It has been 6 weeks since we had our latest version of Darisini on the App Store. And, it’s already 4 months since we delivered Darisini for iOS for the first time. What’s next?

Referring to the statistics, there are more than 10,500 downloads (for iOS) to date. We didn’t release minor updates. We tried to spend more time thinking and developing an application that works. We don’t want to send updates for minor bug fixes. We understand that we can do better for the upcoming Darisini. More features and improvements. And also more data. Our small team work really hard to give more data and make them useful for you.

We’re thinking. What we will have for the upcoming version? No, we will not bring Darisini for iPad. We have some ideas. One of the ideas is to drop support for iOS 4. Darisini requires iOS 4.2 or above to work. But why? We have two main reasons (from our statistics): more people are using iOS 5, and we want to take advantage of the new features offered by newer iOS.

This is a chart we found, based on Darisini app usage.

The above chart is based on the running statistics (based on Darisini v2 “Merapi”). iOS 6 Beta is excluded from the list. From the figure, Darisini is being used mostly on iOS 5 and above. But, what about iOS 6? Darisini is compatible with current iOS 6 Beta. So, when iOS 6 is available on next September 19, you should be just fine.

Okey, we talk too much about the Darisini for iOS. What about Darisini for Android? We can’t share much details about this. But, we are baking something right now for the Android version.

We are happy to announce that we just hit another milestone for our app. Today, Darisini app version 2.0 is available for iOS with “Merapi” as its codename. If you have Darisini installed on your iOS device, you should see the update notification on your application list.

What is Merapi? If you have no idea Merapi (or, you never heard about it before), it’s the most active volcano in Indonesia. It’s located not far from Yogyakarta, our hometown. If you want to find out more about Merapi, you can visit Wikipedia.

In the last two months, after Darisini available on App Store, we tried to figure out what we wanted to bring for the next release. In the first few days we did nothing but listening for feedbacks, ideas, and also criticisms from you. We got lots of positive feedbacks and great ideas. Thank you! Those feedbacks brought positive energy for our small team, and we felt challenged to make improvements and deliver more features. So, what’s new in this release? We’ve shared some of them in our previous post, but we want to share a little bit more.

New interface design

The interface is dramatically modified. Not only for one or two pages, but every single page has new look. We had many experiments on this area, and worked with feedbacks from our testers. We want to make it more beautiful, easier, and work better.

New icons!

We created lots of custom icons. We dropped the brand/company logos and switch to fresh icons. We love our new icons, and we hope you love them too!

Better category management

We only had seven categories when we released Darisini for the first time. Now, you will have more categories. Categories are grouped as primary and secondary section.

We want to make it easy for you to choose which categories you want or care about. Right now, we have ten main categories with more than forty sub-categories. And more categories will follow.

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We have submitted the latest Darisini to App Store, and it has been more than a week. We submitted it on July 19th, 2012 and it’s still under “Waiting For Review” status. It’s already 10 days. When we did our first submission, it took a week cycle to get the information whether Darisini was accepted or not. Yes, we’ve been rejected for some technical reasons. But, we learned. We hope that we didn’t need to make another revisions for the latest release.

In the last few days, it seems that the review process took a little bit longer. From Twitter search using #iosreviewtime, the average review time is more than 10 days. It’s 11 days when we wrote this post. Well, let’s just wait.

Darisini has its own search feature. Right now, if you want to find a specific location, you can easy put keywords there. For example: starbucks, superindo, ace. Or you can also put street names, e.g. sudirman, haryono, tebet, rasuna said, etc.

Does it work? It works, as long as the the keywords matches with some location metadata fields (location name, address, city, province, etc). But, we think that it’s not good enough. We want to improve this search feature. Let’s give you a simple illustration:

You are in Jogjakarta, and you want to eat chicken. Using “chicken” as keyword in search will give Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC). Because there is a word “chicken” there. But, at the same time, Hoka Hoka Bento also has chicken in its menu. Another restaurant also has chicken.

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“Get into a line that you will find to be a deep personal interest, something you really enjoy spending twelve to fifteen hours a day working at, and the rest of the time thinking about.” — Earl Nightingale

We would like to share what we’re doing right now. And, we’re happy to give access to some of you to try our latest development. We hope you’ll like it. Enjoy!

1. New interface

“It’s not easy to tap on the link”, “The menu is too small”, “It takes too many taps”, “My fingers are too big!”

We want to tackle those problems. Darisini will have completely new interface. We hope it’s easier to navigate, and can also give you more enjoyable experience. We make the text bigger. Let’s share what we’re doing right now.

A brand new homescreen. Each category has its own icon now. Our illustrator has been working really hard — and he’s really enjoying it! — to create lots of beautiful custom icons. And, do you know that you can customize the homescreen? Read on for more details.

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One question: What’s next?

We keep ourselves busy right now preparing the upcoming Darisini application. Learning from the performance, feedbacks, and also statistics, we’re now focusing on working on the new Darisini. Anyway, currently Darisini received more than 7,000 downloads from the App Store. So, what’s on the list? Here are some ideas we have for Darisini (the iOS version).

New interface

We want to make the interface much better. We want to help our users by having more friendly interface. We will have more shortcuts, settings and customizations. For example, we reduce the taps. This is the comparison of going to the “Route” page — that’s right, it should be fast and easy to get the route.

