It’s been a long long time since I last updated iWoman, more than a year to be precise. I have to admit the success of iWoman made me lazy. Why would you want to change something that is selling so well? In fact iWoman topped the Healthcare charts in several countries for a long time. Other projects seemed be be more important.
I have to credit my wife who kept bugging me about how I obviously did not care about we women on Earth. She is using iWoman for about years now and I kept updating her iPhone with the latest builds. For a long time iWoman was stuck right between versions, but suddenly – about a month ago – motivation returned. I wanted to polish iWoman into the jewel that is was so long ago and add all these features that customers kept requesting.
iWoman 2.0 is now (finally!) available on the app store.
Under the hood the database has been moved from basic SQLite to CoreData and all the graphics have been polished to perfection. Of course fully Retina. But that’s not all. Let’s start with what you’ve seen before.
iWoman 1.x basically consisted of just one table view what showed the cycles. That’s still there right at the heard of the app. But the colors and overall design are more visually pleasing.
Periods are still being entered the same way as before by pushing the Plus button at the top. If you tap on one of the cycles you get the cycle detail view.
You see that here we have a nice tapestry in the back and the individual days are now showing three kinds of smiley to signify certain symptoms.
In addition to this list view there are now two different kinds of view added that serve distinctly different purposes. One that many women have requested is to have a monthly calendar view. You can get to that via the “Month” button.
Besides of giving a monthly overview the calendar view is the place where you manage events and facts on a daily basis. You see the menstruation days marked with a drop of blood and the calculated fertile days marked with a green sprout. If you tap on the row for a menstruation day you get to the symptom details for this day. By tapping on the blue accessory button you see the detail for the whole period.
There is a new memo feature that lets you record freeform notes for every day. That’s also included for free. Then there are two more tools useful on the individual days: intercourse tracker and basal temperature tracker. Those are available via In-App-Purchase. The temperature tracker has a beautiful mercury thermometer to input temperatures. The intercourse tracker lets you rate the sexual encounter, choose a partner and specify whether a contraceptive was used. The purchasing numbers of these features will tell me which to develop further.
The third major screen is what I call “the Wheel”. It’s aim is to give an overview over the cycle and show with a clock hand in which phase the user is currently in. As far as I know this is totally unique for apps in this genre. You can rotate the center circle with your finger and the calendar in the lower left corner will tell you which day your are pointing to. This way you can go a couple of periods into the future to get a feeling which phase will occur on certain dates.
On iWoman 1 I had a view like this on the startup screen and quite a few requests where for a screen like this. But I did not want to just have a static image in the documentation. Instead I wanted to give something to play with something that shows how YOU are.
The wheel control is reused in one of the settings screens where you can choose how many past periods are to be used for calculating the fertile days window. When testing with live data I found that there is a certain volatility in cycles lengths if you record them for like 2 years. The basic Knaus-Ogino algorithm would then cause the fertile days to take up half of the cycle. So I let you specify to use like 6 past cycles to show are more up to date picture. Using more cycles increases the security. This way users can specify what’s more important to them.
The most important feature probably is the passcode lock, also available via In-App-Purchase. If you are indeed recoding sexual encounters or your cycle you will probably be able to lock the app from spying eyes. With the passcode lock you can.
Many of the components that I built into iWoman have already proven their worth in other people’s apps. This marks the first time that all of these come together in a single product: DTCalendarView, DTPurchaseButton, DTCustomSwitch, DTNotePadViewController, DTPinLockController, DTAboutViewController and DTChartView.
I am very excited to have iWoman 2.0 out on the app store before Christmas 2010. I promise to you that I have a renewed sense of duty to keep improving iWoman, so please let me know if you have any kind of suggestions or feedback for me.
Categories: Updates
