Progress with 1.7

Posted on by TheJoeFin

Update 1.7 is coming along nicely. I have added lots of changes under the hood and I have discovered the source of the crashing when sharing, saving, and printing on mobile.

The changes that I have made under the hood are not tied in so they won’t affect normal app usage. I am still experimenting with how to arrange and organize ink data with relation to the days. It is very simple to associate a month with an ink file, but when you start to move to weeks, or work weeks, or arbitrary date spans it becomes much more tricky.

The source of the crashing of share, print, and save was a result of low ram devices. I tested saving an ink file on device with 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, and 3GB. I’d been doing all of my mobile testing on my Lumia 830 which only has 1GB of RAM and I was experiencing the crashing. When I downloaded a few more mobile emulators I discovered it was related to the available RAM to Ink Calendar.

To remedy this for now I have added a line which checks for the available amount of RAM and enables or disables the buttons accordingly. Long term I would like to find a way to share, print, and save more efficiently and enable those features on more devices, but for now this will have to work.

Thanks again for using Ink Calendar! If you haven’t rated/reviewed Ink Calendar in the app store I would really appreciate it!

-Joe

What’s next for 1.7

Posted on by TheJoeFin

In the next release I plan to focus under the hood. This means improving the way I organize, save, and load data. With more organized data I’ll be able to manage more of it!

For example adding a week view is in the plan. Things that makes that strange. Weeks are not as organized as Months are. Their method of being organized is not as clean and consistent.

This means I’ll need to come up with a system of organizing weeks, their days, and their data. This should not be hard, but it is work that takes time.

In addition to hidden improvements I plan on going after some bugs which prevented some features from being available on mobile. Specifically the share, save, and print capabilities. When I was testing these on mobile without fail they would crash the app every time with no error. This makes debugging harder. I’ll be looking for new ways to tackle and fix this/these bugs in this update.

Thanks for using Ink Calendar! Feel free to contact me on twitter (@TheJoeFin) or email (support@Inkcalendar.com),

-Joe

Version 1.6.3 is on the way!

Posted on by TheJoeFin

This week I’ve been working on adding some intelligence to Ink Calendar. After selecting some ink you can add an appointment to the calendar. Using the Windows Ink APIs the ink will be converted into text and used to build the event.

The simplest implementation of this involves adding the text as the subject of the event on the day the ink is centered. More advanced implementation involves looking for time and using that to set the start time of the event. Furthermore if the ink spans several days the even should span those days as well.

LunchAt1230PMForWeb

This is a first implementation of this technique. Let me know what you think, how well does it work for you? Does it read your ink or not?

As always, thanks for using Ink calendar!

-Joe