My Fishing Advisor released, formerly native code, now rebuilt in Gideros

PaulH

The first mobile app I published was My Fishing Advisor, on April of 2011. It's basically a fishing guide. Tell it what you want to fish for, approximately where, and what you know about the body of water in question and it predicts fish activity levels and movements based on region, time of year, time of day, position of the sun and moon, weather, and other factors. From there it generates a fishing plan, suggesting what to use, and where and how to use it. Users accumulate their own private collections of fishing spots and the app can help the user choose from their spots based on the target species and the conditions.

Over the years the Android version has had over 700,000 downloads, but the iOS version never did as well. That's mostly because I really, really hate iOS interface development in Xcode, and I didn't keep the iOS version caught up with all the improvements I made to the Android version over the years.

That's the main reason I decided to rebuild the app in Gideros, to have a common code base, common interface and to make it easy to push out updates to both iOS and Android. Getting to this point meant porting about 70,000 lines of code from Java to Lua, rewriting the UI and developing a map plugin. I'm very glad I did it.

I just released the Android version this week. In the process of porting it, I overhauled parts of the user interface for efficiency and to reduce clutter, replaced the weather API, and added a few features including a fishing log. There have been a few bumps in rolling out the update. A few users saved data didn't transfer properly from the all-Java version to the Gideros version, but I just released an update tonight that should recover any data that didn't carry over correctly the first time. And of course there will be some bad reviews from people who have used this app daily for years and don't want to see it change at all. That's to be expected, but I'm hearing from more who love the new version.

It's on the Play Store, but it's currently set to be visible only to users in North America, since that's what the fishing logic is based on. I'm exploring adding support for Europe in the near future. Oh, and the demo video currently shows the pre-Gideros version. I need to redo that next.

Links:

Free version - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pishtech.mfa
Premium version - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pishtech.mfaprokey

In the next week or two I'll release the iOS version.

Thanks to everybody who answered my many questions on the forum, and to everyone who has worked on Gideros or donated to developers! Thanks to everyone who plays a part in supporting and improving this outstanding tool, and this extremely supportive and helpful community!

Paul