If you're taking photos on the fly and checking on them shortly afterwards in Remembary, this isn't much of a problem. However, if you have older pictures that you've scanned into your photo library, this can lead to lots of pictures showing up in the wrong dates in Remembary.

For example, back in 1999 I took a big four week road trip across the United States and Canada. In 2004, I scanned in all of the pictures from that trip and meticulously dated and geotagged them. When I implemented the automatic photo fetching and mapping in Remembary back in summer of 2011 (in iOS4), I could type in my road diary entries from 1999 and see the pictures and map points automatically show up in the proper days. It was like magic.

Now, all of these 1999 pictures show up in August of 2004, the time I scanned them into iPhoto.

I've also had some situations where simply editing an older picture would make it show up in Remembary or iPhoto iOS as if it was taken today - although this doesn't seem to happen consistently.

Unfortunately, the problem is at the API level: Apple's "AssetLibrary" API doesn't even store the correct date anywhere - it just returns this new incorrect one instead. There's not much that I can do as a developer to fix this.

It was really disappointing to have one of Remembary's most exciting new features suddenly not work due to an upgrade. Since there haven't been a lot of big name programs that use the dates in the AssetLibrary API, I was worried that it might never be fixed.

Well, earlier this week Apple announced iOS5.1 as well as an iOS version of iPhoto. One of the new features is "Journals", which let you share time-sorted and annotated photo albums with your friends. You can even drag calendar icons into the photo album and they'll automatically pick up the date of the surrounding items.

So I got the new iPhoto on my iPhone, built a Journal out of my "Road Trip 1999" Photo Album, and dragged a calendar into the middle of the trip, around April 28 or so - and it showed August 2004.

So Apple's new flagship iOS app has exactly the same problem with the AssetLibrary as Remembary does. It's a bit sad, but it's also a bit of a vindication, since some users had been very upset about this date situation, and I can now point out that Apple has exactly the same problem. 

Most importantly, it hopefully means that Apple will now make an effort to fix this problem in future releases of iOS. It'll make iPhoto work better, and Remembary too.

What About Remembary 2?

I've been promising Remembary 2 for a long time now - it is on its way soon. I've been swamped with several other projects over the last while, but am planning to dig in over the next few weeks and get this update out the door. It's been a ground-up rewrite with a lot of new plumbing and updated features.

Once Remembary 2.0 is out, I promise to immediately start in on Remembary 2.1, which will include things like downloading retina-display themes and (hopefully) iCloud syncing.

In the meanwhile, the last few months have revealed a few subtle problems between Remembary 1.4.2 and iOS5. I'm covering them here so you'd know that I know about them - and also so I could tell you how I'll be addressing them in Remembary 2.

Funny Split View Behaviour

 The split view is a very common interface style on the iPad, used in many apps including Apple's own Mail. Split view applications have two main components: a listing and a detail view. When the iPad is in portrait orientation, the whole screen is taken up with the detail view, and the listing is available as a popover when you press a button:

(Sneak preview of the how the new listings are grouped by month!)

When the iPad is in landscape orientation, the detail view shrinks and the listing shows up on the left side of the screen:

One of the downsides of the split view in an app that has a lot of typing, like a diary, is that landscape orientation provides a larger, easier to use keyboard to work with - but the area available for the content that you are entering is much smaller. 

Also, in iOS5, the side listing sometimes disappears. Try this: 

1. Have your iPad in portrait mode.  
2. Tap on the calendar icon in the top left to bring up the entries listing.
3. Press the button on the bottom of your iPad to close Remembary and go back to your main iPad screen.
4. Rotate your iPad to landscape mode.
5. Launch Remembary again. 

You'll probably see this:

I had to do a lot of research, but it turns out that this is some kind of bug that occurs in some split view apps that were started in earlier versions of iOS. The call to hide the listing happens at a lower system level than I seem to be able to access. 

How I'm Fixing This In Remembary 2

 I'm getting rid of the split view. I never really liked it much anyhow. Now no matter what orientation you're in, the date entries will be in a popover. The page will stretch out across the entire landscape screen, like this:

It will also make typing nicer: you'll have the whole width of the page to work with.

