iPhone App Released - FRC Tracker

[kfox1731]

Nice Work! This makes it very convenient to keep up with my team while on the go. I'm a college student and can't always have my laptop out, but I do always have my iPhone with me. Now if I can just figure out how to stream the windows media stream on my iPhone

[busted240sx]

wow, this is a great app! Thank you! I can't wait to see how the app develops over time.

[Tom Saxton]

We just released an Event Info update with final match results and award info from the Championship. Loading and processing the update will take a few minutes, and it's important to let it fully complete without interruption or going to sleep. After doing the Event Info Update, you'll also need to do a full Twitter update.

If you don't want to hassle with that, in the next week or two we'll be submitting a new version to Apple with a complete database for 2009, and some cool enhancements (like showing team nicknames).

I learned a bunch of stuff using the app during the Championship and will incorporate a number of improvements into a new version for the 2010 competition.

[Dave Flowerday]

Tom,
Thanks for writing this app. It was quite handy to check in on teams from other divisions to see how they were doing this weekend.

I did find one bug though: the way I was using it, I'd start at the "Teams" page, type in a team number in the search box, look at their match results, then back out a few screens and choose the "X" in the search box and replace it with another team # to look at it. After repeating this procedure for a few times, the search window would get messed up and would not revert back to the full team list after choosing the "X" in the search box. At that point, typing anything in the search box would not affect the results in the list below, which would still show the results from the previous query. The only way to fix this condition was to force-quit the app and restart it.

Other than that, it worked great. One feature request for future years that I have would be to include the rankings as well. That would be really handy, even if it was just a link that would open the rankings page from usfirst.org in the browser.

[Tom Saxton]

Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday

Tom,
Thanks for writing this app. It was quite handy to check in on teams from other divisions to see how they were doing this weekend.

That's great to hear. Thanks for the feedback, and thanks to the other recent posters in this thread.

Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday

I did find one bug though: the way I was using it, I'd start at the "Teams" page, type in a team number in the search box, look at their match results, then back out a few screens and choose the "X" in the search box and replace it with another team # to look at it. After repeating this procedure for a few times, the search window would get messed up and would not revert back to the full team list after choosing the "X" in the search box. At that point, typing anything in the search box would not affect the results in the list below, which would still show the results from the previous query. The only way to fix this condition was to force-quit the app and restart it.

I have already fixed a bug that may have caused this behavior, but I'll try out that scenario to be sure.

Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday

Other than that, it worked great. One feature request for future years that I have would be to include the rankings as well. That would be really handy, even if it was just a link that would open the rankings page from usfirst.org in the browser.

The issue with showing the rankings is that there isn't enough information available to compute the rankings correctly, and we really don't want to show inaccurate rankings.

In the version we are working on now, if no matches have been played by a given team since the last update for that event, then the ranking is shown. If the team has played matches, then FRC Tracker will update the win/loss/tie record, but not show a ranking. There's also a quick way to look at the teams for a given match (played or not) that shows all six teams' records and (if available) ranking.

Linking to FIRST's team standings page is a good idea. There are a bunch of links we want to put in, but we haven't started working on how to organize it.

If anyone has other ideas for how to improve FRC Tracker, we are open to suggestion. Feel free to post here or send us email directly at frctracker at idleloop dot you-know-what.

[Chris is me]

A really easy way to see a team's nickname (pulled from TBA), the obvious "robot picture" that's a lot harder than it sounds are all the suggestions I have. Thanks for the great app!

[Tom Saxton]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

A really easy way to see a team's nickname (pulled from TBA), the obvious "robot picture" that's a lot harder than it sounds are all the suggestions I have. Thanks for the great app!

The team nickname support is in. I had that done a week before the Championship, but that wasn't early enough to get it through Apple's approval process in time. Thanks to Greg Marra and TBA for making that easy.

The robot photo idea is high on the list, either via taking pictures with the iPhone camera, or pulling it from TBA. That probably won't make it into the 2009 version, but maybe for the 2010 season.

