GAME.minder 2.1 with WiiU and PSV now available

In case you missed it, late last week GAME.minder 2.1 was approved and is now available on the App Store. The biggest news in GAME.minder land is that you can now track WiiU and Playstation Vita games. You'll need to make a stop in the info tab > settings to turn them on.

In addition to the two new platforms, we've also added the ability to share a game you are following via twitter. Now, when you tap the share button from a followed game, you'll get the choice between email or twitter so you can spread the word about your games even faster.

The last big change is in the search area. If you search for a game and there are results that fall outside your currently set filters, we now let you know so you can temporarily disable them to see what games you might be missing. We did this because we were getting a lot of reports about missing games that were actually just hidden by search filters or platform settings.

Other than that, there are several other minor fixes that should make the GAME.minder experience a little smoother. We hope you enjoy!

Expo Bingo, the game to play during the Keynote

Some of you Apple fans, you know who you are, will remember the keynote bingo cards of years passed. They would travel around the internet the week before a big reveal and were a fun way to participate in the speculation. Well we were shocked to discover that there was nary a keynote bingo game to be had on the app store! A situation we felt needed to be remedied.And late last week, Expo Bingo was approved. Free for all and universal for all iOS devices, Expo Bingo is a game we whipped up for the community that is just like the keynote bingo cards of yore, only even better.

When you launch Expo Bingo, it will check in and download the latest bingo squares so we can make sure the rumors are as up to date as possible. It also gives you a totally random bingo card so you really are playing against the world. And since apple isn't the only company with big presentations and huge announcements, we'll go ahead and set up a game for just about anything if you just ask. Aside from WWDC tomorrow, we also have games set up for the 3 big E3 presentations from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo this week.

And because a game like this is only fun when you're competing against others, you can share your winning board for all to see via Twitter or email. Go ahead and gloat!

Get it for free right now!

RE.minder hits 100,000 downloads

As of some time yesterday, RE.minder has had 100,000 downloads from the app store. In addition to thanking everyone who's using it and loving it (thanks!), I thought this might be a good time to share some stats, in case anyone is interested. Now keep in mind, we've only been tracking a lot of these since late January, but they should be mostly on target.

• 101,704 - total downloads from the app store (as of this morning)
• 136 - number of days on the store
• 747 - average downloads per day
• 244,949 - total RE.minders set
• 5,000 - average daily users
• 1% - percentage of users who have upgraded in app to the ad-free version (we expect this to grow when you see what's coming in RE.minder 2)
• 74% - percentage of daily users who average between 1 and 3 RE.minders per day
• 40% - average user retention (almost half of the people who try us, keep coming back)
• 958,474 - total sessions since we started tracking, about to crack a million!
• 428,934 - total sessions outside North America (almost half!)

But enough looking back, it's time to look forward because RE.minder 2 is nearing completion and we are so excited to show you what's coming. Keep an eye out for a RE.minder 2 preview, coming later this week. We've gotten tons of great feedback on what you want to see from RE.minder and we think RE.minder 2 is gonna blow most of these numbers out of the water.

Thanks!

GAME.minder 2.0.2 fixes the fix

Bottom line - GAME.minder 2.0.2 fixes the launch issues introduced in 2.0.1.  If you were just waiting for that so you can once again use GAME.minder, the wait is over.  Head over to the app store and download it now!  If you are at all interested in the technical aspects, or just plain curious please keep reading.GAME.minder 2.0.1 is a textbook example of how NOT to issue a software patch and we take complete responsibility for botching it.  There were two distinct problems introduced, either of which were easy to discover and easier to fix, if we had only bothered to look for them (we didn't).

#1  In our Post-Pax excitement, we were super hyped to get out a couple fixes, one of which had been plaguing us since version 1.0 - release dates showing up "off by one" on some devices.  This change required some fundamental, if not incredibly extensive changes to some of the code in the client.  However, it didn't change anything specific to any device so we didn't test as extensively as we should.

#2 If you keep up at all with the Apple development world, you're probably aware that Xcode 4 is now "final" and able to build software for the App Store.  Mistakenly assuming that it would be perfectly fine, we changed over to Xcode 4 from Xcode 3.x.

We then tested upgrading from 2.0 to 2.0.1 on all our recent devices (iPhone 4, iPod touch 4g), submitted it, and sprained our elbows patting ourselves on the back.

So what did we fail to do?

• Test on ANY older devices
• Test upgrading from 1.x directly to 2.0.1 skipping over 2.0

By failing to do these two simple things after a major change to the development workflow (changing to a "final" IDE that is really more public beta) we not only crippled upgrading (Xcode 4 has issues with code data migration) but we also made GAME.minder completely unlaunchable on older devices (The LLVM compiler with the 4.3 SDK generates incorrect code for older processors).  Not bad for a days work huh?

So learn from our mistake and TEST, TEST, TEST before submitting that latest build children. Thanks for your patience and we promise to be more careful in the future.

GAME.minder 2.0.1 brings major fix

GAME.minder 2.0.1 is now live on the App Store and is a recommended download for all users.Among a few other minor fixes, there are two big updates:

1. We've finally fixed a persistant and frustrating bug that could cause dates stored correctly in out system to display in app as one day early.  For instance, GAME.minder 2.0 would display as March 10th instead of the correct March 11th.
2. Due to lots of feedback, we've increased the number of actions before the boosting penalty sets in from 2 to 4.

GAME.minder 2.0.1 is a free update on the App Store so go download it now!

GAME.minder 2 in the wild!

Taking a few moments out of my PAX East Friday to officially announce that GAME.minder 2 is out and available on the App Store!We saw that some of you noticed very late last night and the leader board had more than 30 people by midnight eastern time. And sadly, we as devs no longer have the edge and we've all been ousted from the top spots - But nothing could make us happier.So if you haven't already, now's the time to head to the app store and grab the free update to GAME.minder 2!

Keep up with the Handelabranauts by heading to handelabra.com/pax

Don't forget to play

RE.minder 1.2.1 now available on the App Store

What's been fixed/updated:

• Even more speed improvements, especially when using repeating RE.minders.
• 5 more quick pickers: Tickets, Haircut, Laundry, Computer and Movie
• Fixed a bug where a deleted repeating RE.minder could still fire
• Fixed a bug where selecting "none" for the RE.minder sound could revert back to the default sound

And last but not least, a (non)shiny new icon!

As always, RE.minder is free download from the App Store.

iOS platform now live in GAME.minder

The astute among you may have noticed that there's a new platform on the block in GAME.minder today.  Late last night, we flipped the switch on iOS as a new platform in our system.  Call it a teaser of things to come in GAME.minder 2.One thing to be aware of, as with the 3DS platform launch, the support graphics for iOS won't show up until you download GAME.minder 2 on March 11th so don't panic, nothing's broken, just... incomplete.

For those who don't yet know, GAME.minder 2 (barring any app store funkiness) will be launching on the first day of PAX East, March 11th.  If you'd like to know a bit more about GAME.minder 2, head over to our PAX headquarters at handelabra.com/pax.  There will be 4 of us milling about the conference and tweeting our whereabouts so please, if you're a GAME.minder user, say hi!

There's only two weeks left everyone!  Can you feel the excitement in the air?