Wandle Software is now about three years old. I say “about” because the filing of the paper-work and then Apple taking notice took a while, so the exact date gets a bit blurry. In any case it’s around this time of year and we’ve just had a very big WWDC, Apple’s annual developer conference, so I thought that it would be a good time to discuss what I’m hoping we’ll see in the next year or so.
As ever, what I’m going to talk about here are less plans and more ambitions. There are no dates attached to anything and I’m not making any commitments.
Changes mostly come in two categories: things that I was planning on anyway and things that become possible because of new features in iOS 8.
First, because it’s the closest to being finish, is CameraGPS version 1.1. This is the first feature update to CameraGPS, adding a few features that I wanted to put in version 1.0 but never quite got the time. This will hopefully come out very soon and I’ll discuss the new features then.
Beyond that, iOS 8 has changes to both CoreLocation (how it gets the GPS coordinates) and allows third party Cloud storage services, such as Dropbox, to “plug in” to other apps. It’s unclear to me at the time how either of these changes will affect CameraGPS but there will likely be an iOS 8 update if only to assure compatibility.
At least one of the changes in iOS 8 comes a bit too late for Rootn Tootn. iOS 8 finally has support for the background blur effect meaning that I wouldn’t have had to implement it myself for version 2.0!
As it happens, of course, I did and I don’t plan on dropping iOS 7 support just so I can use the new and easy way of doing the same thing in iOS 8.
In short, I don’t currently see any iOS 8 features that it needs but I am in the early stages of planning another feature release. This may or not make it out this year.
One of the big new features of iOS 8 is “extensions,” or the ability for one app to talk directly to another. Since Yummy 1.0 in 2008 I have been waiting for a way to better allow adding a bookmark from Safari. In fact, this has been the number one source of poor reviews and features requests. The fact that I have not been able to do anything about it has been frustrating to say the least!
So it won’t come as a surprise to hear that I fully intend to support an extension to do exactly that. I am still experimenting to find out what I can do, but support will emerge in some form.
For the past few months I have been working on Yummy 3.0, a substantial update that takes advantage of the vast performance increase of devices released since Yummy 2.0 first came out at the beginning of 2009. Any new iOS 8 features will be in that and not the current 2.x versions. I’m yet to decide the “business” side (pricing or availability) or the minimum supported version (one possibility is to make it iOS 8 only).
Like Yummy, www.cut may be able to make use of the new extension mechanism. I will add that support if it makes sense.
Other
There is also the possibility of a couple of new apps. First is a small, utility app made possible by iOS 8. Second would be in collaboration with anther company and may or may not be under the Wandle name. Either way, you’ll hear about it here if it happens.
Wandle Software Limited is pleased to announce our new app for iPhone and iPad, ShareEverywhere. Made possible by the new sharing functionality in iOS 8, ShareEverywhere adds itself to every standard “action” menu, allowing you to share links and images to a wide range of services.
The first feature update to our newest app, CameraGPS, is now with Apple awaiting review. Hopefully it will be available to download shortly.
