

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:37:00 -0500

The Dossier an "iPad App for Moms on the Go":

Thanks to MakeItBetter.com for giving us a shout out.

Upcoming improvements to Gifts

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 11:44:00 -0500

You may have noticed that development of The Dossier has accelerated somewhat since the 1.1 release a couple of months ago. The Dossier 1.2 has only been in the App Store for a few days, but I’m already getting close to submitting 1.3.

So, what’s new in 1.3? Well, we’re adding some significant additions to Gifts! I wanted to get Gifts into everybody’s hands well before the holiday orgy of shopping got underway, but that doesn’t mean Gifts is done — far from it.

First, we’re adding details to gifts. An arrow appears beside each gift, and if you tap it you’ll be able to change the gift name, as well as enter the store you bought it at, how much you paid for it, where you’ve hidden it, as well as a website and notes.

Next, you’ll be able to check off the things you’ve already purchased. Simply tap the gift itself, and it’ll mark it as purchased. Now you’ll know what still needs buying.

All this is fine and good, but wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to see all the things you need to buy for everyone? With the new Shopping List feature, you can do this easily! Instead of just a dossier list, we’ve added a Shopping List tab:

The Shopping List will also allow you to check things off the list, so it’s great for either using while in the store, or as a place to cross things off the list when you get home.

So, there you have it, a quick preview of what’s to come. I’m not sure yet when we’ll be finished, but we’ll be sending a version to our beta testers in the next couple of days.

Questions? Comments? Call us!

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:53:17 -0500

We really want to hear from you about anything to do with The Dossier. Love it? Hate it? Have a suggestion or just want to chat? Email us, of course, but if you’d rather talk by phone, we’d be happy to give you a call.

Our phone number is (800) 266-9148. If you live outside of North America, shoot us an email with your phone number and a good time to call, and we’ll do our best to call you back as soon as we can.

The Dossier 1.2 now available in the App Store

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 15:55:23 -0500

After what seemed like forever, The Dossier 1.2 has been approved for sale in the App Store.

In the spirit of the holiday season, and with Cyber Monday about to go into full swing, we’ve decided to keep the price at $2.99 through the end of November. It goes up to $4.99 on Wednesday December 1st, so if you’re sitting on the fence, now is the time to buy!

Buy The Dossier here!

And just to tease you a little bit, we’re working on an amazing shopping list feature that combines all your gift ideas into one easy-to-manage place.

Gifts in The Dossier

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 12:11:00 -0500

We’ve submitted the update to Apple for approval, and should be in the store in a few days. This is the largest single feature added to The Dossier since we originally shipped in March. It’s also, arguably, the most important feature and one that should have been there from the start: Gifts.

It all starts with what you see in a dossier:

This is a list of all the gifts you’ve given in the past or will give in the future. The goal is primarily to remind you what you’ve given, but also to help you with ideas for the future.

Tap on Gifts and you’ll see the editor:

You can see the items for the event you tapped on, and can just start typing in items, pressing return after each one. Need to delete? Swipe an item and the delete button appears.

If you want to view the gifts for a different occasion, tap the occasion button at the top:

You can type in an occasion if you want, but there are also quick entry items for common occasions. Upcoming events with known dates (like Christmas or the person’s birthday) are at the top. Other common events, like housewarmings, weddings, Bar Mitzvahs and so on are below. Then, there are historical occasions — things you created in the past, like Birthday 2009 and 2008.

So: tap an occasion, set the date if you need to, and tap on the Gifts button at the top to go back and add gifts for it.

That’s it! It’s a straightforward way to remember what you’ve given people and what you intend to give them in the future.

Gifts are an integral part of our social lives, and I really think it’s the feature that really defines what The Dossier is all about.

This is our new Gifts feature! We’re doing some last...

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 08:47:23 -0500

This is our new Gifts feature! We’re doing some last minute cleanup, and will be submitting it to Apple later today. This shows both gifts that have been given previously, as well as gifts you intend to give in the future.

Once we’ve submitted, I’ll write up a detailed overview of how it all works.

A little bit about gift giving.