PhotoStream and Duplicate Pictures

iOS5 brought with it some huge changes with how pictures are handled on the iPad. Not only can you now sync with pictures stored on your computer, but you can also pull in a PhotoStream of the last 1000 pictures you've taken, downloading them through the cloud in almost real time. This has been great for tourists with iPhones: take pictures of Istanbul or San Francisco all day, and then when you sit down to write in your diary, the pictures are all already there. 

The problem comes when you save all of your pictures back to your computer and then sync them back to your iPad: the PhotoStream pictures are still there, alongside the originals. This means that you often get two versions of the same image. If you're using the HDR setting on your iPhone, you might end up with four almost identical images every time you take a picture. I'm not sure how, but sometimes I get three versions of my pictures, which with HDR comes up to six similar images. 

How I'm Fixing This in Remembary 2

I've tried every way of detecting duplicates I could think of, but the PhotoStream pictures are actually different from the originals: their timestamps are a few seconds later, they're often smaller in size, and they even have different filenames. I could do some kind of exotic pattern-matching, but then I would risk false positives, which might be worse than duplicates.

Remembary 2 has a little control at the bottom of the photo listings that will let you switch between the general library, the PhotoStream library, or just show all the images. That way you can filter out the duplicates yourself. The pictures will also have an icon showing whether they're from PhotoStream or the iPad's library.

Incorrect Picture Timestamps

In iOS5, Apple changed the meaning of the picture timestamp values in the iPad photo library: they used to be the timestamp assigned in iPhoto (which you could edit yourself), but now they're the creation date of the picture itself (which is stored inside the picture and the filesystem). This is no doubt useful for the PhotoStream syncing logic, but not so good for people who like to tune their pictures after taking them. Even worse: if you have scanned in older pictures and re-dated them in iPhoto (like I did with a big road trip I took in 1999), they now show up with the date and time that they were scanned. 

This has been confusing for users, and is especially frustrating for me, since the whole point of this feature was that it would properly figure out all of the dates for your pictures automatically for you. I've spent a lot of time entering in old diaries and travel journals and now they no longer match up with the pictures and maps like they used to.

How I'm Fixing This in Remembary 2.0

This one is tricky. It would be nice if Apple would fix this soon. Other people have noticed this bug, and I even submitted a bug report, but I don't know if it's going to be addressed. I tried extracting EXIF information from the photos, but that takes a lot more time to process, especially on an iPad with thousands of photos, so I would have had to build a caching system, which takes even more storage and memory.

I'm also looking into a way of letting users 'flag' favourite photos, which would then be loaded into the app and where they could assign their own date/time information and geotags. This is a complicated solution, and something I had really hoped to avoid doing, since it makes users have to do twice the work and increases the storage space required by the app.

So - I'm still figuring this one out. Anybody have any ideas?

I'm very excited to get Remembary 2 out in front of the world - but I also want to make sure that it works well. Watch this blog for further updates.

Feedback is always appreciated - so feel free to write in the comments below, or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter or in an email.

iOS5 is an exciting update for the iPad, and things like the Photo Stream are natural fits for Remembary. It turns out, though, that there was a subtle change in the way that iOS5 accesses the iPad photo library which makes the current 1.4.1 version of Remembary not show pictures properly on iOS5 devices.

This problem has been fixed and the latest version has just been submitted to the App Store for review. The update should be out in a week or so. Until then, Remembary 1.4.1 will still work fine for everyone - the only problem being that iOS5 users won't get pictures.

I've cleared the decks and will be devoting the next few weeks to Remembary 2.0, as well as Remembary Express, the 'lite' version for iPhone. Stay tuned for more details!

The details of the problem, for those who like to know about these kinds of things:

Photos are fetched using the ALAssetLibrary API. This API has several methods that go through the iPad's images, and these methods take code blocks that describe what to do with each image group and image.

