a be | daronco production

Several users have reported issues with FitPhone and iOS 5, including my wife. There seems to be some sort of issue with the app taking too long to load on initial startup. When this happens iOS gives up and closes your app. Which means Fit Phone becomes useless since you can’t run it.

We do have a fix worked into the next release. The problem is that we are doing a major overhaul to the look of Fit Phone. So it’s taking us awhile to get this fix out to users.

We apologize for this. We really try to be as responsive to issues as possible. We can fix this issue for people without releasing a new version though. If you are experiencing problems please contact us at comments@bedaronco.com and we will send ong instructions on how to fix this. It’s a pretty quick process to get this fixed so pleas do t hesitate to contact us.

One thing we’ve always needed to worry about in our apps is trying to ensure users data is safe.  The majority of our apps store data that users consider quite important to them.  Because of that, it’s kind of a big deal if someone loses their data.

Our first solution was using SyncDocs to sync our data with a computer connected to the same wifi network as you iPhone.  We have now changed to use facebook sync using the facebook api and also by sending data to our websites using scripts we wrote and calling them by using the All-Seeing Interactive libraries.

If you haven’t used their ASIHTTPRequest and other classes to comunicate with webservices, you’re really missing out.  It really doesn’t get any easier than using their libraries.  Combine this with Kiss XML library and you have XML based messaging with webservices in just a few lines of Objective-C code.

Both websites give good overviews on their sites to make getting started very simple.  Here’s a very quick example:

// start the request in a class that implements ASIHTTPRequestDelegate
NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.fitphonelive.com/clayton/getEvents.php"];
ASIHTTPRequest *request = [ASIHTTPRequest requestWithURL:url];
[request setDelegate:self];
[request startAsynchronous];

...
// you don't need all these, just the ones you care about.  most likely requestFinished and requestFailed
- (void)requestStarted:(ASIHTTPRequest *)request
{
     NSLog(@"Request for data started");
}

- (void)request:(ASIHTTPRequest *)request didReceiveResponseHeaders:(NSDictionary *)responseHeaders
{
    NSLog(@"Received response headers");
}

- (void)request:(ASIHTTPRequest *)request willRedirectToURL:(NSURL *)newURL
{
    NSLog(@"Request will redirect");
}

- (void)requestFinished:(ASIHTTPRequest *)request
{
    NSString *aResponse = [request responseString];

    // do something with the response.  If it's XML use KissXML for an easy XML parser
    [self processResponse:aResponse];

    [myLoadingLabel setHidden:YES];
    [myLoadingActivity stopAnimating];
    [myLoadingActivity setHidden:YES];

    NSLog(@"%@", aResponse);
}

- (void)requestFailed:(ASIHTTPRequest *)request
{
    [myLoadingActivity stopAnimating];
    [myLoadingLabel setText:@"Download Failed"];

    NSLog(@"Request failed");
}

 - (void)requestRedirected:(ASIHTTPRequest *)request
{
     NSLog(@"Request redirected");
}

[Updated: September 11, 2010 6:48 AM]

Fit Phone 6.4 has finally been released.  It should be available to all users as a free update.  This should fix the “data loss” issue.  If it looked like your data was lost after taking the 6.3 update it should be back when you take this update.

Fit Phone 6.3 has a pretty nasty bug in it.  We released 6.3 to fix issues with iPhone 3G users with iOS4 installed.  In all of our testing we didn’t notice any problems.  Even after getting reports from people about losing their data we still had issues reproducing the problem.  We were finally able to get to happen on a couple of devices.  We’re not sure why it didn’t appear right away, but it doesn’t really matter.  Fit Phone 6.3 is not a good release for us.

The good news is that on all of the devices we reproduced the problem on, our data was perfectly fine.  We didn’t not lose any data.  The bug just prevented the data from being shown.  So we have a fix at Apple for review that should fix this issue for everyone.  It’s been at Apple since September 2 so we’re hoping it gets released very soon.  But we really have no control over it right now.

There is still a bug left in the update under review.  At times the calendar may not display the workout name in the bottom table.  All data is loaded correctly, it just seems like the table isn’t updating correctly.  We could pull the update back and fix this issue as well.  We have decided not to do this.  We feel it’s a much more minor issue and you can get to all your workouts by using the list view.  We want the fix for loading the data to get released as soon as possible.  If we pull the update back we will add at least another week to the review process.  Also, the names not displaying in the calendar view doesn’t show up for us all the time.  It has only occurred for us in about 1 in 5 launches and restarting usually fixes the issue.

We were getting reports of Fit Phone crashing for people at launch.  It looks like these people are using iPhone 3G with iOS 4 installed.  Apple has admitted (well, as much Apple will admit anything) that there are issues with iOS 4 running on iPhone 3G.  They are also allegedly addressing this with a software release.  We hope they do.

Until then we have come up with a fix to help people out.  The crash wasn’t really a crash at all.  It was simply taking too long for Fit Phone to launch so the OS was shutting it down.  So we moved our data loading so that it occurs independently of the launch.  It still takes awhile to load on iPhone 3G but it will load, and that’s the important part.

We also fixed an issue with online restores.  If you enter you name in the Body Stats section with a first and last name, or just any space in it, you won’t be able to restore body weight and body measurement data.  That’s getting fixed with Fit Phone 6.3 and it is highly recommended that you perform an online backup when you first start Fit Phone 6.3.  This is to ensure that you get the latest files onto our servers.

Update July 1, 2010: Fit Phone has just been approved by Apple and should be available soon for download!  Enjoy!  Read on for all the new features and bug fixes.

Oh iOS 4, why do you hate our apps so much?  We love iOS 4 but it hasn’t been all that kind to us.  The good news is we think we have all of our issues fixed and are ready for Apple to unleash them to the world.

First up is the stupid keyboard issue.  I won’t even get started as to why there is no number pad built into the iPhone that has a decimal point.  As it is we have to manually add a decimal point to that keyboard type and iOS 4 removed that ability.  We found a way around that so the decimal point will be back on all screens that require a decimal.

Now we can get into some of the fun and exciting stuff iOS 4 lets us do.  We have made Fit Phone work in the background.  If you leave the app while tracking a cardio exercise Fit Phone will now continue tracking your location and continue giving you audio updates.  So if you take a call while running you will still be tracked.  If you like to text and run, you will still be tracked.  I think you get the point.  And no matter what you’re doing in Fit Phone if you leave the app you will come right back to where you last left it when you enter Fit Phone again.  We like it and we hope you like it to.

We also have another backup option for people.  This one requires you to have a facebook login.  You login using your facebook account and we then store all your Fit Phone data online based on your Fit Phone ID.  So what does this really do for you?  It gives us a device independent way to store your data.  So if you have two or three devices you can login using your facebook account and be able to transfer your Fit Phone data back and forth between all the devices.  We are going to look into adding support for more account types in the future but for for now it’s just facebook.

There are a couple other bugs fixed with the new release.  One involving emailing a lot of results.  Another one dealing with the break timer and messing up the audio.  Hopefully those are all fully fixed as well.

We hope you enjoy it!  It should be available within a week or so.  Next up is trying to get Glimpse working on iOS 4!