We’ve finally reached the point - the work on Cloud Calendar v1.1 has concluded and we’re now putting the final touches before releasing the update to the App Store. Some features made it into the release, while others did not. Let’s take a look!
iOS 4.2
We had been working on support for iOS 4.2 for quite a while. In fact, we had implemented almost full support for it about 2 months ago. We couldn’t make an intermediate release because by the time we had completed full support, other features were half-implemented and we were already in the middle of the next cycle. Thus we decided to keep going and include iOS 4.2 support in the next major version - so here it is!
There are some features that we would like to include in upcoming releases, namely support for native alarms and ability to sync in the background - those didn’t make it into v1.1.
Copy + Paste
That’s pretty simple to explain. You’ll now have the ability to copy and paste events, no need to re-enter them! Support for Cut will arrive in a minor update.
Additional Settings
In the last few months, we received several queries about adjusting the start of the week. Now, how does Cloud Calendar pick the week start? It looks into your regional settings which specify the start of the week. So if you’re in the US, Europe or Asia (and your iPad is set up correctly), it will just work. Of course, there is a very small number of users that need it differently from their regional setting and up until now, there was no way to do that. So, we have now exposed the ability to manually set the start of week, if you wish to do. We are also including options to adjust the default behaviour of tapping and long-pressing.
Pinch + Zoom
Another feature that should ease your workflow is the ability to pinch & zoom in / out to switch perspectives. So, for example, let’s assume you are in the month view and you want to switch to a particular week or day. Just pinch and zoom in to just switch to the week view for the week that you’re pinching in.
Contextual Actions
Instead of having to go to the event screen to delete an event, you will now have the ability to do that from a contextual menu. You can set up whether the contextual menu appears on a single tap or whether if you long press on an event.
Day Area Improvement
Another small improvement that we implemented was the auto-resizing day view area. If you have more than one all-day events, the area will now extend (up to a certain limit), so that you can see most of them.
Event Time Increments
Another little improvement we made was to change the time increment to 5 minutes (by default). On Google Calendar, you can be more granular and in that case, Cloud Calendar will automatically switch back to 1 minute increments if it detects such events.
Address Book Integration
When inviting people to events, you will now have the ability to pick their email address from the Address Book. No longer do you have to remember those addresses.
Help / FAQ
Another weak spot of Cloud Calendar was the unavailability of a user manual. Even though it’s fairly straightforward to use, there are a useful features that are not quite obvious. We’re in the process of writing a guide that will show users some tips & tricks on how to get most of the app.
Automatic Sync on Launch
We’re also including another feature - the ability to trigger a sync on launch. This feature is off by default but some of our users will find it quite useful. There are a few options to control how the synchronisation should be triggered.
Performance Improvements
Last but not least, we have been aware of some performance issues related to recurring events. We took a deep look at the problem and we identified the core issue. Unfortunately, completely eradicating the problem requires huge architectural changes that were out of the question for the current release cycle. Instead, we took a hybrid approach - we put in a lot of optimisations and included as many architectural changes as long as they didn’t break one of the core assumptions. As a result, working with repeating events is many times faster. Unfortunately, there are some corner cases where the performance is not up to the high standard we want but we will eradicate all such cases in the next architectural overhaul (most likely v1.3.x).
The Plan
Given that the majority of the work for v1.1 has now been done, we are entering the final stage - thoroughly testing Cloud Calendar. We need to put the app through a thorough test before we submit it to the App Store and given the significant amount of changes, it might take a couple of weeks to ensure that there are no major bugs.
Beta Testing
We had plans to start beta testing upcoming Cloud Calendar releases but we never got to do it because the next major release (v1.1) was not around the corner a few months ago. Now that the situation has changed, we’ll be more than happy to accept beta testers. We collected a few volunteer emails a while ago but we still have several places open - just drop us an email at the Cloud Calendar support email (see the support page) and we will get back to you.
