Goalbook 1.5

Filed under Development, Design, Update, Goalbook

In the last post I mentioned sales declined dramatically, after appearing as a featured app for some time in the App Store. I submitted Goalbook 1.5 a couple of days ago and I hope to boost sales a little bit and cover some of the essential things people had been requesting.

One of the things that had a negative impact on the sales and reviews was the lack of functionality. When I started developing Goalbook, I set out two goals for myself:

1. Create a gorgeous looking app.
2. Simple functionality, no hassle.

The big difference with a normal todo list is mostly due to design and functionalities like: sharing, viewing other peoples goals, images, tweets and a map with goal locations.
But after launch it quickly came clear the functionalities didn’t live up to people’s expectations. These high expectations are mostly due the looks and feel of the app and my wrongly formulated app store description which stated goalbook offered tracking functionality, but this tracking was only limited to a completed and not completed goal state. I should have made clear Goalbook offers simple functionality for keeping goals.

I got a lot of positive reactions. Some, which I will discuss below:

Macstories wrote a great article about Goalbook, you can check it out here.

Eye-popping iPhone and iPod touch application, Goalbook
If your a fan of applications that burst with beautiful pixels, I would not stop reading right now.
Goalbook is floored with an incredible interface that’s shines of

Guys, let’s quit drooling over the pretty and get to the nitty gritty

Some Itunes reviews:

If you have goals & want to be something in your life or want to accomplish a goal. This is the app for you! best app I ever purchased! I recommend this to you if you have goals you want to pursuit & achieve! 5 stars all the way
A great app to jot down your goals, graphically pretty!

Overall people and reviewers gave me positive reactions about the design/concept of the app. But now onto a couple of negative reaction's:

These folks have a great idea but, the app is useless as is.
This app doesn't do anything. They say it has goal tracking it does not. Only has goal completed or not completed. This is not goal tracking. Nice design but has zero substance.

People don't realize I am an independent developer, still going to school and therefore I mostly have to do all the work in the evening and night also working on such an app takes a lot of time. And because of my wrongly formulated app store description I got some negative reviews/ratings.

Now I am working as hard as I can to improve Goalbook with more features and functionalities. And Goalbook 1.5 will be the first step in that direction.

Goalbook 1.5 has the following changes:

*FIXES*
- Fixes critical iOS 4 bug, when adding goals
- Fixed iOS4 text alignment when writing on the cover
- Fixed rating on the popular goals section
- Some minor things

*NEW*
Removed filter options, replaced by order by:
- Priority, Progress, Completed, Name, Date created, Due date

Added goal options:
- Progress %, Priority stars, Due date, Categories

Rearranged goal edit view, to make room for future functionalities.
Goal sharing is disabled by default.

This update covers some essential things people requested for keeping their goals in check. I worked pretty hard on this update so I hope everyone will like it. As usual I tried to build some realism and metaphors into this update. For example you can see paper tabs slides in view when pressing on the category button. At this moment you can only select one category, by doing this you will see the tab animate tightly to the paper and gets fixed by adding a paperclip. And with the new order options you will see the front view curl up while the brown paper index tab slides downwards to reveal the order options.

Same thing while editing categories(not shown below), you will see a paper tab move across the screen with a fold line, which hints on the fact that the tab gets folded back when your finished with it.

This probably sounds a bit vague, bit I think you will get the point when your start playing with it.

Tell me what you think in the comments!

Two screenshots below:

Next update will bring localization, subgoals and some other things.
I could use some help on the localization part. So feel free to contact me if you want to help localize Goalbook into your own language.

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Goalbook 1.5

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