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 00:56:26 -0400

So, I’ve been playing with our new Gifts block (coming in the next version of The Dossier), and it’s got me all excited. When I show it to people, they immediately understand the purpose of The Dossier, moreso than any description ever could. This is the thing that made The Dossier exist, the thing that I wish we’d had in the app since day 1, because it defines us.

The Dossier is, at its core, about giving. Clothing sizes? So you can buy clothes for someone accurately. Twitter? To get ideas for gifts. Notes? To store your ideas for presents, likes and dislikes and whatnot. Photos? To capture moments that remind you of the person, of things they like, of things you want to give them.

Gifts in The Dossier is the first step to bringing that to the forefront and showcase it. Being able, at a glance, to see everything you’ve ever purchased for someone, as well as the things you’re going to give them next (and even whether or not you’ve already bought it!) is super cool.

We all give gifts, and organizing them (especially if you’ve got an extended family or large group of friends) can be a huge pain. I’m hoping the next update of The Dossier will really show you that it can be easy.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll be revealing a few details about how Gifts will work.

Johanna Blakley talks about fashion and the lessons we can learn...

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 15:57:00 -0400

Johanna Blakley talks about fashion and the lessons we can learn from the culture of copying. “There is no rest for the fashionable!” (click through the source link below if you’re on an iPad or iPhone to see the video)

Who knew?

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 10:29:02 -0400

Our new website was launched last night, but some early reports of problems viewing it on the iPad came up. Turns out it was a silly problem with the iPad web browser, and we’ve worked around it. So, if you had trouble getting to our website this morning, give it another try!

Changes, changes, all around!

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 12:58:37 -0400

Things around the Without Software offices have been buzzing[1] with changes. Last week we started some new advertising with a unique look and feel. We’ve been working to extend that across to our website as well, a place that is woefully in need of some updating.

We should be launching our new website in the next couple of days, once we’ve finished tweaking it. Here’s a quick preview:

I’m sure you’ll agree it’s a fair bit better than our current, generic, bland, informationless site! :-)

We’re also hard at work on the next update to The Dossier, which will see a few new blocks and some improvements to existing blocks. If you have any ideas, now is the time to let them fly! Tweet us at @thedossierapp with your ideas, or even if you just want to say “hi!”

—
[1] May not actually be buzzing, as both James and I work from our respective homes!

Our first two ads for The Dossier are now running on...

Sat, 16 Oct 2010 08:35:24 -0400

Our first two ads for The Dossier are now running on StyleDemocracy.com!

Hi! I received an email with a code for your software, but no instructions on what to do with the code. Where is the URL where I should enter it?

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 23:17:59 -0400

Here’s a post showing you how to redeem promo codes. It’s geared toward the iPhone, but the basics are the same for the iPad.

Just saying. :-)

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 23:14:00 -0400

In a week since The Dossier 1.1 was released, hundreds of people have upgraded and there has not been a single crash reported. Thanks again to all our testers for their hard work in helping us make this version of The Dossier so stable. <3

The Dossier 1.1 Contest!

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 21:46:21 -0400

To celebrate the release of The Dossier 1.1, we’re giving away 11 copies of The Dossier. To enter, simply start following us on Twitter and retweet this status update.

Good luck!

The Dossier 1.1 is now in the app store!

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 20:48:35 -0400

It felt like it took forever, not just for us to code it but for Apple to approve it, but we’re finally in the app store with our biggest update yet!

Thanks again to everyone who supported and encouraged us over the last few months. We hope you love the update as much as we do.

Awaiting Approval!

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 23:57:25 -0400

The Dossier 1.1 has been submitted to Apple, and we’re waiting to receive approval. Typically this has taken 3 or 4 days.

If you’ve had problems with The Dossier, we’re pretty confident that the 1.1 update will solve them, and we look forward to hearing your comments!

Trials by fire

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 18:01:29 -0400

One of the things about The Dossier that’s been fun for us is the learning experience. Neither James nor I had any experience with developing for iOS when we started out, and it’s been a struggle getting up the learning curve. It’s only been six months or so, and we’ve learned a ton.

One of the things we’ve had particular problems with is memory management. The iPad is not forgiving of memory leaks, and we’ve had some doozies as we’ve made the changes necessary for The Dossier 1.1. Tracking them down using Instruments has been an adventure in pain that we never expected. One specific leak that was leading to crashing took us nearly three weeks to track down.

