The Golden Hour App

It’s been a while, but I’ve finally had the time to update The Golden Hour to fix some iOS 9 bugs and refresh much of the design with a more modern look and feel. As the first app I ever wrote, it’s showing its age in some of the code and getting harder to maintain, so this update has taken a little longer than I would have liked. Should be in the store by the start of March, Apple review times permitting.

With the release of Golden Hour 3.1, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve been able to take advantage of Apple’s new App Transfer facility to bring Golden Hour back from my partnership to my own Apple account.

This secures the future of free updates to the application for both new and existing customers.

Yay!

We’re in the process of updating the site so please note that some of the images and descriptions will refer to the new version that launches in a few days time. The update is as always free to existing customers.

One particular feature that a lot of you may like is the improved date selection – when you use the slider for changing the date, there is now a date picker to help you refine the day you want.

As before, you still have the option of not using the date picker and using the day nudge feature that many of you seem not to have discovered yet 😉 Turn the date picker off in settings and then when you use the slider to set a rough date, simply tap below the horizon to the left to nudge the date down by a day or to the right to nudge the date up.

Some of you may have noticed that the Golden Hour website has been doing rather strange things of late – maps were taking a long time to load and clicking on maps would send you off to the middle of the Atlantic!

It seems that our friends over at OpenLayers have introduced a few breaking changes in their latest library and so we’ve had to revert to a previous version in order to restore normal operation.

Everything should be back to normal now 🙂

It’s been a while since I last wrote here so I thought I’d give you all an update as to future plans for Golden Hour. At the moment we have a designer working on a new look and feel for the application and also a new app logo which I hope you will all enjoy.

New Golden Hour Logo

As well as refreshing the look and feel, I’m working on making the sunclock page more informative with information on the current days’ events as well as a countdown to what’s coming up. At the moment you tend to launch the app and then have to switch to the golden hour tab for the extra data and this should just make it all a bit easier to use.

Next up will be work on an Android version. I don’t have an ETA for that yet and it’s likely to be early 2012 rather than 2011, but I’ll keep you all posted.

New year, new version and this time it’s a fix for a crash that some of you have been reporting. It looks like it was a memory issue because the app was crashing in response to a low memory warning instead of handling it more gracefully. I’m pleased to say that this afternoon we traced the fault and have just this minute uploaded the new version to Apple for review so expect notifications about a new version in a week or two.

*** IMPORTANT: Just discovered a bug affecting some iOS3 users. If you are still on iOS3 please upgrade to version 2.9

I’m also delighted to say that I can now count Poland in the list of countries where Golden Hour has made it into the top ten charts. It might only be a brief moment of fame, but it is much appreciated nonetheless.

Apple have just confirmed to me that the latest version of both Golden Hour and Golden Lite are now in store.

This was primarily a bug fix release for iPhone4 not saving your location across application launches but as I never like to do just a bug fix release, you’ll see there is a new feature that displays the length of the day so you can watch the days get longer and shorter more easily as we move through the year.

I note from a review in store that one user has been experiencing a crash with version 2.6. As you may know, we have no way of contacting users who report issues through the itunes store and would ask that you report any issues directly to our development team so that a) we can investigate for you and b) we can advise of any solutions. According to the only Apple statistics we do get access to, there have been no crash reports uploaded to Apple and so this particular issue is puzzling to us.

One hint we can give, is that in the unlikely event that you are experiencing a crash on launch, please visit the settings app on your device and select Golden Hour. Then turn the reset database and reset bookmarks to “on” (warning, this will delete any of your own bookmarks). Now launch the application again (iPhone4 users, please ensure this is a cold start) and this should rectify any issues you were having. As I mentioned though, we are not aware of any crashing issues so if you do have to take this action, please do get in touch so that we can be sure to correct any issues for the next release.

As a small consolation for the clocks going back this weekend across Europe, you can now purchase Golden Hour LESS THAN HALF PRICE right through until bonfire night on November 5th.

Just had the email from Apple confirming that the latest versions of Golden Hour and Golden Lite are now in store. For Golden Hour, this version adds the ability to change which year you are looking at as well as fixing a few memory related bugs for the iPad.

For Golden Lite the change is more significant because this is the first universal version so it too can now run on the iPad.

For both versions, the most important fix is for iPhone 4 users with the text on the golden hour now working correctly – trust me to pick the ONLY typeface that actually changed size between ioS3 and ioS4!