We worked hard these past couple weeks to make the Birdhouse app better for you. Here’s what we did over the past 10 days or so.
Begun laying framework for expanding the range of activity types available for logging and tracking
- We know each child is different, and with those differences come a wide range of behaviors and other details of daily living that are unique to a particular child or family. This week we started putting our plans and brainstorms to use in anticipation of making changes to Birdhouse to accommodate the unique needs of your family. We’re extremely excited about this and can’t wait to work with all of you to make sure it’s amazing.
Entering the final phase of work on iPhone and Android 2.3 – Managing medication and supplements from the app
- Being able to access medications from within the mobile apps (and not just on the desktop, as it is available currently) is going to make it easier and much more convenient to use more of Birdhouse on the go and improve its ability to help you make more progress with your child in less time.
- Had a call with Ryan about the remaining items that need to be addressed
- Created a special API for android app action button activity types
- Fixed the mobile response for Nutrition occurrences from true/false to integer so it saves with the correct info
- Distributed our new welcome screen and background texture overlay for updating to the latest design convention
- Filtered the dosage units api for most common + Other, for a more efficient entry process
- Create and distributed an autocomplete API for dosage units to go along with the Other entry option, for any dosage unit that we don’t suggest in the app.
- Worked on creating the last response attribute for mobile Nutrition api response. Teaching a computer to be able to communicate information back to you in a human-readable format is quite a task!
- Met with the team for a full review at Lantern Coffee
Making plans to keep the development team running smoothly
- Backups are currently costing us a bit more than they probably need to, so we revisited and optimized the current program
- Conversed with Anthony about helping with some more development work and his specialities
- Conversed with Rob to get his insight and support on upcoming improvements
- General follow up with individuals who are interested in taking on a development role with us
Started final prep to release a surprise new feature before the end of the month
- That involved a good ol’ brainstorm on what would needs to happen to release said email/reminder feature (hint hint)
- Fixed how we handle Poop when recording by email because it was doing weird things
- Tweaked reminder email content to fix syntax errors and such
- Started toying with history support to reminder emails
- Tweaked the reminder email wording
- Enabled email permission for our testers to have access
- Setup some notifications for when reminders are processed for evaluation
- Created dedicated page for managing your reminders
Much needed housekeeping and detail improvement for the app
- Fix how we load your child for Reports, because there were some occasional issues
- Reduced some unnecessary processes
- Started investigating and making tweaks to speed up the app (these are SORELY needed– lots more coming ASAP)
- Alphabetized the Nutritions and Therapies lists
- Change the color of incomplete/collaborator rows to match the new mobile version
- Implemented new messaging in the web app for testing
Overall Maintenance and Evaluation
- Checked in with new users and long-time users to see how they’re enjoying the app, talked through some challenges, and got some wonderful appreciation
- Evaluated downloads/installs/opens in the past week
- Are Lite users clicking the Reports nav link in the web app?
- Are new signups clicking the mobile app store links on the landing page after creating an account on their phone?
- Were there any Amazon, Android, or iPhone app crashes this week?
And that’s the latest low-down 🙂 Let us know what you think. We always love hearing from you.
– Adam