In earlier versions of iOS, this code block runs sychronously in the context of the calling method, which in Remembary is a NSOperation running in the background in an NSOperationQueue. In iOS5, the blocks run asynchronously, spawning a new thread to walk through the photo library and then instantly continuing on the parent thread. In Remembary 1.4.1, this made the code that updates the button and drop-down list for the current diary entry run before any matching photos had been found - and then when the ALAssetLibrary search blocks finished, the results didn't go anywhere. This also happened with the code that figured out the map points, since it was set up as a dependency on the parent NSOperation in the queue.

The new code in 1.4.2 checks for completion inside the block instead of just running afterwards - and it then calls the update code once the ALAssetLibrary search loops are finished.

... aren't you glad you know this now?

I've been having a lot of trouble lately getting my iPhoto library to sync properly with my iPad. I thought it might be a problem with available free space, since I have a pretty large photo library (12,000 pictures or so). But even if I limited the sync to only certain photo albums - 5-star favourites and recent pictures from the last 3 months, for example - it would still often skip a lot of the pictures. 

After some searching around online and some experimentation, I finally figured out the problem: the "iPod Photo Cache" was having trouble. I've been using iPhoto since 2003 and first started syncing pictures back in 2005 when I got an iPod Nano - I'm sure somewhere in the various upgrades and transitions over the years something got messed up. Fixing it turned out to be easy:

1. I went to my home directory in the Finder.
2. I opened the "Pictures" folder
3. I found the "iPhoto Library" icon - it turns out that double-clicking on it launches iPhoto. Instead, I right-clicked (or CTRL-clicked) and picked "View Package Contents" from the pop-up menu.
4. I found the "iPod Photo Cache" folder and moved it to the trash. (If you're feeling cautious, you can just move it to the Desktop and trash it later on after you're sure the rebuild worked).
5. The next time I synced my iPad to iTunes, the "Photo" sync settings had been reset, so I had to turn them back on and set them up again.
6. Then I waited for an hour or so while my computer rebuilt the photo cache for 12,000 pictures and transferred them to the iPad.

Now for the first time in ages I have a complete photo library in my iPad, and going back through my old diary entries is a lot more fun since they now have pictures in them.

In the interest of further disclosure: this got the article 6400 hits over the last few days. It looks like 10% of the article visitors went on to other parts of the Remembary.com site, and about 1% did things like view the intro video. It doesn't look like all of this attention lead to any actual sales, though. 

If you're interested in more about my experiences in building and selling Remembary, there's a whole series of posts on my Shindigital.com blog.

Speaking of further disclosure, I've put a CSV export of my sales/rankings/etc. tracking spreadsheet on Pete Forde's cool new BuzzData platform (think GitHub for data). It has daily numbers since late October 2010 for sales, revenue, App Store rankings, search rankings, Facebook followers, etc. I'll be updating it every so often with new numbers. 

http://buzzdata.com/ajlburke/remembary-stats

Hope people find it useful.

I built Remembary because I wanted to learn iOS programming, and I wanted to have a digitally-enhanced diary on my iPad. Most importantly, after years of selling my services as a developer, I wanted to have a product and learn all about production, pricing, promotions, and customer service. I had heard a lot about the App Store marketplace and I wanted to see for myself how it all worked, and whether there was actually any money in it.

I've read numerous articles and blog posts from app developers about their experiences in the App Store, but almost all of these have suffered from selection bias: developers are more likely to write about their successes, and success stories often get more attention from the press, Twitter, and/or Hacker News and are thus more likely to reach me.

Remembary has been moderately successful as iPad apps go: it has had some good reviews from major review sites, it has been (lightly) featured in several countries' App Stores, and the people who have used it seem to like it quite a bit. But it certainly hasn't become a solid top ten contender, and I still make a lot more money out of my consulting work than I do out of Remembary.

So, as an extra data point for people who are interested in this kind of thing, here's how Remembary has done:

Raw Sales

Remembary came out in mid October of 2010, and in the ten months since then it has made just over $2000. This comes to about $48 / week, or just under $7 / day.

(These charts etc. are straight from AppFigures.com - it's well worth getting an account with them if you have iOS apps. AppAnnie is good too.)

Compared to iPhone apps, iPad apps are still a niche. Diary apps are also something of a niche - they're not like quick impulse buy video games or utilities. I'm actually not too disappointed in these numbers. I gather that the average iOS app makes about $600, so Remembary is actually on the right side of the curve.

