lil todo vee two

logo173x173

I’m working v2 of lil todo, the to-do list app I wrote for Windows Phone 7 last year.

I wrote lil todo for two reasons:

  1. Provide myself with a good to-do app on Windows Phone. Most of the to-do list apps I tried were utter crap.
  2. Learn how to write Windows Phone apps using Silverlight.

Because it was my first attempt at Silverlight and my focus was to get an app up and running, it wasn’t designed very well. It’s not horrible, but the model code isn’t very portable and contains a lot of things specific to Silverlight.

After writing the app, I realized I really wanted a Windows, Mac, and iOS version so I could access it from my other devices. Unfortunately, the design made it hard to port, which leads me to v2…

To the cloud! (And more)

Now it’s time for v2 and I have a lot of ideas already. Here are my goals for v2:

  1. Move to the cloud. A lot of users complained that they couldn’t sync their data in v1.
  2. Support more platforms. It’s almost 2013; let’s support Windows RT, Mac, iOS, and … command line.
  3. Keep the core model code portable. I’ll write it in C++ this time to make it easier to keep it platform-agnostic.
  4. Write the absolute best-looking to-do app on Windows RT. Most Windows RT apps I’ve seen so far are generic and ugly—no taste. Let’s see if I can do better.
  5. Support live tiles on Windows Phone and WinRT. A lot of users requested this feature in v1.
  6. Add notifications. This is another missing v1 feature.

Command Line?

I’m serious about the command-line interface. I’ve always thought that the best way to ensure that you don’t write too specifically for one platform is to intentionally design your app to handle a text-based mode. If you can handle that as you are designing for a modern UI, your business logic code should be fairly platform-agnostic.

My first prototype, which is partially working already, will be written in Ruby. Ruby’s a great language for rapid prototyping, although I’ve never really used it for that. My plan is to hash out the overall design using Ruby and via a command-line interface. Everything will be done using CLI and will save to temporary storage (maybe not SkyDrive or Dropbox yet). However, the concepts should be absolutely the same as the final product, which I will write in C++ and overlay with a platform-specific UI (i.e. XAML stuff on Windows RT/Windows Phone, and Cocoa stuff on Mac/iOS).

Watch this space for updates during the holidays!

grinch-cindy-lou-who

App download stats after 14 days

I now have stats for lil todo, a WP7 app, for 14 days. lil todo got published to the Windows Phone Marketplace back on April 9th, and because of a 6-day delay to stats for the Marketplace, I have data for up to April 23.

The grand total after 14 days is 218 downloads, which is an average of 15.57 downloads a day. However, the trend looks pretty grim:

The graph you see above is the number of downloads per day from 4/9/2011 up to 4/23/2011.

It’s a pretty steady trend towards zero downloads a day. On the 23rd, there was only 1 download. Granted, I haven’t done much advertising of this app, so take what you will out of these numbers.

Some thoughts and random points:

  • there are about 100 to-do apps in the marketplace (there were maybe 15-20 when I first started developing mine), so there’s a lot to choose from
  • most people aren’t likely looking for to-do apps, but they are searching for games, I imagine
  • do most average people know about the marketplace at all and how to download apps?
  • this app is free and has no ads, so price isn’t holding people back from downloading it
  • the second peak you see at 4/18 occurs around the same time as I updated the app, so it’s possible it showed up in some sort of “updated apps” page (?)
  • the reason for the big debut was most likely the huge visibility of the app in the “new apps” page when browsing the marketplace
  • my app shows up on page 5 of the “Productivity” category in the Zune app. I assume you move up the pages with more downloads.
  • the app has around a 4.5 rating with 8 ratings. That means 8 out of 218 people rated it
  • I’m not sure the new, eye-catching app icon for the 4/18 update made a whole lot of difference
  • there were 19 downloads in Germany, 21 in the UK, and 127 in the US. All other countries are in the single-digits each.

At the end of the day, though, you have to admit, 218 people downloading an app is a pretty darn small amount. I should try writing a simple fart app as an experiment to see how many downloads I can get from that. 🙂

UPDATE: I checked the stats again and they have been updated. The 4/23 number is now 8 downloads and the following two days (not originally in the graph) are 9 downloads each. From this small sample, it looks like downloads may start to settle at around 8-9 a day.

 

Early marketplace download stats

My app, lil todo, has been in the marketplace for about 10 days now, since April 19, and I now have some numbers

For the first four days: 131 downloads. (The marketplace has a delay of something like 6 days for data, so I don’t have anything beyond 4/13.) These are early numbers, so let’s see if there’s a trend of some sort. Also, at this point there are 7 reviews of the app, and they are all 4 or 5 stars.

This app is totally free (no ads or fees) and a kind of experiment for me, so once I have more interesting data, I’ll share it.

Saul Bass-like WP7 icons

Just playing around with new icons for lil todo. I’m not sure if I’m going to stick with these yet.

The whole Metro aesthetic would really work with Saul Bass-style imagery. I’m surprised there aren’t a lot of apps doing it yet, though I suspect most graphic designers have iPhones.

Speaking of Bass, check out this book that he illustrated.

UPDATE: The above were inspired but not Bass-y enough, so I went back and tried to be bolder and more cliched. 🙂