Mobile Evolution - Thoughts, insight, and experiences related to the mobile software industry

Date Wheel is not your usual date calculator. While it may have been said that "anyone can write a date calculator," not everyone can write a GOOD one, and we like to think ours is the best. Date Wheel has won awards in the past and has been recently nominated in the 2009 Best App Ever Awards, sponsored by 148apps, in the category of "Best Time Management". This post was inspired by Dan Grigsby's challenge over at Mobile Orchard and will spell out some key features and design insight in an award-winning app that has celebrated a decade in existence. Read on to see if you agree and, if so, please nominate us by Dec. 31, 2009, and/or vote for us in January if we make the cut. Thanks!

Date Wheel 1.1.0 update is now live on the AppStore today. The update increases the number of calculations you can save, adds accessibility for visually impaired, plus includes optimization.

We are pleased to announce that we've uploaded a new update to DateWheel.net today. The new version updates the web application to add better support for Internet Explorer 8 and to add localization for Portuguese. In addition, included in this release are some bug fixes and optimization to increase performance.

DateWheel.net is a date calculator that can be accessed via your PC or Mac's browser. We also have a mobile-optimized version for mobile smartphones with browsers, such as iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Nokia, and Pre. Native versions of Date Wheel are also available on the iPhone and Palm OS mobile devices. Please visit the about page for more information.

UPDATE: Date Wheel is now showing up for sale on the AppStore. Here's the iTunes link.

We just received the email for which we've been waiting--Date Wheel has been officially approved for sale on the AppStore! Should be a few hours before you can access it for purchase. We're very excited to finally release for iPhone. We'll keep you posted and provide links as soon as we know. In the meantime, feel free to follow DateWheel on Twitter for up-to-the-moment updates. We also ask you to please submit a review if you would. Thanks!!

We finally submitted Date Wheel late last night to the AppStore. Now we wait. Apple has a new feature when you log in that tells you how long a typical AppStore submission will take. According to Apple, right now "96% of applications are being approved within 14 days." So, to show you what Date Wheel can do, I took a little screenshot showing the estimated timing if we are among the lucky 96%.

If you want to be notified of when Date Wheel for iPhone is ready for sale,

Today we announced at Creative Algorithms that our Palm OS apps, Trip Boss and Date Wheel, have been "Classic Certified" for the MotionApps emulator app "Classic" for the webOS on the Palm Pre. (full press release here). What exactly does this mean?

Palm Addict, one of the oldest community blogs, focused on mobile, just handed out awards to two of our software titles, Trip Boss and Date Wheel.

Many blogs and websites use Google Adwords to advertise their product and/or use Adsense to bring in ad revenue. The Adwords model is strongly based on HTML content of the landing page to drive its mysterious "Quality Score" for keywords. The Adsense model uses the HTML content of the website to serve applicable ads. However, as non-HTML-based web applications become increasingly popular, can this current model survive? Or will Google have to rethink their algorithm to support this type of website? We've tried to use Adwords to drive traffic to our new web applications, but Google's current model is completely incompatible. In addition, we had to sacrifice some functionality in order to support the sites with Adsense. This post will describe our experience, layout our frustrations, and challenge the keyword marketing crowd to find a solution.

As the AppStore fills up, and reviews are not properly moderated, finding the right app is becoming more and more difficult. The reviews range from valuable, to helpful, to outdated, to shameless plugs (for the app or its competition), to commentaries on any pricing that isn't free, to absolute gibberish. Since you cannot try before you buy (in most cases), and the star rating has little relevance, a user must wade through (in some cases) hundreds of the reviews to get an idea of what to download or buy. In many cases, these reviews are not even made by people who have purchased the app, so again their relevance is questionable. A few enterprising websites have decided to take action by providing a Digg-like experience for finding apps.

This week we released our Date Wheel web application. We moved the desktop version out of beta and released the iPhone formatted web app version. You can access both versions at datewheel.net. The website will detect if you are coming from an iPhone or iPod touch or desktop/laptop computer and render accordingly.