Ben here, from Enable. You may remember me from some FRCMastery.com LabVIEW training videos called the “Tip Jar” which our company did for previous seasons.
For this past season, we worked with FIRST to provide the interactive FRC Game Manual, and the iOS app. We also partnered with App Delegates to provide an Android App.
We’re planning our improvements for next season, and would love your feedback.
If you can spare 2 minutes (And I know you can, because the season’s over and you’re STILL on Chief Delphi :)), please fill out the survey here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/L9F25YQ.
And, of course, feel free to comment in this thread.
Big fan of the app! The only thing I wish was that if we wanted to, we could look at several rules at once, in addition to having to move between each individual rule.
Figured I would duplicate my two main comments here for everyone on CD to enjoy/discuss
For both the app and website: I’d love to see a direct connection (in the form of “comments” on the side?) between the rules and the FRC Q&A. Both the rules and any Q&A responses that pertain to those rules are really needed to fully understand design constraints on the robots.
The ability to “subscribe” to changes to specific sections or subsections, so I could receive an e-mail containing updates I’m interested in. Often teams are broken up into subteams, where each subteam may be interested in a different portion of the robot rules. For example, the electrical team is the only one really interested in the Power distribution subsection, while the PR/awards team will be the only ones really interested in the Awards section.
And of course, I mentioned the app’s limitation of viewing one rule at a time. I ended up ditching the app and just loading the PDFs onto my iPhone… much easier to scroll through and find the rules I wanted to look at.
I took the survey, and it didn’t take that long at all.
I really liked the APP and was glad to have it. I did add to my survey comments the same items I’ll repeat here.
The ability to search the entire manual. I don’t always remember what section has what, so searching for a keyword of phrase would make finding things easier and faster.
The ability to ZOOM the screen you’re reading. Some of us “older” folks cough cough have enough trouble reading a paper manual or PDF so being able to “size up” the screen I’m reading would be a huge plus.
Overall great APP, add my 2 items above, it becomes outstanding. IMHO.
One other thing I asked for is an offline mode. If there was one, my Itouch and Android tablet couldn’t use it. I would also like the return of the all inclusive .pdf. It made desktop searching offline so much easier.
The best part about the app was the auto-update feature. Although with the new notification features in iOS 5, I would like to have notifications whenever a rule gets updated.
But the bottom line is great job, and I hope this returns next year!
I agree with the link between the manual and the Q&A. Directly synching the two by rule would be awesome, so you can read the rule, see posted questions, and see answers (where given) all at the same place.
I appreciated having everything available off-line. With no wifi at the event, and having a Canadian cell phone plan, but volunteering at an American regional, data costs are… unreasonable…
Linking Q&A to their relevant rule, so you don’t have to go searching for them would be great.
