No Spoon Software Product Blog

Hey all, I’ll write a bit more in detail here in the next few weeks but I wanted to let you all know that Sparks for iPhone has reached a minor milestone and hit 1.1.0 today. Far from a bug fix release there are a few new ideas and concepts that have been added. Here’s a few highlights:

First and foremost, Jerry has delivered a phenomenal visual update. There are visual enhancements from the minute the app loads to when you lock it. There are more of these in the works and the aesthetic is a precursor to all the great things to come in Sparks iPhone and iPad. The messages, tables, backgrounds, splash page, icons, toolbars, everything has been redesigned or re-articulated with the user at the core of every choice.

Least you think I’ve been resting on my laurels, I’ve added a few bells and whistles of my own on the code side of things! Here’s a few highlights I’d like to quickly mention:

“Peek Mode” a.k.a. incognito mode. I hate to say it, but there are times when I want to see what’s been going on in a room but I don’t want to alert other users that I’m up working at 3:00AM EST and available for questions. This is what Peek mode is all about. From the Lobby tab, double click (or 2 finger single tap) on any room and the messages from the day are shown under a page curl. You’re now peeking in the room without joining. If the messages seem a bit out of date, run a refresh from the lobby. If you see the last updated date change (you know, within normal variance. Seconds are going to change even without a new message. ah relativity!) then there’s a good bet you might want to peek again.

Tab reordering now successfully remembers the tabs that you moved and will be saved the minute you make a change. The bug that removed tabs from the “edit” list is squashed so re-order away. My tab setup is: “Lobby - Pulse - Important - Search”.

Async and Parallel take center stage. For my tech/code savy geek friends out there, while looking at our overall plan for Sparks one thing was made clear: we can count on more than one core. The A5 chip has to be heading to the iPhone soon and the iPad 2 has it. We’re already highly async (as much as we can be) but this version is optimized for multi-core setups. If you’ve got an iPad 2 and you run Sparks for iPhone on it you’re going to simply be astounded.

It’s an exciting time for us; iPhone 1.1.0 is here and continues to evolve, alpha for iPad is just around the corner and we’ve a few more surprises up our sleeve that we’ll be sharing soon. We aren’t stopping any time soon and can’t wait to show you want we’re doing next! :) As always if you need anything holler to me: leon [at] nospoonsoftware.com