Version 1.2 lets you connect multiple devices to your Mac at the same time. If you copy something on the Mac it’ll show up on all your connected devices. If you Paste something from your iPhone/iPad, you’ll get the choice of either sending it to the Mac or to your other connected devices. It’s all pretty cool and should make life easier for all of us with multiple devices.

Pastebot has no eyes for you.

You may have noticed Pastebot v1.2 has an updated app icon. About 2 weeks ago we received a letter from a company claiming that our old Pastebot app icon infringed on their trademarked face logo. After consulting with different lawyers, we were given two simple choices. Try to settle with the company or spend upwards of $250k in legal fees to fight it. We feel that the logos, market and customer base are different enough that we aren’t infringing on their trademark, but we don’t want to waste our time and energy in a protracted legal battle. We want to focus on creating software. After much discussion we decided that the best solution for us was to just settle with the company. We originally suggested changing the color of our icon but that wasn’t sufficient enough. Removing the eyes was the only solution that didn’t make Pastebot unrecognizable and appeased the other party.

We’ve been asked not to publicly identify the company, so don’t ask us who it was. I will say that their trademark was issued before Pastebot was even started, so this isn’t a case of a company using trademark to extort another company. Trademark is also an interesting brand of law in which you have to proactively defend against anyone you think is infringing on your rights. So while we don’t agree that we are infringing on their rights, we understand where they are coming from.

We aren’t happy that we had to change the icon, but really didn’t have a good choice. I’m sure that most people won’t be crazy about the change, but by putting this behind us we can continue to focus on our next app.

The Data

When Convertbot launches, it grabs the latest currency conversion data from our server. Using the headers that Apple includes as part of every HTTP request and a couple extra ones that we throw in for reporting purposes we are able to see unique requests by OS and device version through each day of June. The average number of requests per day is ~3250. The number of iPhone devices is about 6 times greater then the number of iPod Touches. I also filtered out anyone not running Converbot 1.3 and then normalized each day’s numbers so that each day adds up to 100%. The reason I filtered out anyone running an older version is because those folks aren’t likely to be impacted by changing Convertbot to 3.0 only.

The Graphs

The data seems pretty clear. Prior to June 8th we have a fairly low adoption rate of ~3%. Starting on June 9 this jumps up to 6-8%, which can be directly tracked to the developer release at WWDC. Starting on June 17th we get a huge jump as all the non devs start upgrading. We’re currently running at an overall 75% upgrade rate which is pretty insane considering the number of devices and the fact that its only been 5 days.

Overall Upgrade Rates

This graph adds up both the iPhone and iPod devices and just measures overall upgrade rate for both devices.

iPhone Upgrade Rate

Given how many more iPhone devices there are vs iPod Touches it isn’t very surprising that this graph looks fairly similar to the Overall graph. The iPhone upgrade rate is a bit higher then the overall rate, currently sitting at 79%.

iPod Touch Upgrade Rate

This is somewhat more interesting and shows the impact of that annoying $10 fee that Apple charges for upgrades. While the iPhone upgrade is almost 80% the iPod Touch has just passed 50%.

Conclusion

It’s somewhat early to draw an overall market conclusion from our single sample. It’s pretty clear that at least our customers are upgrading to 3.0 at an incredibly fast pace. We’ll be keeping an eye over the next couple weeks and will update this post as needed with newer numbers. As I said before we don’t currently have any plans to make Convertbot or Weightbot 3.0 only, though they both have been submitted to Apple with some minor 3.0 bug fixes (which are still pending approval). However, our third app will be 3.0 only, as will anything else we do after that. So if you haven’t upgraded yet, what are you waiting for?

Quick Update

To answer some of the questions that have been asked in the comments. The Convertbot 1.3 update rate is ~87%, if you add in folks running 1.2 that goes up to ~94%. There are a few folks still running the original 1.0 version which I find quite interesting. If you add in the folks running all the older versions we are looking at 70-71% as far as the conversion rates to 3.0 goes. And for those folks running the older version the OS 3.0 conversion rate is only ~37%.

Convertbot 1.2

The second major update of Convertbot adds localization. We managed to add in support for French, German, Japanese and Spanish in this version. Many thanks to Guy Parrot, Maximilian Schöning, Yuzuru Shiraiwa and Martín Marconcini for spending a lot of time in getting all the hundreds of strings translated over. We’ve also managed to sneak in a few extra currencies, speed up the launch time and fix a couple minor UI bugs. And just for our English speaking cousins outside of the USA, Meter and Liter are now spelled as Metre and Litre (though the “correct” spelling is kept for folks in the US).

