Mac Grading app

The most commonly requested feature for Attendance that I haven't implemented is grading. There are a few ways you can do simple grade recording with Attendance:

1. copy the class and use statuses corresponding to grades
2. take attendance multiple times per day and use the second time for a grade
3. use the new daily note per student to record a grade

The reason I have not tried to add full grading capabilities to Attendance is with all the different capabilities people will want (total points or weighted averages of categories, drop lowest X grades for a category, etc.), I do not think I can design a good interface on the small iPhone/Touch screen.

I previously used some scripts written in Python to keep and calculate grades for my classes. In November I began developing a Mac app based on the ideas from these scripts and the capabilities I thought people would want. I've spent a number of long days and nights in December working on it and it's at the point where it's now usable by me. I'm going to get some feedback from a few friends and have a few colleagues beta test it with me this semester. Assuming all goes well, I'll try to finish it up over our mid-semester break at the beginning of March. It always seems to snow during our week off so it should be a good time to get version 1.0 ready to submit to the Mac app store.

The main items I need to finish our polishing the GUI a bit, design an icon, and create the help files. That's probably at least a full week's work. Here are the main features:

1. document-based app so you create one file per class
2. support for using total points or a weighted average of categories
3. option to drop lowest grades from each category (different number per category)
4. add/delete students, categories, assessments with full undo support
5. configurable letter grade scaling
6. import students from a CSV file
7. email grades for an assessment to students
8. email full grade report to students
9. export a CSV grade report with all grades

Once I do a little more GUI polishing, I'll post a few screenshots and/or videos of it.

I plan to price it in the $15 to $20 range in the Mac app store. At the moment there are no in-app purchases or upgrade pricing in the Mac app store so at least for now, it appears all updates will need to be free forever unless you create a new app that people need to buy. I don't want to ask people to pay for a new version so I'll probably price it at the high end of the range.

If sales are decent and I think I can design a reasonable iOS app based on it, I may try to do that in May-July 2011. My guess is that if I do, it will be an iPad only app to take advantage of the larger screen.