It has been a few months since I've bothered to write. During the Fall Season, I got swamped with taking stats, fixing bugs, teaching new statkeepers, and generally having a good time. I got some great feedback from the team of rookie statkeepers that helped mold the shape of Version 2.0.
Since the Spring season won't start until March, I have until the first of February to get 2.0 done and then put it through its paces in early February to shake the bugs out. That means that I'll be a coding fool between now and January.
Additionally, I changed day jobs, which delayed me a bit. But now I can dedicate some time each day to the forward progress of LaxStats.
On to the feature list!
First and foremost is the game screen. Although the LaxStats game screen is highly advanced and literally allows for a statkeeper to know exactly where a person is at anytime on the field, it isn't wanted. One of my new statkeepers was extremely enthusiastic about the flow, and then within 5 minutes of her first game, couldn't keep up with the substitutions on the field and gave it up. Other statkeepers who had spent many seasons with the Pencil and Paper method were hesitant to use something that didn't look familiar. And LaxStats does have an issue with deleting bad recordings, something that also turned off others. I have one statkeeper who just doesn't trust technology in that setting (although she herself is extremely tech savvy) and would rather have just a pure offline version that she could enter the data in at her leisure at a later date. Regardless of my intentions with the software, these are my customers and if that is what they want then I need to provide.
That means that I'll retain the advanced game screen, but signify it as such and not turn it on by default. A new, simplified version of the game screen will replace the default, looking as much like the Pencil and Paper method as possible, while still retaining some of the advanced functionality (such as the FaceOff Win/Loss dialog and the Assist Dialog). This simplified screen can also be used a the offline data entry method, although there will be no way to capture WHEN something was done with this method so games recorded offline will have NO ability to also have a GameCast. Again, small price to pay.
The game screen was mostly hard coded to work on the iPad, especially since we had not had any users on anything else up until that point. Lucky me got a couple of customers using Android and that means that we need to adjust the new game screen to be completely responsive. For that I'm updating the entire site to be Bootstrap 3.0 compliant (everything but the game screen was already 2.0 compliant).
By making a more simple version, many of the stats that were on the board to be reported on (Time Played, Time Per Position, Points per Minute, etc) won't be possible, but the consensus is that no one at the Youth level needs or wants so it won't be a loss and will actually free up some time.
One the Home screen, it needs to become more User centric and focused on what the user can do. Also, we need the ability to find Organizations, Teams, Games in your area so that you can choose to become involved or not. It tends to be a bit of a Black Box currently (although that was on purpose) and it needs to get opened up a bit more. Also, Social Media sharing needs to get incorporated (previously planned but never completed).
On the list is also the completion of the Virtual Game Clock/Game Keeper that will allow clock keepers and fans stay in sync while on the field.
I had planned on converting everything into REST based API's to be a bit more robust and could actually be used by other developers. However, as I planned it out, I realized that my time frame would be pushing March just to do the conversion and not add any new functionality. So instead I'll be organizing into more API like functionality in preparation and will be incorporating AngularJS to start to serve as the front end MVC like application. Converting the PHP to MVC is just too large at this point.
That's it for now. I've got to get back to coding while I have a window today. If you have any suggestions for what you might want to see in the 2.0 Version, feel free to drop me a line.