There are certainly apps making a lot more money than Remembary - in fact I'm sure there are iPad diary apps that are making a lot more money than Remembary. However, there are also many more making less.

Sales History

Here are the weekly sales, once again straight from AppFigures.

Remembary had a brief hike in sales when it first came out, presumably from friends and family buying copies. In the following weeks sales slowed down to less than one a day - in one week in late November Remembary sold no copies at all.

In late December, I tried promoting Remembary with Facebook and AdWords ads - as you can see, these had little effect.

Then in January, Remembary got a really nice review from AppAdvice.com  - that's the giant spike. It's even more dramatic if you look at daily sales: On Monday January 24th, Remembary sold 1 copy and made $1.40, on Tuesday January 25th, Remembary sold 2 copies and made $2.54 - and on Wednesday January 26th, it sold 122 copies and made $167.

The spike lasted about three days day and made more money for Remembary than all of its previous sales combined: about $400. The thing is, it was a spike. On February 2, Remembary only sold 2 copies again. 

This wasn't the only effect though: a week or so later an upgrade to Remembary was featured in the "What's Hot" and "New & Notable" sections of the Canadian and Worldwide App Stores. 

The dream of all iOS apps is to be given the full "big header" feature treatment in the US store. This wasn't that - instead, it was an icon showing up in Canada and in a lot of smaller markets handled by the same curatorial team. It still made about $300 or so.

In March I submitted an updated version of Remembary, and AppAdvice were kind enough to do a follow-up posting with a promo code giveaway. This prompted over 100 comments (unfortunately lost when they changed comment providers) and another spike in sales, making another $300. 

Every time there was a spike in sales, the new base level afterwards was a bit higher than before. Instead of 5 sales a week, there were 15 or 20 sales a week.

In May, Remembary got a decent (4 stars) review from 148Apps.com - this didn't cause a huge sales spike like the AppAdvice one, although this might also have to do with Remembary costing more ($2.99 instead of $1.99).

A few weeks after that review, Remembary finally got featured in the US App Store, in a special "Graduation Day" section. It was still a small icon, and required scrolling to be seen, but it still earned the app another $300.

Since then, there haven't been any big review or feature events for Remembary. I focused my energy on new features for Remembary 1.4 instead of promotions, so sales slowed down a lot - in early July back to the 5 a week rate of late 2010. 

Once 1.4 came out, the sales have picked up quite a bit. This is the bump at the far right. I also raised the price, which hasn't impacted the sales numbers much but has incresed the revenue.

Patterns

The obvious thing here is: the key to getting sales is to get noticed by an app review site. Getting a favourable mention in AppAdvice can really change things. 148Apps is still good, but perhaps less so. Remembary hasn't been mentioned in any really big sites like Engadget or Wired or BoingBoing, so it's hard to know how much bigger the attention can be.

I also noticed that I was featured in app stores usually a week or so after a major review. This is a sample size of two, so it's hard to really say if it's a real pattern. It's certainly clear, though, that the app store curators pay attention to the review sites.

App Store features are the other big deal. But I also learned that a small feature in the US store can be as valuable as a major feature in a smaller market.

The value of a feature really varies by section and country. In fact, Remembary has been in the top 10 of "What's Hot" in the Lifestyle section of the Canadian iPad App Store (often above Martha Stewart and Mario Batali) since January, and there have still been days when Remembary hasn't sold a single copy.

Rankings

You 'only' get sales figures from Apple daily, but ranking numbers are released hourly. Unless you're solidly in the top ten, you can actually see individual sales as peaks in the app rankings, which gradually slide back down over time. Here's a chart from the last few days:

You can see a few sales in the US store in the last few days in purple and green - because the US is a busy market, the rankings drop off over just a few hours. With other countries it's a different matter:

The big peak in the Canadian rankings on the left came from selling two copies of Remembary in the same hour on August 2nd. The big peak on the right (in hard-to-see light green) are from selling ONE copy in Mexico - this instantly put Remembary into the #13 top grossing lifestyle spot in that country, and several days later it's still #59.

