Apple released a major update to iOS yesterday. This update brings a lot of new changes to iOS, mainly CarPlay. While this doesn’t mean much for users right now, it will in the coming months as vehicles come to market.

One unlisted feature of iOS 7.1, is the default behavior of Geofences and iBeacons has been restored to iOS 6 defaults. For those of you not aware, starting in iOS 7, if you force close an app (double-tap home, and swipe the app up) you are telling iOS that you don’t want this app to run anymore, and that the app should not be allowed to respond to background events. This is completely opposite of the behavior in iOS 6. If your app needs to respond to a Geofence update, it would get notified, woke up if you will, and be allowed to respond to the event. This new change has caused a lot of problems for our users that are used to closing apps from the app switcher and not getting updates to various background updates.

With 7.1, we have confirmed that force closing an app that is monitoring Geofences will respond to Geofence updates. This is great news for users (and developers) that want their apps to continue working in the background. We got word via a story about improvements to iBeacons in 7.1 that piqued our interest. We immediately confirmed their findings about iBeacons, and checked if this change applied to Geofences as well. We were very happy to find that this change applies to both.

While most users won’t notice anything different, that is great news for everyone. Developers don’t have to code around this change in behavior, as well as not being put in the position to train users how to use iOS differently. Users shouldn’t notice anything different because like Apple says, it just works.

You can download Simple In/Out and see for yourself. We are putting the finishing touches on a new 6.0 build that is just about ready to go live. We wanted to wait until 7.1 was released to make sure the update would work for everyone. A few last minute tweaks, and we’ll be out the door.

Today, we’re excited to announce that Simple In/Out has an API accessible to the public.  In beta testing for several months, we’ve now unleashed this on the world and can’t wait to see what our users do with it.

When designing the API (known as APIv2 or Version 2), we relied heavily on industry standards like OAuth2 and JSON.  This means several off-the-shelf tools can be put to work to do wonderful things with your data.  For now, this is a read-only API that allows access to your users, statuses, groups, etc.

If you’d like access, just email me and we’ll provide you the tokens necessary.  My email is brandon [at] simplymadeapps [dot] com.

To kick off this weekend, we’ve shipped a new look for Simple In/Out.  You’ll find the website is a little brighter, a lot cleaner and contains a lot more details on our main pages.  We’re highlighting more features for our phone apps, iPad and Windows 8.  We hope you find the changes easy on the eyes.

Also, we’ve updated the GeoFence page on the website with three important improvements we’ve had requests for.  First, it’s responsive and provides a bigger map for bigger screens.  Second, we now support editing your GeoFences on the iPad web browser (including pinch zooming and dragging pins).  Finally, we’ve added an address lookup to make it easier to find locations.

We’re excited about these changes, but the best is coming soon.  6.0 is right around the corner.

Startups at work: Previous entrepreneurial events have lingering impact in Fargo

To start the new week, we’re happy to announce some great report upgrades we’ve just shipping for Simple In/Out.  Both the Time Card and Daily Timeline reports now take advantage of the screen size of your browser, making for larger reports on your desktop and smaller side-scroling reports on your phone’s web browser.  This is especially useful for the Daily Timeline, which loves that extra space.

We’ve also hidden the advanced settings in a dialog to lessen confusion for the vast majority of our users that don’t use them.  And, we’ve added an extra advanced option to the Time Card report that allows users to choose the length of the little time card bars (they default to 8 hours).

We’re nearing the finish line on our big new release.  Until then, thanks for reading.

It’s Friday night and we here at Simply Made Apps are shipping more features for Simple In/Out!  By popular request, we’ve worked to add more control to the presentation of the in/out board.  Many of our customers have wanted smaller text to fit more users on the screen, while others have wanted larger text so they can see their users’ statuses across the room.

To that end, we’ve added a gear menu in the upper-righthand corner of the board.  This menu provides text size controls as well as control over which data columns display.  You can remove columns, remove the avatars and add a new column for phone numbers.  When you go to fullscreen mode (we’ve moved the fullscreen button over to the left), you’ll see those same text controls and control over the number of columns.  Now, fullscreen mode users can use large text and two columns for a few users or up to 6 columns and small text for a whole mess of users.

In this update is one more big change, international date support.  This has been a big request amongst our international users and we’ve delivered over 60 different date localizations.  Every user has a language setting that will format the dates (month/day/year, day/month/year, etc), the times (3:20pm or 15:20) and any of the relative text (Today for example, in the language selected).  While we haven’t internationalized the entire website, dates were far and away the biggest request we’ve received.