Weightbot 1.3

For Weightbot 1.3 we finally added in the long planned Data/Goal view. This view gives a simple way to look at your progress in reaching your weight loss or gain goals. I think it adds an entire new dimension to Weightbot and makes the app much more useful.

We also did a bit of visual clean up in the app, this is especially noticeable on the main screen. Here are the before and after shots (the left side is the updated version):

The change is very subtle, but it feels more in sync with Convertbot. The first thing we noticed about Weightbot when we finished Convertbot was that it looked so dated in comparison.

Coming up

Up next for Convertbot is more units, we’ve gotten a ton of suggestions and we’ll be going through them and implementing a number of them. For Weightbot we plan a full re-tooling of the Graph view, we’re not ready to share details, but we plan to make them a lot more useful. We also plan to get started on App #3 sometime in the next couple weeks.

The Past (aka The Start)

Around the start of August of 2008 Mark and I were wrapping up a project at Oakley. We were chatting about something insignificant when I asked Mark, “Want to design an application for the iPhone? I’m thinking of doing a Weight Tracker”. I was thinking a simple application with a good feature set, a nice clean look to it. Well, Mark’s beautiful design had other ideas. After about 2.5 months of nights and weekends and about 70 custom classes we finally released Weightbot 1.0. The rest is history.

The Present (aka The Exciting Part)

We’ve been juggling day jobs with Tapbots for almost 9 months now. As of now that’s no longer the case. This month, Mark and I both gave our respective notices and we’re now going to be able to give Tapbots 100% of our energy. I think it’s nothing short of amazing that we are able to support ourselves with $0 investment (other than time) and all of it $1-$3 at a time. Weightbot sold 100k copies in its first 100 days, Convertbot is selling at about twice that rate. To say we’re excited about the future is an understatement. We’d like to thank all of you guys for getting us to this point.

The Future (aka The Big Plan)

So starting May 1st, we are both 100% focused on making the best iPhone software we can. We are putting some finishing touches on the 1.3 releases of Convertbot and Weightbot and hope to have them both over to Apple by the end of this week (just in time for the ADAs). Sometime in May we’re going to start on our 3rd application, we haven’t decided exactly what it’ll be, but the front runner concept should be really cool.

Longer term we aren’t looking to get any VC funding, grow to 100s of employees or get bought out by some big corporation. We may get help with support, testing and/or marketing, but development and design is going to just be us two for the foreseeable future. We think that’s the best way to keep the quality of our applications at the level that everyone expects. Our goal is to produce about 4 applications a year. We aren’t going to shovel out crap-ware to cash-in on our names. We aren’t going to write the next Office or Filemaker. We are going to write simple but incredibly polished applications that are created specifically for the iPhone/Touch devices. Two guys, lot’s of passion and a lot of hard work, that’s the Tapbots way.

There is no proper definition for a kilobyte. Most people think it’s 1024 bytes, however a number of organizations (IEC, IEEE, ISO, Drive Manufacturers, etc..) claim 1000. So we are left with a tough choice. Pick the value people expect or pick the value that the standards suggest. We’ve had similar questions to this in the past (like how many days in a year?) and I’ve always gone the way of the standard bodies. In this particular case, I thought long and hard about which way to go. I personally prefer a 1024 byte kilobyte, however if we had done that, what would we have called a 1000 byte block? Well, turns out that there is no alternative name for a 1000 bytes other then a kilobyte. On the other hand, a kibibyte is recognized as a 1024 byte block without any sort of ambiguity. So given all of that, I think the 1000 byte kilobyte was the least worst choice we could make.

Now I think one could argue that maybe the kilobyte should’ve been disabled and the kibibyte should be enabled by default. Of course the problem there is we’d end up getting a million emails with, “Where’s kilobyte?” or “What’s a kibibyte?” Maybe we should’ve just split the difference and used a 1012 byte kilobyte, so everyone would complain.

Convertbot Mini is Convertbot’s FREE little brother. Same UI that everyone loves, just fewer units and categories. Did I mention FREE? Anyways, go download a copy now! Even if you already own Convertbot, you can show your support by downloading his little brother and writing a review!