I should post some screenshots as a preview of what I already have working but haven't released yet...

[Tom Saxton]

I've still got some work left to do before submitting version 1.2 to Apple, but here's a quick preview of the new stuff.

http://www.idleloop.com/frctracker/preview.php

As always, we appreciate feedback.

[engunneer]

Tom,

I'm not quite sure (you are more familiar with the match software than I am), but what info is missing to compute Rank? The only thing I can think of is the pre-penalty score of the losing alliance, but that can be derived from the twitter feed.

Thanks again for the updates. I updated it in the hotel in Atlanta and was using it when I could.

Random idea - ask the user what team number they are from, and if there is no picture in the database for that team yet, nag them to upload one to TBA. It's not good for the users, but it's good for the scouts

[Tom Saxton]

Hi Branden,

Thanks for the great comments!

Originally Posted by engunneer

I'm not quite sure (you are more familiar with the match software than I am), but what info is missing to compute Rank? The only thing I can think of is the pre-penalty score of the losing alliance, but that can be derived from the twitter feed.

There are three issues.

You are correct that the Twitter feed has enough info to reconstruct the unpenalized score, but the Twitter feed isn't official and doesn't reflect any changes made to the scoring after the end of the match, such as the head ref changing a penalty or correcting a scoring error. Fortunately, I saw a lot of that happen at the Oregon regional, so I'm really aware of how it can change things.

I also need to know where all of the surrogate appearances needed to fill out the schedule are located. I could assume that, knowing how MatchMaker works and that they are all supposed to be in the third round, but that could be problematic.

Finally, the big one is DQs. The Twitter scoring data doesn't say anything about DQs, and neither does the data on FIRST's site. Without that information, any attempt to calculate rankings could yield really large errors, especially for teams that have already been punished with a DQ. I really don't want to get involved with that at all.

Originally Posted by engunneer

Thanks again for the updates. I updated it in the hotel in Atlanta and was using it when I could.

Cathy and I were following the matches very carefully from home, and watching you folks do well motivated me to add the match detail view so I could preview the upcoming matches.

Originally Posted by engunneer

Random idea - ask the user what team number they are from, and if there is no picture in the database for that team yet, nag them to upload one to TBA. It's not good for the users, but it's good for the scouts

I definitely want to add the ability to add robot photos (and maybe also team uniform photos) and it would be awesome to be able to share those photos, either through a web site like TBA or directly using the iPhone 3.0 peer-to-peer networking enhancements. That won't be in version 1.2, but I do hope to add it for the 2010 season.

[Tom Saxton]

We just submitted version 1.2 for Apple's approval. It should be available in about a week.

[Tom Saxton]

Version 1.2 is now available. This one has support for showing and searching through teams' nicknames, and shows the championship matches and awards, plus some other enhancements (several of which only appear when a competition is in progress).

You may have noticed the name of the app (as shown in the iTunes app store) has changed to "FRC Tracker 2009." That's so we can have a new app for 2010 and users can choose to also keep around the 2009 version for looking up past year info. The 2009 version is locked down from doing Twitter updates so that next year, 2010 results won't get loaded in and mess up the 2009 info.

We'll probably do some work later this year adding features to the 2009 version in preparation for the 2010 season and expect to release a 2010 version shortly after registration data for the new season appears on FIRST's web site.

As always, feel free to give us feedback in this thread or via private message.

Tom & Cathy Saxton

[Nate Smith]

Nothing like bringing back an old thread, but would anyone be interested in a Windows Mobile version of this app for 2010? I recently picked up a WM phone, and was looking to see what fun things I could write for it...

[Steve W]

I was wondering if there would be FRC tracker for this years game? Loved it last year. Will last years work this year?

[synth3tk]

If the author is willing, I'd like to know the specifics of the program. I'm thinking about doing an Android version, now that I'm learning Java.