Diary / Calendar View

Hi,
The app looks great, and I am really pleased to see that you listen and respond to users. I haven't begun to use it in practice yet, but the one area I can immediately see an issue with is the diary. A 2-week view leaves little room for much information on each day, and the list of events is mostly invisible as they are listed side by side across the top. This will almost certainly result in important events being missed! I think the app can replace my planner, mark book and diary, which is absolutely perfect, but only if the diary view is customisable to allow daily, weekly and monthly views and all events and notes are easily visible.

Many thanks for your work so far.

Hi ianmck,

We're working already on some major improvements for the diary, you'll have that monthly view,a diary report and you'll be able to add pictures and audio as well.

I'm not sure if we'll be on time to add the daily view for this upcoming 2.0 release , it will be there for sure on 2.1

Our initial thoughts on the diary were not to compete with the 'completeness' of iCal or other diary apps, we even had no diary on our first releases! That is why you miss some important features here, we'll keep adding features until we are there, it is only a matter of time.

For the moment, you can have a single week view by rotating your iPad and you'll see more iCal events if they don't fit, by scrolling from right to left , I know there is a lot of room for improvement here! Lets see what comes to mind for this next release.

Thanks for contacting us, find attached a sneak peek of our next release, hope you like it.

Thanks for the speedy reply, Bert. It's good to hear that improvements are coming. I understand your thinking about iCal, but what it means in practice is that the useful stuff (clear list of events, time and duration, ability to add or modify events) is not really there in the app and from a user's point of view it's just easier if the info is readily at hand in one place. Any idea at this stage how long between v2.0 and 2.1?

The rotated view does make a difference, so thanks for that tip!

Ian

Hi Ian,
Our deadline for 2.0 is in mid-August, we've been releasing a new release consistently every month since the beginning but needed some extra work from 1.7 to 2.0 .
So, if all the new features don't make it for 2.0 , by the end of September/beginning of October, 2.1 will be ready.
By the way, when does your next scholar year begin where you are located?
Bert

Hi Bert,

I'm in the UK. Academic years start at the beginning of September for schools, later in Sept or early October for University. However, I know already what my classes are for next year and I am planning now. I would like to do as much of my planning as possible within the app (i.e. make notes of lessons, assignments, etc as well as students and grades).

Good to see regular updates. Have you seen the diary integration that istudiez and iTeacherbook do? That looks ideal to me, especially because The teacher can set events and alerts from within the app, which sync with iCal. Incidentally, I think you said in a post on a different thread that you would integrate with iCal. That's fine for me because I use Google calendar and sync it all to the calendar on my iPad. I know some people who use outlook, and it would be worth checking whether syncing with iCal would also be ok for them because it's an exchange account.

One other thing I've noticed - nothing to do with this thread - is that my seating plan doesn't fit easily on screen. I have several rows of 9 desks in my room and, although I can fit them on, I have to squash them together. I don't see that there's any facility to resize the plan so it fits more easily. Also, how about snapping the desks to some sort of grid so that they line up neatly, and perhaps tapping on a student in the seating plan could bring up their record - attendance / grades / notes directly?

I know I'm firing a lot of requests here, but I know how valuable customer feedback is. I'm trying to help, not complain.

Thanks,
Ian

Hi Ian,
We have some planning tools in mind for iDoceo but for this next release we're focusing on improving the existing features so that we can add new ones later. It is one of our main worries not to end up with lots of half-baked features , we iterate over its until they are right, then move on.

About iCal/Google integration, still not sure about the final implementation, I'm trying to avoid any possible trouble updating external sources (and your info), that is why iCal integration only works in one way in the current versions, there is no way to do iCal data any harm... I'll see what I can do about that.

The seating plan needed some serious improvements, I know, it is done already and they'll be on this 2.0 . You'll be able to snap to grid, pan&zoom,view grades and check the attendance from that same screen.

Thanks a lot for the feedack Ian, do not hesitate to post again anything that comes to mind, we're listening!
Bert