Enable/Disable Categories and Units

The biggest change for 1.1 is the ability to enable or disable individual categories and units. Just go into settings and you can customize Convertbot to only show the units you are interested in.

More Categories and Units

We built Converbot with an eye towards supporting a large number of categories and units. While we may not get every single thing in that someone requests, we do plan to aggressively add new units. Because of the new ability to enable and disable we now support over 100 different currencies and a number of new categories. Click here for an up to date list of new categories and units added to 1.1.

OK

OK, OK, OK we’ve heard a lot of requests to get rid of the need to click the OK button. Well the OK button is still there and can be used exactly the same as before, but you can now touch the From/To/LCD buttons without having to touch OK first. Convertbot will behave exactly the same as if you had touched OK and then whatever button you touched.

Increased button hit area

File this under a non obvious change, the hit area for the keypad buttons has been expanded. This should make it a bit easier to hit numbers on the keypad. The buttons still look the same, you are just now able to touch slightly outside of them and still have it registered. In the below image you can see the hit area as the red areas around the button.

Increased conversion accuracy

Not sure if anyone will notice this one but I tweaked the low level code that does conversion to use the NSDecimalNumber class instead of the good old double. This means that conversions should be more accurate then ever, though this is somewhat hard to notice in day to day usage.

Coming up next

Over the next few weeks we are going to spend some time on Weightbot (cleaning up the graphs and adding the long awaited data forecast view). While we are doing that please continue to send in your requests for new categories and units, we’re at a point now where we can add them in fairly easily so expect to see many new Converbot releases. Depending on how Weightbot work comes along we’ll probably also start doing some localization of Convertbot. I think we’ll start with German, French and Japanese and take it from there. Finally expect a really cool new announcement from us over the next couple weeks. I think it’ll make everyone happy, I know Mark and I are thrilled about it.

Update (04/09/09) : Version 1.0.1 approved!

We are still waiting for Apple to approve our 1.0.1 update. After 6 days they rejected our first release for something UI related, this wasn’t any new behavior it was just something that whoever was reviewing that day didn’t like. We resubmitted the same day and are yet again waiting. If it follows the same pattern as before it should be approved (or I guess rejected) sometime very soon. We’ve sent a few emails out to Apple to try to speed up this process but unfortunately haven’t gotten any response. Again the only changes for this 1.0.1 release was the fixing of the comma issue and the addition of a few more currency units.

1.1 is on track for being submitted to Apple on Monday the 13th. This adds a number of new units and categories as well as the ability to enable/disable any category or unit. For anyone interested here is the list of categories and units we plan to support for 1.1. If you find anything missing send us an email at support@tapbots.com.

If you read this far here’s a sneak peak at 1.1.

Currencies

We currently grab the currency data from Yahoo twice an hour and serve that up from our servers to Converbot whenever it launches. The code currently grabs about 130 different currencies so pretty much anything that you’ve ever heard of, and a lot you haven’t, is available to Convertbot. For release 1.0 we hid the majority of these units from the UI because obviously you don’t want to have to rotate through 130 different units most of which you don’t care about. For 1.0.1 we’ve enabled a handful of other currencies but have still tried to keep the list manageable. We of course understand that even with 1.0.1 we aren’t going to please anyone with a small static list of currencies. Which is where 1.1 comes in.

Conversion Categories and Units

We wanted to ship with a manageable number of Conversion Categories and Units for our first release. Again the goal here is to not inundate you with a million choices a lot of which you’ll never use or care about. We patterned our choices after the Mac OS X conversion widget since that’s been around for a while and Apple does a good job of trimming down options. That being said we never expected this original list to be our final list of supported Categories and Units. We expect to add more as they are requested and we release new versions of Convertbot. If there’s some Category or Unit that’s missing from Convertbot and that you really want please let us know. The Convertbot code was built to support a number of different conversions and so adding new ones is relatively simple, in a lot of cases the hardest part is going to be doing the icon for the Category. Regardless of how many Categories and Units we add we still want to make the list manageable which again leads into 1.1.

1.1

Our top development priority right now is to get 1.1 finished up. The main new feature in 1.1 is going to be the ability to Show and Hide individual Categories and Units. This will allows us to add new Categories and Units without overwhelming the main interface. Most of the low level code to support this is already in place within Convertbot and the rest is pretty straight forward and simple The part that will take time is to get the UI for this designed and implemented. As everyone is hopefully aware we take a lot of pride in our unique look and feel. While most companies might just stick a set of standard elements to let you manipulate your selections we aren’t like most companies. Mark will design the UI, I’ll implement it and we’ll go through a number of different iterations to try to get it just right. This takes time but we think the result is worth it.

