Mealstrom Feature of the Week: Mealstrom 1.1 for the iPhone
Hey everyone,
This week’s big feature, I’m happy to announce, is the submission of Mealstrom 1.1 for the iPhone to Apple. This updated version — the first one I can truly call ready for the masses — fixes a number of glaring bugs with the original and also has a couple of enhancements:
- UI improvements: the UI (along with the rest of the program) was overhauled between the old alpha release and this post-beta version, but this version polishes it up quite a bit, from the fade effects on app load to the better look to some of the buttons.
- iPhone-based signup: the first release, sadly, didn’t give any of the users who downloaded Mealstrom from the App Store any way to sign up from their phone, short of navigating my iPhone-unfriendly site or waiting till they had a real machine in front of them. I’m sure I lost users for deferring that feature. No more! When Apple approves this release, you’ll be able to sign up from your iPhone and be directed back to the app once you’ve finished the process.
In addition, I’ve also done a lot of preliminary work on rebuilding the meal entry and meal viewing pages on the website. File upload is being segmented (a la Gmail before the snazzy progress meter); next I’ll be improving the whole layout and moving the images into a lightboxed gallery rather than loading them in their huge glory directly onto the meal. The final segment in this rebuilding process is to integrate the new Facebook story publishing form and, for the first time, add the ability to tag our friends. I don’t know how much I’ll get done this week, but I hope to roll out at least the file upload and lightboxed images by this update next week.
I know there’ve been a few bugs that some of you have found on the website. Thanks for your emails as always; I’m going to put some better error monitoring in place so I can catch these quicker as well. This is a small site run on the side, so there are bound to be bugs here and there. Thank you for your patience — things will only get better.
Have a great week and happy eating!
Alex
Updated iPhone UI
iPhone Signup Form