Version 1.7 Released!

Version 1.7 of Handicap: Golf Tracker is now available on the android market.  The major change with this version of the application has to do with using the Play Round feature.  Now if you have started to keeping track of a round using the Play Round screens, your round will be saved if you exit the app.  Once returning to the app and selecting Play Round you will be prompted to continue the round or start over.  You can also now go to the Rounds screen and see the abandoned round.  You will be able to enter your complete rounds stats there if you’d like.

I made a small UI change to all of the screens in the application.  I added a title bar to each screen that should help distinguish each screen a little better. This space will host some of the ads when in landscape perspective.

The other change has been to the ads shown in the free version of the app.  I have removed the ads from the Add Round and Add Course screens to make entering courses and rounds easier.  I have also adjusted where ads are shown when the phone is in landscape.  This should hopefully utilize screen space better.

Please feel free to contact me about any additional functionality you’d like to see in the applications.  The changes above have come from user reviews and emails I have received from consumers of my application.

Filtering Rounds

As people start to play more rounds it can be a little more difficult to find specific rounds.  In an effort to resolve this I have added two new menu options about filtering the Rounds list screen.

Now when viewing an individual course you can now open the menu and go to a new round list screen with just rounds played at that course.  I thought this might be helpful to see how you’ve played a course in the past.  You can now see how you are trending at that course.

The second menu change is to the Rounds list screen.  Now if you press the menu button you will have the option of filtering the courses.  This menu button will navigate you to a new screen where you can choose to filter by course, year and/or holes.  Make you choices then click Apply and you’ll be navigated to a filtered rounds list screen.   To remove the filter just navigate to the Filter screen again and click clear.

I am using these new features to see how I’m going in my 9 hole league and to see the rounds I entered last year.  Hopefully this will be beneficial for those of you that play a ton of golf each year.  If you would like to have some more filtering options please drop me an email.

Backup & Restore

In a recent update to Handicap: Golf Tracker the ability to backup and restore your data was made available.  From the main screen you can now press the Menu button on your phone and the options to Backup and Restore are available.  This feature will backup your stats, courses and rounds to your SD card.  

Once you have backed up your data you can easily move it to another phone or your home computer for safe keeping.  To restore the data just make sure you copy the handicap folder with the export.xml onto your SD card.  Then after starting Handicap: Golf Tracker press the Menu button and choose to restore.  This will delete all current data and replace it with the data from the SD card.

I hope this feature will make it easier for people to move from phone to phone.  It will also make it easier for those that downloaded the free app to migrate over to the paid app.  As I’ve said before there will be advantages to owning the paid version in the future.  This feature should help those planning on making the switch.

New version of Handicap: Golf Tracker Lite

Voghan Apps is proud to announce that Handicap: Golf Tracker Lite has released version 1.3 to the Android market.  The new version has some minor usability changes in regards to ad placement and now the application has been localized to French.  

I am currently working on some major changes to Handicap: Golf Tracker which I hope to release  before the holidays.  The new features will include a totally remodeled Play Round section to the app and a export/import feature to migrate your data easily from phone to phone or from the free app to the paid app.

Productive Week

It’s been a very productive couple days for me. In the past couple days I’ve pushed out two changes to Handicap and release an ad supported version. I have a list of features I want to roll out for everyone but I ended up working on ideas that came up.

The first was to simply localize my application for English and Italian. I really have no reason to do this because I’m not seeing an traffic from Italian android users but it was a nice learning activity for myself.

I also added the ability to share your rounds or handicap with others. Now you can share your round via twitter with your friends. This should be a fun feature allowing people to directly brag about their golf skills.

I had been working on an ad supported version of Handicap for a while now. Originally it was going to be the slimmed down version of the app but for the initial release it’s identical except for the ads. I’m not sure how I will be releasing features but I’ll probably make it worth while to have a paid version of the app.

Localization

I haven't done much in my app lately so I decided to localize the app and rename it to Handicap: Golf Tracker. I was going to go with Golf Tracks but it was taken.  It's crazy to see all the different golf apps in the market.  When I first started developing mine there were a handful but now the space is packed.

Screens shots:

Dashboard

At last year's Google IO, a fair amount of attention was given to the Android UI.  I did not attend but there were a couple presentations made available online.  The schedule app Google made for the presentation was an example of the UI concepts they want to promote. One of the key features was the main home screen.  They referred to it as the dashboard plus gave a couple examples of it in use today: Twitter for Android and Facebook for Android.  I have recently gotten a hold of the source code and implemented a similar dashboard for Handicap.  Below is a preview.