At the start of each new year both personally and professionally most of us look down the road and make plans and set goals.  Some call these new years resolutions.  Its energizing to look a the new year a clean blank slate and imagine all the great things that will come….(imagine the sound of the needle scratching the record) Then the reality sets in.

Take for example the recent Informant iOS 5.41 release.  We were notified in October that our long time weather feed provider would be ending their weather feed on 12/31/18.  We had a long history with them and hated to see them go but such is life so to speak.  We did some research and found a new provider and development began.

We had the new weather feed working rather quickly and anticipated releasing the update well before the end of December.  Our target was before 12/23/18.   We had the application submitted to Apple well in advance of our desired release date, and before Apple shut down for the holidays.  To our surprise Apple rejected the application for items, unrelated to the weather update, that they have approved for the last 3 years.  We corrected the items they asked us to and resubmitted, this time the application was rejected again for different items, unrelated to the weather, and again items which had been going through approval for the last 3 years without issue. This cycle went on for a couple more rounds which caused the 5.41 updated to be delayed in getting out to our customers until 1/5.  No new developer guidelines were posted but it seems that some things that had not been enforced over the last 3 years were now being patrolled and we had to make a handful of minor changes.  None affected the application operation most all were essentially regarding the presentation method of the information related to the subscription description. In their most recent reject Apple said that the Informant Settings screen looks “too much like Apple’s General Settings”. Which is really quite strange since in the

Quote from Apple design guidelines for iOS

For now, we are back to our roadmap and  back on track with our 2019 plans.  In 2019 our focus is on the details of Informant, we feel that it is the details that separate the really good applications from the excellent applications.  Informant has been on an aggressive path of new items for the last couple of years.  From a totally new user interface for Informant 5  coupled with a new and revised framework, updates for the new iOS devices without home buttons, and revisions to nearly every subsystem our focus has been on making those things the best they can.  During this time we’ve been collecting a good number of usability fixes that many of you have sent in and a few requests for minor changes that simply make sense for the entire application. By themselves any one of these fixes will not be much of a game changer but in whole, these details will smooth out some rough edges, streamline some other areas, and ultimately will elevate Informants overall quality and feel to even higher levels than they are now.

We may have to take a detour here and there for various reasons as even the best laid plans….well you get the point.

Have a great 2019!!!