This underlines how much more sales activity happens in the US than anywhere else, at least for the iPad. It also shows that the iPad still has a long way to go in terms of market penetration in the rest of the world outside of the US.

Speaking of Sales By Country

My top selling countries are:

United States: 612 sales, $1119.22

Canada: 160 sales, $292.60

U.K.: 53 sales, $73.47

Russia: 34 sales, $67.62 (only two reviews in their store, both 1 star)

Australia: 27 sales, $55.31 (only two reviews in their store, both 5 stars)

Germany: 19 sales, $29.17 

1. First off, please let me know if you're having trouble! Fill out the support form and describe what happens. Many problems don't happen to everyone, so it's hard for me to fix things unless I know about the problems. This also lets me get back to you personally.
2. Some people have reported that they can't see pictures or maps in Remembary. This is probably just a setting on your iPad and is easily fixed. Read all about it in this blog post.
3. For security reasons, there is no way to restore a lost password - if you can't remember your password for Remembary, there's no other way into the app. This is another reason why it's a good idea to export your diary every so often. If you just want to start using Remembary again, you can delete it from your iPad and reinstall it, and you can start again with a new empty diary. (Of course all of your photos will show up just like before, since they're actually in your iPad's photo library). There are more details on resetting Remembary in this blog post.
4. Remembary can get confused if it encounters poorly-formatted RSS feeds, and sometimes can get stuttery if it is downloading from very large feeds. Try using the 'Test Feeds' button in the feeds setup popover (where you entered the feeds in the first place) to see if everything works properly. If not, try removing that feed and see if Remembary performs more smoothly.
5. Occasionally the cover page will stick in the closed position, locking you out of the app. Tapping anywhere on the page will make it open for you. You can also leave the app and come back in and the cover will open properly.
6. If you're using iPhoto on a Mac, you might notice some pictures aren't syncing to your iPad properly. Here's how to fix that by clearing your cache.

A number of people have contacted me saying that they have forgotten their password and asking how to recover it. In designing Remembary, I erred on the side of security - so Remembary doesn't have a way to retrieve a password. If you've forgotten your password, you won't be able to access your diary anymore. On the other hand, this means that nobody else who doesn't know your password will be able to access your diary.

A few things to keep in mind though:

- It's a good idea to export your diary every so often, and ideally keep this backup separate from your computer and your iPad. It's good to have a backup available in case or a robbery or a fire or some other disaster - or if you've forgetten your password! The new versions of Remembary allow exports to be sent via email or synced to DropBox.

- Remembary doesn't have any limit on the number of times you can guess the password - so before doing anything else, it's worth trying to guess your old password again. Try different kinds of capitalization or misspellings, or add extra spaces at the beginning or end, in case you made a mistake setting your password the first time.

- If you just can't recall your password, you can 'reset' Remembary so you start again with a new diary. Then you can copy-and-paste entries from a backup if you have any. Here's how to do it:

1. Plug your iPad into your computer. iTunes will come up. Click on your iPad's icon in the directory on the left, and then click on "Apps" at the top of the screen. 
2. The first thing to do is look at the "File Sharing" section at the bottom of the screen. If you did any exports of your diary back before you forgot your password, you can get them from here. Click on "Remembary" and drag the export files out to your computer. 
3. In the top part of the "Apps" panel is a miniature version of your iPad's home screen, with all of your apps and groups. To the left of that is a list of all of your apps, with checkboxes next to each one. Find the checkbox in the left-side list for Remembary.
4. Click on the checkbox for Remembary so it's OFF. Then click on the "Apply" button in the bottom right of your iTunes window. You will get a message asking 'Are you sure you want to remove the app "Remembary" from the iPad?' Click on "Remove". Your iPad will sync and Remembary (and its data) will be removed from the iPad.
5. Once the sync is finished, go back to the list of apps and click on the checkbox for Remembary again so that it's "ON". Click on "Apply" in the bottom right again. Your iPad will sync with a new blank copy of Remembary.
6. Once your iPad has finished syncing, find the Remembary icon and tap on it to start again. You should see the book cover appear without the password field, and then today's entry should show up with the introductory instruction text ("Today I started using Remembary...")
7. Now that you have a new empty version of Remembary, you can re-enter any diary entries that you might have exported previously and that you saved on your computer back in step 2. The easiest way to get them back into your iPad is to send them to yourself in an email, or sync them into Pages or another text editing program. Then you can copy-and-paste them back into the appropriate dates in Remembary.

