• 60 new units and currencies (including all the old European currencies obsoleted by the Euro). Convertbot now has about 520 units.
• New and improved way to select units. Hold the unit button for a split second, rotate the wheel, and then release to select a unit. The 3-step selection process can now be done in 1.
• The unit selection animation is now faster so there’s less wait time between selecting units.
• Updated Settings UI
• Search added to enable/disable units section.
• New support section in settings for easy access to help topics, contacting support, and providing feedback/suggestions.

Here are a few screens of the updated settings:

And here’s a quick and dirty demo of the new way to select units (the old ways still work as well):

And finally, we should mention that we feel Convertbot has matured enough to justify a higher price point. So once 1.5 is released, the price will become $1.99 USD. So if you haven’t purchased Convertbot yet, you better get it at 99 cents while you still can! Convertbot 1.4 is available now on the app store. Convertbot 1.5 is currently being tested and localized. It should be submitted to the App Store within a week or 2.

Stay tuned for info on the upcoming Weightbot update and then Pastebot soon after.

Weightbot 1.4

So what’s new? Not much on the outside. OS 3.0 has enabled us to re-engineer the date and weight select scroll views so that they behave as they should. You can now scroll faster and enter weight data back 10 years. We’ve also added a few tap gestures to make things a bit easier. Double-tapping each end of the date view will quickly scroll you forward or back 30 days. Single-tapping the weight-select view will move you one-tenth of a number while double-tapping will move you to the nearest whole number. And that’s pretty much it for this Weightbot update. Remember, this update requires OS 3.0.

We also wanted to quickly mention that the updated graph views are still in the works.

Convertbot 1.4

Convertbot 1.4 is in its final stages of development. Here’s what’s new:

Calculator

We’ve gotten a few requests for the ability to do calculations in Convertbot so we added a simple calculator. We made this optional so if you don’t need this feature, you can still have the simple number pad. It’s disabled by default. As you can see in the screenshot, we had to make slight UI changes to the number pad for consistency.

(Click the image to view the full interface.)

Copy and Paste

You can now copy and paste numbers in Convertbot. To access this menu, just hold down the LCD for a second.

(Click the image to view the full interface.)

Other Options

Aside from the ability to enable/disable the new calculator, we’ve added 2 more options that may be useful to you. The first option is the ability to disable the automatic currency updater. This has been requested by many international travelers in order to conserve data consumption. We’ve also added the ability to limit decimal places for your conversion results.

A few new units will be added, but the final list hasn’t been determined yet. This next release of Convertbot will also be OS 3.0+ only. It should be submitted to Apple in about week or so.

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.

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.

Getting Started

The first step was to set up the groundwork for the application. What is the primary purpose of this application? Who is the target audience? What are the bare minimum features this app needs and what features can we add that the competitor’s apps don’t have? It’s all about balance. Features alone don’t make a great app. As developers, we needed to carefully decide what features directly supplement the core directive of the app and cut ideas that may have been “cool”, but removed focus.

The audience was also an important factor. We were targeting casual users with Convertbot. As with Weightbot, we knew that a small percentage of professionals and enthusiasts who need to convert numbers daily might find our app “over-produced”. But designing for our core audience was key and we had already proven it to be successful with Weightbot.

Designing the Interface

It didn’t take long to come up with a working solution for the interface. After 5 quick sketches on paper, I had an idea of what I was trying to accomplish. The iPod-like radial dial was a very early design decision and it really gave me direction for the app. One of the drawbacks with the Weightbot scroller was that because it’s linear, you had to keep scrolling to go from one end to the other. You also had to keep lifting your finger to scroll continuously. So the radial scroller was the perfect solution for Convertbot. It also provided nicely-balanced geometric shapes for buttons and negative space.

The look and feel of the app had to build upon the Tapbots Brand. At first I wasn’t sure if I should introduce a new color instead of white. But since it was only our second application, I felt that sharing a similar color scheme with Weightbot would be best for building the brand up. The same went for the general UI layout. I wanted to create something new, yet familiar to Weightbot users. I’m pretty happy with the results of the interface. It even makes Weightbot look somewhat dated now.

The User Experience

The 3-Step Unit Selection Process

We’ve had a few complaints about this and I knew this would be a an issue for some the moment I asked Paul to implement it. But I have good reason for it (in my opinion anyways) and I have no plans to change it. Our primary goal for Convertbot wasn’t for it to be the most efficient unit conversion app there is. If that’s what you are looking for, there are plenty of nice conversion apps that get you from point A to point B in the shortest amount of clicks. Our goal was to make unit conversions fun and enjoyable. I wanted to separate the conversion steps into little tasks that need to be completed. It gives a sense of satisfaction when you’ve completed a unit selection sequence or shock if you press the wrong button, almost like a game. Regardless of whether the feedback is positive or negative, it brings out emotion in the user and that was my goal. Once you get used to it, there’s a sense of satisfaction and rhythm to the process. It’s very subliminal, but it’s there.

There’s also pseudo-realism in the way the mechanics of the app works. I say “pseudo” because they are obviously not based on physics of the real world, but in the mechanical world I have created within the application. In this world, the unit tile that’s currently selected resides behind each button. When you press the FROM or TO button, you can see the selected tile slide out from behind to the top position. In this world, the selected tile needs to slide back behind the button it belongs to before any other action can take place. I’m assuming most people never notice and others probably don’t care, but I think the extra step contributes to the believability of the world I’m trying to create in our apps.

Limited Data

Limiting the amount of categories and units was a conscious decision. The biggest disadvantage to our radial scroller is that it can become a pain when you have to scroll through dozens and dozens of categories and units. If we shipped with 20 categories and 100+ currency units, I guarantee that we would have received far more complaints. So we decided to ship v1.0 with the same list of categories and units Apple provides in their dashboard widget (as well as cut down on the list of currency units) until the next major release. Rest assured, v1.1 will allow the user to enable/disable categories and units as well as bring along a handful of new ones.

What is Intuition?

There is a slight learning curve in using Convertbot, but we don’t see that as a bad thing. Our apps are designed more like a game. Whenever you play a new video game, you need a little time to learn how the game works and how it controls. Even the most well-designed game interfaces require time to learn and get comfortable with. But with time, a good game becomes natural and even second nature. We hope that’s the case with Convertbot. Considering the most popular categories in the app store are both games and entertainment, making our apps a bit more game-like was a solid decision. We also added an auto-playback demo for users to learn how it works which is a lot like in-game tutorials in today’s video games.

The Hurdles

Designing Convertbot was not without it’s challenges. The biggest hurdle was early on when we had to implement the scroll wheel. Each tile is actually a separate image which has to line up perfectly to create the circle. The math has to be spot on otherwise cracks appear between the tiles. Several attempts in photoshop proved to be unsuccessful so I had to move to a more precise tool, Illustrator. With that I was able to build pixel perfect tiles by entering coordinates for each point. For the longest time I was worried that the scrolling wheel just wouldn’t work, but persistence really paid off in both the design and programming.

The category icons were another challenge. I dreaded working on them until the very end. As simple as they may seem, icons aren’t a big strength of mine. And making a family of them was a challenge, but they seemed to work out in the end.

That’s about all I can think of saying about Convertbot. If you have any questions or comments related to the design of this app, feel free to write in the comments below. I’ll try to answer them as best as possible.

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.