Fantasy Demon

 A new version of the iPhone application is coming soon and I wanted to let all our loyal fans know what things to expect in the coming weeks.  Our hope is to have these out before the start of the season, but such things will really end up in the hands of Apple more so than ourselves.

Facebook / Twitter integration

You will be able to post any news article or even your “My Teams” (Pro and upgraded users only) out to Twitter and / or Facebook.  This will be a great way to boast during the season when one of your players has a good week, or taunt your opponents when their players goes down with injury.

Start This Guy Integration

Start This Guy will also be released as a seperate free app, but we will integrate directly with it.  This tool lets you create weekly polls on who to start for the week and lets the fantasy football community vote for you.  Not sure what RB to start?  Just ask the world and see what they say.  Simple, sweet, and needed.

Guide Store for Free Users

The Guide store will be opened up to the free users of the app.  We will also be working on getting more content throughout the season so stay tuned!

Bug Fixes

Naturally, we will release a series of fixes for any bug s we find.  The draft tool has one that we know of, and there have been a couple minor issues reported when the app has zero internet conneciton.  We will also have a fix that allows the free version to run on OS 3.1.3, opening it back up for the iPad.

This tutorial will walk you thru using our Fantasy Demon iPhone application to view the news. You can do open ended searches and also email articles out to your friends.

We aim to make this Fantasy Football application extremely valuable but we can’t know what’s valuable to you until you tell us. We are two geeks who have been playing Fantasy Football for over 20 years and want to build an app that we want so any feature is up for grabs. Tell us what you think…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFrA_GyEq_8[/youtube]

Mark it down folks.  This weekend I will be releasing an updated version of the free or “Lite” version of the fantasy demon iPhone application.  It will contain links to our new pay version of the application with tons of added features, and will have a bunch of interface updates that make it even better and easier to use.

After this weekend I want to move on to the full iPad version, and I hope my graphics person can get me the new 2x version of the images so those of you with new iPhone 4.0 phones can enjoy and even better looking interface without any scaling up.  Here is a list of some of the changes coming your way:

Lite version:

• Merging the news into one consolidated list.  This will allow me to grab news articles from other sources later on.
• Articles will have links directly to the player profiles or team profiles.
• Player profiles now support an Email option to send information to your friends or yourself for later use.
• Player comments have been moved to their own tab to make room for added player detail fields.
• Team profiles now support an Email option to send information to your friends or yourself.
• All player lists now sort by Rank as a default, and paging through them has been removed.
• Some crashing issues when browsing away from loading screens has been addressed (this is very rare anyway)

Pay Version (4.99):

• Ability to create and manage “My Teams”.
• Ability to browse a list of free strategy guides, with guide information integrated into player profiles and draft tools.
• Draft Tool to help track players chosen during a draft, and to help add players to your My Team.
• Ability to Email My Team profiles to help your league commissioner with setup and to track draft results.
• My Team narrowed news, giving only news relavent to players in your own teams.
• Ad free.

Work is now underway on the pay version of the iPhone application. Included and completed already are a series of improvements on the free version, along with additions like My Teams and Guides.

My Teams will allow the user to add players to their own teams. This lets them mirror the teams they have in fantasy leagues so they can track player performance and news throughout the year. It will also include a draft tool they can take with them when at their fantasy drafts, making choosing the next player or bidding an easy task. Integration with Start This Guy will also be included.

Guides will allow the user to download information, like draft guides, to their phone to aide in the research needed before draft day, and during the fantasy season to help them administer their team. A free guide will be included with the pay version, and other guides will be (optionally) a pay as you go internal store.

Hello!

Our iPhone free (lite) version is now available on the app store!  Thanks to all our supporters over the last few weeks, and a special thanks to Apple for finally streamlining the approval process.  Be sure to download the app and play around with it.  We hope to get at least one version update out before the start of the football season.

Remember this is the lite / free version.  The pay version will allow you to create your own teams and download strategy guides and other fantasy football content.  We will be adding iAd to the lite version, something new from Apple, to help support our efforts.  It is completely non-obtrusive, something we prefer, so as to not interfere with the use of the app.

Also I am proud to announce that Jane from Rainbow Rabbit is hard at work creating our custom theme for this blog and later web site.  From what I’ve seen, it will rock your socks off!  If any of our fans EVER need any graphic work done, she’s your lady!

Later!

Well, it’s finally done.  The free lite version is now submitted to Apple and the waiting game begins.  As promised, I have attached some screenshots of the app for your review.  Rick has posted a quick video on YouTube, but his camera was blurry… ugh… so here are some cleaner pics.

Enjoy!

Ok,

I was planning on submitting today but the day got too long and I have to retire to go to work tomorrow.  So, it will be done tomorrow after work.  At that time I’ll post up screenshots, the ones used in the submission.  For now, I’ll talk a bit about what was done over the weekend.

I was able to get the remaining screens up and running for this release, and updates from Jane with new graphics.  I was also able today to get some new data imported into the system.  This included an update to the player list, the official player rankings (cheatsheet stuffs), and player comments.  I have been going through, team by team, and de-activating several player records since my source of player data includes EVERYONE on the roster, and fantasty people only really care about starters, rookies, and maybe some sleepers.

In the course of getting the new player data, I was able to load up the players age, height, weight, and draft projections.  So, I will be adding that information to the player detail screen tomorrow (should only take a couple minutes, it’s already available in the data feed).  I will also spend a quick few minutes running through the app, looking for any memory leaks before submittal.  So here is my quick program list before pushing out:

• Add Age, Height, Weight, and Outlook fields to the Player Detail Screen
• Change default sort of players on the Team Screen to sort by position, then rank (so starters show first)
• Remove any memory leaks (if present)
• Take screenshots and write full submittal text, including the list of keywords needed for the app store
• Adjust code settings to make app ready for submittal, then submit to Apple

I was hoping to have all this done today, but the holiday’s makes it tough, with all these damn kids around.  No worries, it WILL get done tomorrow.  Till then!  Thanks!!!

It’s here, we finally have our first version going out to apple today. Our goal was to get something out as quickly as possible so people could start to use it as quickly as possible and provide us with feedback immediately. We have two more modules that we’re going to add but after that it’s all up to the users. We’re going to take all suggestions from our users and build in what is the most popular requests so it takes about 1-2 weeks to get approved by apple so check back or check the apple store for “Fantasy Demon”.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELxeuB5nhJw[/youtube]