Pancake — Development updates
07/15/2017
The Beta is Out
Yesterday (07/14/2017) at about 3a.m. (Eastern Time) we released Pancake’s Beta. A very important moment for Rudy Rosciglione and I; and the response has been GREAT.
Feedback
As soon as the Beta was available the Pancake Community became active. Comments, thoughts, suggestions and feedback started coming in way faster than what we had expected. Some users wrote that the app didn’t work from the beginning. Others reported the bugs they found and some gave us some feedback and love ❤.
All of the comments we received were very neutral. A perfect example of constructive critisicim.
I didn’t expect this at all… In fact, i spent a lot of time reading reviews for Apps similar to Pancake and my mind started thinking about all of the the bad things people would write if the App wasn’t what they expected. But to our surprise all of the comments have been very easy going and helpful :). Keep it coming guys!
The Bugs
When i tried Pancake in my device i thought that i did a great job of covering everything and creating a “bug-free app”. — What. A. Mistake. — Three hours into release and users were already reporting crashes.
Users reported the following bugs:
- Login not working.
- Alarm not working when iPhone’s time is set to 24 hours.
- The app crashed when creating an alarm
- The UI got stuck when creating an alarm.
- Slow playlist loading time.
- The app crashed when trying to view profile.
- Private playlists not showing.
Rudy Rosciglione and i spent the whole day, and night, fixing these issues and trying out builds.
The most difficult bug to fix was the crash in the alarm creation view. After hours of debugging i finally found the cause of the crash. It turns out that the app was crashing because there was no error handling for playlists that had no songs or cover but still existed. I know, i know. It’s my bad guys… But im happy to announce that this is now fixed.
The numbers
After the feedback we have received, this has been the most exciting part of this Beta release. I know it is not colossal but we could get more than 100 Beta test sign ups and 500 visits to our website in 24hrs. We are very happy about this because we were expecting, at most, half of these numbers for day one.
What’s next
For now Rudy Rosciglione and I are focused on fixing bugs. I am very positive about the build we distributed today— v0.2 (7) — It covers all of the bugs that were reported and even adds some simple features.
After we are bug free in v0.2 we will start implementing more useful features such as:
- UI improvements.
- Animations.
- The ability to select between playing music in order or random.
- The ability to add a background image to the dashboard.
- The ability to add a background image to an alarm.
The end
Both Rudy Rosciglione and I are very motivated to build the best Spotify Alarm Clock. Today really opened my eyes as a devloper and i am happy we started building this product.
Feel free to contact me at @avzquez. I’m always up for a chat :)
