It's been about two weeks since Meerkapp has been featured in AppAdvice Best Apps Of The Day list. Things have slowed down quite a bit since then (I was seeing 100~150 downloads/day back then) and Meerkapp has slip out of the Free featured list in the Entertainment category.
Not something surprising here.
The thing is, the app really needs users to stay interesting. The built-in community is what Meerkapp is all about.
Currently I am trying to reach blogs / review outlets to get the app reviewed.
At the same time, on the technical front I am cooking a major usability update. It's not quite ready still, but I hope in a week or so I'll push it to the App Store for review. The thing is that currently it is really slow to load the picture stream. This is because it now works using a full-page synchronous model -- the app dials in the server and says something like: 'hey give me the second page of the newest pictures stream'. The server then goes to the database, does the various queries and fetches the requested page. With the page size being 20 pictures, this means that all twenty images are being taken out of the database, processes and sent down to the client. This takes time. Depending on the current load of the server, it could potentially take 15-20 seconds for a full refresh. Not a showstopper, but it gets really nasty if you scroll up and down a lot.
It just hurts usability. People (including myself, I know, it's a shame) are reluctant to start the app as they know they'll be faced with 20 seconds delay before actually seeing any doodle. Terrible.
What I am working on now is to make the server to fetch information about the pictures very fast, and then individual pictures are asynchronously requested by the app on demand. It works much in the same way as browsers work. Making it asynchronous means that the user would see almost an immediate feedback and pictures start to appear much quicker. There are still a thing or two I need to figure out, but as a whole the bulk of the work is already done.
Also, I am assessing how much it would take to make Meerkapp working on the iPhone. I'll obviously need to rework a lot of the UI storyboard but it shouldn't be a problem with the main bulk of the code.
Update: I am adding a link to AppScovery article I have posted about Meerkapp.
http://appscovery.com/article/meerkapp-ipad-drawing-doodling-app-deep-community-involvement-features