So when’s 1.1 going to be ready? Well the short answer is when it’s ready and not before. Longer answer, sometime in April is the most likely timeframe. We will post on our twitter account once we submit to Apple.

1.2

We’re not going to say much about 1.2 other then we plan to add at least one cool new feature that I don’t think anyone has really asked for but that will add a new dimension to Convertbot. We’re not sure when 1.2 will come out but we need to do a refresh of Weightbot before we can fully hit 1.2.

Localization

The last thing I want to talk about is Localization. We both think this is very important and Convertbot will be localized in multiple languages. And yes for our UK friends we do plan to support metre vs meter. The trickiest part about localization isn’t the localization itself, its what happens after an application is released. Suddenly instead of having two people being involved in a release it mushrooms to possibly over a dozen. All these folks are in different countries and have their own jobs to worry about, so release complexity increases quite a bit. Robert Heinlein coined the term TANSTAAFL and its very apropos for localization. For a normal application I’d like to get the second or third feature release to be the localized one, in other words 1.2 or 1.3. Convertbot, however, is not your typical application and I think its more important to have it localized sooner rather than later. Localization will happen, I’m just not sure if it’ll happen before or after 1.2 (and if its before it may cause 1.2 to be called 1.3).

Well that’s about all I had to say, please stay tuned we’ve got things in the pipeline. Again if you have any Category and/or Unit that you want let us know, feel free to add a comment and we’ll consider all the suggestions.

Update (04/09/09) : Version 1.0.1 approved and fixes this issue

The Bug.

Early this morning we started getting some bug reports about wrong conversions in Convertbot. After some troubleshooting we determined that this is a problem that happens when a Phone’s International Region Format is set to a locale that uses a comma as the decimal separator (i.e. 1000,00 for one thousand). After a bit of digging around through the code I found the problem and fixed it with a very simple addition to the code. Within another hour or so we fully sanity checked the app and submitted version 1.0.1 to Apple. Assuming things go as planned that release should be approved within the next 7 days, though unfortunately this is totally out of our control.

So how did this happen?

In order to convert from one unit to another there needs to be a formula for the conversion. For example from Celsius to Kelvin we store something like K = C + 273.15 as a string. In order to use that formula we have to do some parsing on the string that isn’t very interesting to anyone but geeks like me. The problem however comes when we get to that 273.15 number. We’re using a class called an NSNumberFormatter which abstracts a lot of the complexity of turning numbers into strings and vice versa. The NSNumberFormatter code uses the Region Format settings to decide exactly what the user would expect a number to look like. Since some of the locales use comma as the decimal separator NSNumberFormatter was assuming that 273.15 meant 273 which is what’s causing all the havoc during conversions. For currencies a conversion of $1.35 to €1.00 would just become $1 to €1. The Fix was a single line of code to tell NSNumberFormatter to expect a period as the decimal separator when reading in data from the conversion formulas.

Data Integrity.

Obviously regardless of how cool a unit conversion application looks its pretty useless if you can’t depend on it to correctly perform calculations. Because of this there is a lot of automated testing code that was built as part of Convertbot. Every single conversion is exercised a number of times through these tests so that we can avoid a situation like this. Unfortunately neither the automated tests nor any of the beta testers ever tested using a comma as a separator. This is obviously in the process of being changed and each of the tests will be run through multiple locales to make sure this particular problem can’t happen again.

Work Around.

Again we hope Apple approves this new release as soon as possible. The temporary work around for folks affected by this bug is to change their Region Format to one that doesn’t use a comma. Simply go to the Settings app and Navigate to General -> International -> Region Format and chose a different format, United States as an example.

Apology.

I’m personally very embarrassed by this bug and its something that should never have happened. There’s really no excuse for it and we are very sorry that it happened. As we’ve shown with Weightbot we are only interested in producing high quality applications and we are very concerned with making our applications work properly for all countries. We’ve localized Weightbot for over 10 countries and we’ll probably do the same for Convertbot. We respect and go out of our way to respect any locale differences whenever possible (Stones as a weight unit available in the UK). Again we are sorry and will do better next time.