After a ridiculously long gestation, the latest app I’ve developed is available on the Apple App Store – GAA Scoreboard from DubMatchTracker. As the name suggests, this app lets you track the score of a GAA match and tweet the current score.
Way back at the end of May 2011, a GAA obsessed friend of mine Ronan Gahan (one of the guys behind DubMatchTracker) approached me about developing an iPhone app so he could quickly tweet out the score of match. After a couple of to-ing and fro-ing emails, I told him it wouldn’t take long and I’d have time in a few weeks.
Roll on 6 months later and I finally had some time and threw together a prototype. Ronan and the DubMatchTracker lads field tested this over a couple of weekends. David Whelan in particular was a monster of a tester for us.
The first version started the user off in landscape mode and had tapable scoreboards. While I thought this was a great idea, no one realised the scoreboards were tapable. Using the app in portrait mode required two hands which proved awkward, especially in cold weather.
Armed with the feedback (and a request to use the Dublin colours), I rejigged it to work in portrait mode. The tapable scoreboard was ditched and replaced with a simple LED font. A few more weekend test runs shook out all the inevitable bugs and it was finally ready for the App Store.
One of the interesting parts of this app for me is that I’ve included the Heatma.ps library to track user interaction with the scoreboard screen. The library was trival to add and gave back results pretty much instantly.
At the moment, the preview button is getting a lot more love that the quick tweet but that’s because of working around issues during the field test.
I’d love to hear any feedback and comments people have about the app.