Attendance Summer 2010 Updates (one more feature)

I'm just about finished with the planned updates for Attendance for June. As of June 8th, version 3.3 is waiting for Apple's approval. In addition to the initial work to allow in-app SMS supported by version of iOS 4.0, it now allows you to take attendance multiple times per day for a single course if you turn on a preference setting. Version 3.4 of Attendance will be submitted after June 21st when I install iOS 4.0 and test the in-app SMS feature on my iPhone. Read more below for the details.

To take attendance multiple times per day, launch the iOS Settings application, scroll down and select Attendance and turn On the setting for "Multiple times per day." All the places where dates are displayed will also display the time and you will be able to add a new date with a specific time. If you turn this on for an existing course, you may notice weird times for existing dates as every date value in the iPhone has some time value associated with it. Just ignore those times for old dates and select the time you want for new dates.

Version 3.3 and above has a new Student Detail screen to support displaying the additional information (phone numbers and a student ID value). Select a value to edit it. If you have an iPhone, you can call or text a phone number. In version 3.4 on iOS 4.0, it will use the in-app SMS support but if you are running iOS 3.x or version 3.3 of Attendance, pressing the button to send an SMS will quit Attendance and launch the SMS application with the phone number pre-populated. Version 3.4 on iOS 4.0 will also support sending an SMS to multiple people at the same time (either the enrolled students or the students missing for a day); this is not possible on iOS 3.x.

When you create a new course, you can import the phone numbers. If you import from an Address Book/Contacts group, the mobile, home, and work numbers are imported automatically. If you are importing by pasting a CSV file or putting a CSV file on a web server, here are the names to specify in the header line that starts with a pound sign.

#last,first,email,extraemail,mobilephone,homephone,workphone,identifier,note

Reed,Dave,dave256@mac.com,dave@fakemail.com dave256@fakemail.com,614-555-5555,,,,test note

Note that there should only be two lines in this example (on the web, the second line is wrapped). The first line is the header specifying the order of the fields and the second and subsequent lines each correspond to the information for one person.

With all the new features I've added in the last year, I will probably increase the price to $4.99 sometime later this summer (August 1st is the earliest I will do it). So if you have colleagues who are considering buying it, please let them know they can get it this summer before the price increases.

Taking Attendance multiple times and SMS are the last two feature requests I've received more than five requests for other than grading. I'm still debating whether to try to add grading to Attendance as an in-app purchase or maybe try writing an iPad only app for grading. I realize there are currently many more iPhone/Touch devices and that is likely to be the case for quite some time so for sales purposes making it iPhone compatible would be beneficial. I still need to give some more thought on what a good design for the user interface for setting up grading and entering grades would look like on each device. Obviously, the iPad interface would likely be much more usable given the extra screen space, but it would be nice to integrate it into Attendance on the iPhone. Whether I add it to Attendance, write a separate iPad app, or do nothing will depend on whether or not I can design a reasonable user interface and how much I have to work on it this summer.

Comments

[Natho gibraltar]

I think all the added futures are going to be great!, keep up the good work.

[Chay]

Great app ! Multilanguage next time ???

Customisable de choice : present, absent, late, unknown, customisable

[dave256apps]

Chay, the choices are customizable now - see the videos. I'm the only person developing the app and the only other languages I've studied are French and Latin, but it's been 20 years since I studied them.

Dave

[Kevin McKay]

Hi-just a thought on the grading issue. I am a secondary school teacher in the UK: I tend to use Excel for keeping, combining and displaying grades. But I miss (from my old Palm machine) the ease of ticking off homeworks, equipment brought/not brought, etc. as well as attendance. Could your new multiple time slots be used for such lists? I realise it would have to be some kind of separate module, though, as these are basically Yes/No fields under an editable title such as 'Homework', 'Pen&Pencil', etc.
What do you think?
Kevin

[dave256apps]

Kevin,
You could use the multiple time slots if you want to add extra statuses. I'd actually recommend copying the course (see instructions below) if you want to use the Attendance app as-is for copying. While I periodically check the comments here, the best way to reach me is to email me: dave256apps (at) me (dot) com.

On the Add/View tab, press the Edit button at the top right, scroll down past your list of courses, and press the green + button. On the new screen, scroll past your list of Address Book Groups until you get to the section titled "Duplicate Existing Course" and select the course you want to duplicate. Finally press the Add button and it will create a course with the same name and the word "-new" automatically appended. It will copy all the students to the new course. You can later edit the name of the course on the Add/View tab by selecting the course and pressing the Options button.