Today we released the latest Pivotal Tracker iOS app to the App Store. This is a major release that includes support for creating attachments, dynamic iteration calculation, and significant performance enhancements. We have also dropped support for iOS 4.x, which less than half of one-percent of our users have installed.
Add Attachments Directly From Your iPhone or iPad
Our customers who use Tracker to develop mobile apps and websites are going to love this: you can now attach photos to stories directly from the app. This makes it super easy to take a screenshot of a bug you find on your iPhone and share it with your team. We’ve been using it ourselves and it’s already our favorite feature.
In addition to attaching screenshots and other photos from your library, the app also supports taking photos directly from the app. This is a great way to capture whiteboards from meetings!
Dynamic Iteration Calculation
Iterations are now calculated dynamically within the app, allowing you to see the effects of your changes on your project’s backlog in real-time. As stories are dragged or edited, iterations will animate and change in response, allowing you to tell whether that change will delay your release or not.
In previous versions of the app, iteration information was calculated on the server and required a lengthy refresh in the app. With this release, you’ll have one less reason to wait while the app downloads the latest data from the server.
Improved Performance & Responsiveness
We’ve expended a lot of effort to ensure that every user of the app has a smooth, stutter-free experience with the app, allowing them to focus on quickly on the task at hand. To that end, our iOS app has been heavily re-engineered to take advantage of the multi-core processors on the iPhone 4S, iPad 2, and the new iPad.
The UI rendering has also been refined and optimized, resulting in velvety smooth scrolling. This should be true even for large projects!
Other Refinements
Besides the headlined items above, there are numerous small improvements we hope will make the iOS app an even more important part of your daily Tracker rituals:
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The acceptance date of a story is now visible and editable, allowing users to backdate accepted stories.
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The Search panel now displays an activity indicator while the project is searched for matching stories.
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The Search panel is updated as changes are made, ensuring the results are always fresh and accurate.
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Downloaded project data is encrypted on disk, ensuring sensitive project information isn’t compromised if the device is lost or stolen. To enable this, you must have a passcode set on your device.
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Remote changes to the project are now detected more reliably, and now defaults to every 30 seconds instead of every minute. The change detection interval can be changed or disabled in the Settings app.
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After dragging a story, the story is now animated into place.
The Future
Since our iOS app was first released over a year ago, our customers have taken to it quickly. In fact, more customers use the app than don’t. We’re committed to bringing all features from Tracker Web to the iOS app.
Tracker is uniquely able to provide users a “forests and the trees” view of their projects. As small changes are made in a project, Tracker is able to show the macro effects on your velocity and schedule as a result. Dynamic iteration calculation, which shows macro changes to your iterations in real-time as stories are moved, is one of the ways we’ve begun to highlight this unique aspect of Tracker.
Expect future releases to continue this trend, in particular as we begin integrating features like Epics. Stay tuned!
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