Logo

This is the new logo. I found an excellent artist Damian to help me with the logo and the splash screen. For the first time I am providing a pre-rendered icon for the App Store. Both I and my developer Pavel like the logo very much.

Landing Page and Domain

I say the app is almost ready because I am doing some last minute tests. The last two weeks have been hectic. I had pre-launched a landing page using LaunchRock (which I leaned from Sophia at the iOSDevCamp) to test the landing page. I requested and got some feedback from Sifter creator Garrett. I incorporated all that feedback and created a new landing page. Initially I had used bucketapp.lookitupforme.com. Now I was able to acquire bucketapp.info. I thought the .info TLD was most appropriate because this site is about the app – this is not the app itself.

Screenshots

As before, I have been wanting to share the screenshots for quite a while, but was always less ready than I should have been. Now I am ready to post them. Here is a typical workflow within the app. Note that this app is useful only to those of you who have Sifter accounts.

The icon to kick off the app. I guess I should have put the icon on bar at the bottom. Oh well. When you touch the icon, a nice splash screen comes up. This is the time the application is loading and the iPhone is allocating resources to the app. The app cannot do anything useful at this time, so might as well show a pretty picture. In my earlier apps, I used to have the “Look It Up 4 Me” logo on the splash screen. But in this app, the app gets all the emphasis.

So the Bucket App logo is front and center.

The first thing you need to do is tell Bucket where your projects are. Sifter allows you to specify an Access Key to provide to Bucket and other third party apps. You specify this in your Profile page in Sifter (just login and click on My Profile at the top). You need to do this in your Sifter Web app before you can start using Bucket productively.

Touch “Add Account…”. You will be taken to the “Account Management” screen.

Here enter the subdomain name for your sifterapp account. My subdomain is lookitup4me.sifterapp.com, so I enter ‘lookitup4me’. Then I can name this account. It is best to give it the name of your company. I call mine “Look It Up 4 Me”. Where it says Access Key, you can type in the long set of characters that Sifter gives you, or you can copy and paste it from the sifter website. Or the easiest way is to touch “Get Access Key”. It will open a secure session with https://yoursubdomain.sifterapp.com and take you to the standard sifterapp login page. You can enter your login credentials there and the app can pull in the Access Key.

Read Access Only Now

Currently the Sifter API only allows read access. The write API is almost ready, and we are all set to get cracking on that when it is available. So with the read access that we have here is what is available.

You can see all your projects from the Projects tab. If you have multiple accounts with multiple SifterApp logins/accounts like I have, then you can see all projects grouped under their accounts.

Touch on the project you want to work with. At this time you can only work on the issues of any one project at a time. A check mark next to a project name indicates which one is active. All the information in the other tabs are dependent on this setting.

You can see all the issues in the project by touching the Issues icon.

You can set up filters, so that only the issues you are interested in will show up. You can filter by Priority, Status, Assignee, and Owner.

Once you set a filter, it is applied to a all queries for the active project. When you work with another project and come back to this one, the filters are still active.

From the Milestones tab you can see all the milestones for the active project.

If there are issues not associated with any milestone then they show up under “Unplanned”. When you touch on a milestone, it takes you to an issue list very similar to the previously mentioned issue list.

From both the issue lists, you can drill down to the issue details.

It shows you the description and the other parameters like Category, Priority, Status etc.

And that is as much as the free version does. Only the comments cannot be seen without a subscription. I am currently setting the auto-renewable subscription rate for read access to the comments as follows:

1. Monthly subscription - $0.99 per month.
2. Half yearly subscription - $4.99 for 6 months. This is approximately 83 cents per month.
3. Annual subscription – $8.99 per year. This is approximately 75 cents per month.

Skins

Future Plans