As always, let us know what you think by shooting us an email.  Our big 6.0 iOS release is in beta testing now, we can’t wait to show you what we have in store.

Brandon Medenwald and Bill Burgess make things easier with Simply Made Apps

It’s been a while since we’ve posted to the blog but rest assured that we are not dead.  We’ve been working feverishly on some new projects, one of which will see the light of day soon (and has been a big feature request).

Right now, we have just shipped a new feature that has the potential to make life better for a bunch of admin users.  It’s call Everybody Out, and it’s just that:   a simple way to change all the users in your company that are “in” to “out”.

Sounds easy, right?  We have some customers who would like to start fresh every so often, and this makes it super easy.  Simply navigate to your Settings, then Everybody Out (listed on the left).  Once there, you have two options:  Do It Now or Do It Everyday.

Do It Now allows you to move everyone to “out” immediately, with an optional comment.

Do It Everyday allows you to schedule this to happen once per day.  You can choose a time period (say, 1am – 2am), and within that time range Simple In/Out will move all your users “out” with a message that states “Automated Out”.  It’s a simple way to start fresh every morning.

We hope this makes life a little easier for some of our customers.

Today, we’ve just released a project that’s been in the works for a little while.  We’ve completely redone the most used page on our website, the board that lists all of your users.

The new board on simpleinout.com features a responsive design that looks great on a mobile phone.  While the previous board also worked on mobile devices, we wanted to take that support a step further.  Now, the board takes up the whole display.  We’ve moved the status updates down to make room, which gives everything more space to breathe.

Another big change is the managing interface for Quick Picks (One Click Status Updates).  To help folks understand how it works, we’ve placed instructions right on the screen when you click to manage the list.  We’ve replaced the big, bulking links with buttons similar to our Windows 8 app.  

For our users who embed this via Public Link, this is even better.  Now, this will live a lot easier in smaller spaces, great for sidebars and frames.

We’ve also fixed the header at the top, so the menu is always present.  We’ve tinkered with the full screen view to make it adapt better.  Our 7 day history dialogs are also brand new and better than ever.

Also important, this new board lays the groundwork for the future.  We have several other requests from our users that we can’t wait to get to.  These changes give us room to do some other great things.

We hope you like what we’ve done.  We can’t wait to tell you about what’s coming next for Simple In/Out.

iOS 7 has finally landed and users around the world are downloading, upgrading, or buying brand new phones with iOS 7 installed. For those of you that have already upgraded or had a chance to use it already, you have probably noticed that this isn’t your normal iOS. iOS 7 is a huge shift compared to previous versions. As Apple stated during the WWDC Keynote and iOS 7 unveiling, the OS has “deference” and “clarity” in respect to the users content. Or in layman’s terms, get out of the way and give me what I want.

We have been working hard here at Simply Made Apps to make sure all of our apps (Simple In/Out and FrontDesk) were ready for iOS 7. We have updated Simple In/Out to 5.0 and FrontDesk to 2.0. Both apps are taking advantage of some of the visual aspects of iOS 7 as well as some new iOS 7 only features. We are very pleased to announce iBeacons for Simple In/Out and FrontDesk.

iBeacons are a new iOS 7 only feature. Think Bluetooth Geofences. You can use FrontDesk to create an iBeacon. The app (and device) act as the central point for a Bluetooth Geofence. The app is constantly broadcasting a signal that the iPhone app can listen for. All iOS 7 users of the iPhone app can enable these iBeacons and can be checked in or out when they get close enough to the Beacon. This really has a benefit for users that want to have several beacons in close proximity to one another (like a college campus, or office park). iBeacons are much smaller than normal Geofences. They are limited by the range of the Bluetooth chips broadcasting range. Indoors, you can expect about 30-50ft without any obstructions and 10-20ft with walls in the way. 

While this is pretty new technology, it is built on existing technology that has been around for years. Bluetooth works great on battery life. We know that once users start using iBeacons, they’ll find some great ways to use them. Give em a shot and let us know what you think. We are looking forward to continuing improving and expanding iBeacons. There is so much potential, we can’t wait.

We’ve also done a lot under the hood for both apps. We think both apps are in great shape for the future. So make sure you update today and let us know what you think. We are always open to suggestions, so don’t be bashful. Shoot us an email and let us know what you want. 

Enjoy!