However, the end is here! We’ve now fixed all known crashes and we’re just going through and crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s. We hope to submit to Apple later tonight or tomorrow.

I’ve mentioned the changes we’ve made in previous posts and won’t rehash it again, and we’re excited to get this into everyone’s hands. This should stablize the app, and let us move on to making the real improvements we’ve been sitting on for a long time.

Slow and steady wins the race!

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:00:21 -0400

Wow, what a fight it’s been! The promised update to The Dossier is inching closer. We’re still getting the finishing touches on the update process, and hope to submit the update to Apple early next week. You’ll hear it here first when we do.

In case you’re interested in the technical details of what we’ve been doing, here’s an overview:

Having multiple photos turned out to be a big ol’ memory hog because we were loading the entire image and displaying only the zoomed, cropped piece. As soon as we added the ability to have multiple photos, memory became an issue, so we had the rewrite the way we displayed and edited the photos.

It was also a massive speed problem. Having 3 or 4 photos on a dossier was taking up 30+mb (which is about the time that iOS says “hey, yeah. No.” and shuts down the app, and it was taking several seconds to open. With the changes, dossiers with a dozen photos now open nearly instantly, and take up a couple of mb, tops, with a jump of about a mb when editing, keeping us well below the crash threshold.
Coming up with an elegant way to associate a dossier with a contact was awkward. We’d tried a few different methods, but ultimately decided to keep it really, really simple. When you’re editing the title of a dossier, you can now select a contact if you want to from a popover. If you don’t want to, just don’t select anyone! If you accidentally select someone, simply tap the None button to have a dossier that isn’t associated with anyone again.
Migrating the data has turned out to be very difficult. In the current version of The Dossier, we’re storing the entire original image in Core Data. This turned out to be very, very slow (and prone to crashing). So, we’ve changed how we store the images internally, but this has meant working hard to make sure that when you migrate from 1.0 to 1.1 you won’t lose your photos. This is where we’re currently focusing most of our energy.

We’re profoundly affected by the comments you send us, both the positive and the negative, so please do keep them coming.

Big changes are coming!

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 15:00:42 -0400

When we first started writing The Dossier, we had pretty strong opinions about how it should work. Since we didn’t have the actual device, we had no idea how well those opinions would hold up to real world use. Now, a few months in, we’ve heard from enough people about what they like and what they don’t, and have reevaluated some of our opinions.

So, without further ado, here’s some of the big changes that are coming in The Dossier 1.1:

Dossiers now need to be explicitly created. When you start up the app, instead of seeing empty folders for all your contacts you will only see the dossiers you’ve actually created. If you want to create a new dossier, you tap the New Dossier button at the top. This was probably the single most common request from people.
Dossiers no longer need to be associated with a contact. When a dossier is created it doesn’t have to hook to a contact. You can create a dossier for any topic you’d like. If you do want to, you can easily associate a dossier with a single contact, and get the benefits from doing so (birthdate display, star sign, ability to view their contact info, etc), but if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. This is the second most common request.
Photos are not longer fixed to the top right corner. People wanted to put in more photos, and they wanted to position them in other places. So, we’ve made photos first-class blocks, just like clothing sizes and notes. You can position them where you’d like, and can have as many as suits your needs.
Search. You can now filter the dossier list using the search box in the toolbar. Another huge request.
Speed improvements. Load time for the application is now well under a second, even with hundreds of dossiers! Load time for individual dossiers is also greatly improved.
Stability improvements. All known crash bugs have been fixed.

We’re currently working on the finishing touches to make the update go smoothly for everyone who already has The Dossier installed. This may take a week or so, as there is a lot to keep track of. Once that’s done, we’ll submit it to Apple for approval, and will let you all know when that happens.

Thanks again for all your comments and support. It really helps keep us motivated!

Quick patches!

Thu, 20 May 2010 18:38:02 -0400

We just pushed out a minor update to The Dossier which fixes a crash if you put a space in someone’s Twitter username. Oops! :-)

We’re still working on a larger update. If you have any problems, don’t hesitate to contact us at support@thedossierapp.com.