iHomework <3 Element 84
Posted by Paul Pilone on Sep 16, 2012 in Element 84, Featured, iOS Development | 10 comments
We’ve got two big announcements that we’ve been itching to talk about for a few months now. First, we’d like to announce that iHomework is officially a product of Element 84! If you haven’t gotten a chance to check out iHomework, it’s a great tool for helping students of any age stay organized at school. You can find it on the App Store for iOS and the Mac App Store for OS X.
I started iHomework back in late 2008, when the App Store was brand new and iPhone was still in its infancy. After 3 years of nights and weekends, the app has grown into a full iPad and Mac versions with users all over the world. In order to keep up with the pace of the App Store, I’m happy to announce that iHomework is now a product of Element 84. What this means for users is new features, faster updates, and big changes. We’ve got a lot of exciting things planned for the app and thank everyone for their support and patience during this time!
We’re not just announcing the iHomework and Element 84 hookup – we’re also releasing iHomework 2.5 for both iOS and OS X! This is one of those “near-and-dear to our hearts” update. We’ve already submitted the update for review and hope for a quick approval process. This update includes iCloud support for iOS 6 and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and full support for the new iPhone 5! In addition to iCloud support, this update addresses some compatibility issues with both iOS 5 and iOS 6.
As mentioned in the release notes – iHomework 2.5 requires a minimum of iOS 5 (iOS) and Lion (OS X 10.7). We’re pushing the minimum version in order to incorporate some of the features Apple is offering with their newer operating systems. If you want to use iCloud to sync data between all devices, you’ll need to be on iOS 6 and Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8). Requiring the newest versions of both operating systems for iCloud support was not our original intent. We wanted to make iCloud available to iOS 5 and Lion so that we could support the biggest user base possible. However, after (literally) months of debugging, testing, debugging, crying, testing, caffeinating, and crying, we decided that iCloud was not stable enough on iOS 5 and Lion. There are major issues with iCloud syncing in iOS 5 and Lion; huge improvements were made in iOS 6 and Mountain Lion. Since your data is incredibly important to us, we decided we just couldn’t safely include iCloud support for the older OS versions.
Keep an eye out for the release of 2.5! We’re really excited about iHomework and what we have planned for the coming months. Updates are going to be rolling out much faster so feel free to send your feedback and comments. We want to thank everyone for your patience and support! We couldn’t do this without you.
Sincerely,
The iHomework Team
Cool!
One thing I’d really love to see though is Android and Windows support. I have an iPod Touch that I am starting to use iHomework on, but I may get an Android phone in a few months, so then iHomework wouldn’t be nearly as useful to me. I also have an old Macbook (only able to run Lion at the latest) that I use almost exclusively for development purposes. Now that iHomework is being worked on as a team, can we expect Android and Windows versions?
Really glad that iCloud support is coming to the desktop version as well!! I already have the iOS updates! The other thing I’m hoping for on the desktop version is a full screen mode. The full screen mode isn’t as important though.
I am using iHomework for my Masters program and have liked it so far. One thing I would like to see is being able to switch between WiFi and iCloud syncing. Since this syncing is currently broken between iOS and Mountain Lion, I am stuck using the iOS version only.
Thanks for the feedback! iCloud syncing on the OSX side is coming. OSX approvals were backlogged pretty significantly with the release of iOS6. We’re hoping it’ll be out soon! Thanks again!
Still wont sync from my mac book pro to my iPhone 5.
Hey Max – can you send an email to ihomework@element84.com detailing the problem? v2.5.1 fixes an issue where data was not persisting after a sync. We’re still waiting on the Mac app that supports iCloud to be approved by Apple. We can offer help for legacy WiFi sync support via email better than comments. Thanks!
I just had to restore from backup on my iphone 5 and now my ihomework has no data. iCloud still says my info is on it but when I enable icloud nothing happens….. please help as I do not want to re-enter my information.
Patrick – First, thanks for using iHomework. I’m really sorry to hear you’re having problems. Can you please email ihomework@element84.com so we can reply to you directly and see if we can help? — Dan
You gave your reasons for not supporting iCloud on iOS5. That’s fine, at least they can still use the software without the syncing. Now say something for the people who are stuck on iOS4 and became unable to run the app at all.
In order to move iHomework forward, we decided to require iOS 5. iOS 5 introduced significant fundamental changes to the OS that iHomework is/will be using. Features introduced in iOS 5 change how iHomework is built from the ground up. In order to give the user the best possible experience, we want to take full advantage of those features, which required re-working some of iHomework’s foundation.