Seriously Fish App?

[Matt]

This is something @dunc and I have discussed on a number of occasions and we have some ideas already but basically, we’d like to know what features you would like to see or find particularly useful should we go ahead and develop a SF app for mobile devices.

Also, iOS (Apple) and Android are two very different beasts so we’d be restricted to one of the two operating systems to begin with. Any preferences?

Feedback would be much appreciated please!

 

[dunc]

Please try to (separately) think “inside the SF box” and “outside the box”.

For instance, my initial thoughts would be a simplified, quick-access version of SF:

• Access species profiles
• Read news and articles

However, I’d also like to consider the following:

• Wide range of aquarium tools
• Take photos of your aquarium, with your phone, and upload to a “My tank” area of the website
• Forums, Q&A (only reason I haven’t mentioned these in the previous section is because the development will be more complicated)

Any other thoughts or suggestions? We’ll probably have to release a basic version of the app (essentially so I can learn how to develop apps…) first, then work on advanced features.

[BillT]

Based upon my personal usage, I would like the following features in an app:

• species profiles

• wide range of aquarium tools (I am thinking calculator type things like volume conversions, dilutions, chemical interaction ratios {how much sodium thiosulfate to inactivate an given amount of chlorine}, toxic ammonia at given pH/tamps, etc.)

• Although I probably would not use it, phone photos to the website would also make sense to me.

 

These are things I would be likely to want to use when walking around the fish room. Other things I would be more likely to access from my laptop in a more leisurely manner.

 

I use iOS and would be using an iPad, so I would vote for iOS.

[Matt]

Anyone else out there? 😀

[Sverting]

I’d vote for an Android. iOS is the minority of systems, so the choice should be easy.

 

Features:

-profiles – but first the search on the website should be perfected.  Try typing only “Betta” and look for B. splendens in the results.

-a callendar (water changes, feeding and stuff like that) with some kind of logbook(?). It would be usefull if You could upload certain info to “My tank”, like the water measurments or what You have fed your fish with, and also it would be good to store such info and be able to copy it to the PC.

-photo uploading would be awesome

 

Other tools would be also awesome, but are not needed for vanilla SF-app ;]

[dunc]

@Sverting said:
I’d vote for an Android. iOS is the minority of systems, so the choice should be easy.

Unfortunately it isn’t quite that simple! In the final quarter of 2011 Apple and Android had equal market share. Now Android is estimated to have between 55% and 70% market share, but the number of *cheap* Android phones being retailed (phones which will barely be able to run apps in a lot of instances, especially when it comes to photo uploading capabilities etc) is huge. They’ve taken that market share from Symbian rather than iOS.

In addition, the App Store has (just, now) more apps than the Google Play store (around 800k to 700k) and the revenue from the App Store is almost 300% greater than that of the Play store.

Tough choices – and not as straightforward as you may think!

[Matt]

@Sverting said:

-profiles – but first the search on the website should be perfected.  Try typing only “Betta” and look for B. splendens in the results.

Yep, this is on our ongoing lists of bugs to fix. Also the fact that species results return chronologically rather than alphabetically.

[Author]

Posts