• Before: Tap a certain location, choose “Map” icon, and create a route.
• After: Tap a certain location, and tap the “Route” icon.

We want to make the information more visible. The distance will be displayed clearly. Phone numbers, fax, email address, street location, including website will have a bigger font size. So, instead of tapping text, you will get kind of buttons. A larger tapping area, which (hopefully) improves the experience.

Customization

Currently, you will be presented with locations in 10 km radius. Later, you can adjust the searching radius up to 99 km. What does it mean? Well, more locations in the radar. We are working hard to provide more location data. We want to keep them well-organized, and we will think about how the data should be presented personally.

More locations

Many of you requested to have more data (and more categories). We’re listening. But hey, we also use our application to help us. Here are two things we have in our mind when we talk about ‘more locations’:

• More organized categories
  It’s easy to manage and display seven categories. But, what about having more than 30 categories? We don’t want to make it easy for our side (as developers and users), but more importantly from your side as users.
• Major cities
  If we refer to Wikipedia, there are 33 provinces and more than 400 regencies in Indonesia. Will we cover all cities?No. Is it like an impossible mission? Probably. We’re now focusing on the big cities in the island of Java, for some provinces like Jakarta (Special Capital Territory of Jakarta), Surabaya, Jogjakarta, Central Java, and also Bali. If we have data for the other cities/provinces, we definitely will put them in our list.

Other

From another technical perspective, our developer is working on making some modifications. For example on the map. Recently, Apple announced its own Maps app and iOS 6. We modified our codes to makes sure Darisini will work with iOS 6. Google Maps has richer data, but we haven’t got any big issues when having Apple’s Maps for Darisini.

Image Credit: 123rf

We’re happy to share this news with you: Darisini is now available on Google Play. We have mentioned about our plan to bring Darisini to multiple platforms. We finally did it. Darisini for Android released 3 weeks after the the iOS version available on the App Store.

From the technical perspective, Firman Maulana (our code composer), worked really hard to tackle the challenge. He changed his (and our) plan! We mentioned earlier that we want to support OS Version 2.3 or above. But, as he also has Samsung Galaxy Mini S5570 with him (with software version 2.2), he felt challenged to build Darisini on his device (Thank you, Virtri!). For us, this is a good news. If you go to Android Platform Distribution Versions, we hope by supporting Version 2.2 or above, more users can use and get what Darisini is offering.

By having Darisini in two different platforms (we’re discussing whether we should have it for other platforms), we learned other cool things. For example about the hardware and software fragmentation like screen size, hardware specifications and OS versions. Even we have more application testers for iOS devices (than the Android), but Android is more challenging. We love challenges!

We love hearing feedbacks. For the iOS device, we have wrote down lots of feedbacks, and for the Android version, you can download the application from the Google Play (yes, it’s free and without banner), and we’d love to hear your feedbacks to make our application better in the future.

And, if you want to have more POI locations, we’re working on it. Many of our application users requested places like ATMs, gas stations, and restaurants. We hope we can give them more than that.

regards,

Firman, Fredy, and Thomas

After having our application delivered for iOS users, we want to respond feedbacks about Darisini’s availability on other platforms. And, we decided to bring Darisini to Android.

Right now, Firman Maulana (our code composer) is working hard to ship Darisini for Android, while Fredy Sujono (illustration ninja) is working on some creative touch for the graphics. We already have some people testing the application. Here are some screenshots taken using HTC Desire HD (Android Version 2.3.5).

In the meantime, we will keep ourself busy dealing with another stuff we want to deliver. You can check our blog, or follow @darisiniapp on Twitter for quick updates. Thank you.

Ten days ago, Darisini was officially listed at Apple Store. We are just happy for what we’ve been developing in the last few months was finally available for public. Before the launch, we involved in discussions and worked together with some friends to build something that is working.

During the first few days, we did nothing but listening and reading feedbacks. We had had some positive feedbacks, ideas, and also criticisms. We believe that they’re all great things to improve our application. We want to share few things:

Darisini is built for users in Indonesia

If you live outside Indonesia, we’re sorry that Darisini will not work for you. Currently, we have more than 1,500 location data in Indonesia. Not in all provinces, but in big cities like Jakarta, Jogjakarta, Bandung, and Surabaya. We have Starbucks Coffee outlets, ACE Hardware stores, Super Indo, and also Carrefour. All of them are in Indonesia. They’re all distributed. If you’re in Medan for example, you can find Starbucks at Polonia Airport. Or, you can find ACE Hardware in Palembang. But, you will not find ACE Hardware in Jogjakarta. Why? There is no ACE Hardware in Indonesia Jogjakarta. (Thank you Tony!)

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After working with some processes — including how we communicated with Apple’s iTunes Store team (because they can not find Gandaria Hospital and TransJogja bus shelters from the US) — we’re happy that our Darisini application is now available to download. We only have the free version, and you will have them without banner advertisement.

During the review processes, we didn’t stop the development. We chose iOS as the first platform, and we’re thinking of what platform Darisini should be shipped to next. For now, we only have it for iOS (iPod/iPhone), and it requires iOS 4.2 or later. But, we are challenged to bring Darisini to Android.

During the development process, we had some friends helped us testing the app and we asked for feedbacks, including ideas to make Darisini app better. Thank you, all of you!

We hope you find this application useful, and we definitely will have more data delivered. You can find information updates from this blog or by following @darisiniapp on Twitter.