1. Do a Test. Take a screenshot of your iPad by holding down the 'home' button (in the middle of the bottom of the iPad) and the 'power' button (on the right side of the top of the iPad). If you have an iPad2, you can take a picture or video with one of the built-in cameras instead. The new picture or screenshot should be saved in your iPad's photo library, which means if you go to today's entry in Remembary, it should show the picture button near the top right of the Remembary page, with at least one picture in the list. If the picture button still isn't showing up, check item 2 below to see if your iPad is configured correctly. If the picture does show up, check item 3 below, to make sure you actually have pictures in your photo library.

2. Make sure Location Services are enabled. When you first started Remembary after buying it or upgrading to 1.4, a box popped up saying that Remembary wanted to use your location. This is an iOS-supplied (and poorly worded) box that is actually asking to allow Remembary to access location services and the iPad photo library. For the pictures and maps to work, you need to have answered YES to this question. Don't worry if you didn't though: just go to your iPad's "Settings" app and pick "Location Services" from the listing on the left side - make sure that Location Services have been turned on for your iPad, and then make sure that Remembary is allowed to access Location Services from the list on the right.

Note that Remembary doesn't actually detect your current location - but it does get the location information from the pictures in your Photo Library, as well as from your Tweets. 

3. Check your Photo Library. If your iPad runs out of storage space (which can easily happen if you put movies and TV shows on there, or if you have a large music collection or photo library), iTunes often removes pictures first before removing anything else - so check in your iPad's "Photos" app to see if there are in fact any photos available. If there aren't any, you'll need to change your sync settings in iTunes to include fewer items.

If none of these things work, there may be something else wrong - so please use the Contact form and let me know.

However, only having bug fixes in this release would have been kind of boring, so I decided to throw in a bonus: some new fonts.

Before now, you could pick from 6 different fonts in Remembary:

I've added another six fonts for a total of twelve:

I've reorganized the fonts into two columns - the left for more decorative handwriterly fonts, the right for more printed-looking fornts. Also, now that the box is wider, I've added a little display in the top right that shows the current font and point size. Here's some more about the fonts I've added:

Hoefler Text is an old favourite of mine. It has a distinctive, slightly old fashioned look, while actually being very technically sophisticated in its use of ligatures and such. I used it for most of my papers back at university - since everyone else was just using plain old Helvetica and Times New Roman, I suspect that Hoefler Tet was responsible for a few decimal points in my GPA.

Didot is an elegant serif font that Wikipedia describes as "neoclassical" and "evocative of the Age of Enlightenment". Several people had asked about having more straight serif fonts in Remembary, and I hope this and Hoefler Text give them what they want.

Andrew is a cheerful-looking free font from Andrew Vardeman. I don't have much information about him or his font - but I can't help but like the name. You should be happy that this isn't based on my handwriting - there's a reason I wrote a whole diary app to replace my handwritten ones!

The other new fonts are all licensed from the the excellent (not to mention erudite) collection at Pia Frauss. Check out the other fonts available, and enjoy the great essays on their origins. 

Jane Austen is exactly what it sounds like: based on the actual handwriting of the famous author herself. It looks especially good on the 'Paper' theme:

Mitre Square is a fine example of late Victorian steel-tipped pen handwriting. The name comes from the part of London where Jack the Ripper used to lurk - the original version of this font comes from a police report about the murders. I like to use it with the "Codex" theme:

The last new font is Tycho's Recipe. I admit that it isn't the most legible font, but I really like how it looks, especially with all of the flourishes. It's based on an actual recipe by 16th century scientist Tycho Brahe, copied as a gift to the queen of Denmark - a recipe for a medicine "against Plague, and all Morbos Epidemicos". It looks great with the stylized antiquity of the "Parchment" theme:

Hope you enjoy playing with the new fonts. Drop me a line and let me know what you think.