JaMarcus Russell has been linked to the Vikings, Jets and Cardinals in various recent rumors, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
Our View: All three of the teams have apparently shown just elementary interest, and no deal for Russell is imminent. Any interest is good interest for Russell at this point, though it remains to be seen if someone will bring him on board before training camp arrives.
To our loyal subscribers and visitors, you probably have noticed that the site has gotten a serious facelift of late. I would like to give a special shout out to Monica @ Blissocity.com and Jane @ Rainbow Rabbit for all your hard work. There are still some tweeks, but it is truly a VAST improvement over the prior look and feel and should make it easier for our users to navigate their way around.
iPhone development of the myTeam feature progresses nicely. I have been flushing out the draft tool and am looking forward to showcasing this new feature in a youTube video once it’s ready and gets released. Since I love fantasy football myself, I’m designing this app with one central question in mind at all times: what tool would I want in my drafts.
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!
This weekend I will be adding the My Team feature. This will not require an account with the central server, but WILL once I can offer a sync capability. The sync will let users log onto the primary web site and manage their teams there as well as on their phones. This will be pretty important once the season is up and running, but not so much in the coming weeks.
This will be our first pay-only feature and so will require me to find code sample for turning on and off features based on what “version” I am compiling. Our goal is to offer the current version, plus a “Pro” version that has this feature along with the draft guide access. By default, since it’s a pay version, I plan on including my own draft guide with the app. Extra guides will be fed by our online store and of course will cost more. Rick is working hard contacting other content providers to see who will be interested in selling their fantasy guides through our store.
So, once the My Team and My Guides are working, it will be off to copy-paste the code into a new iPad based interface. That is a MUST have for draft day.
Rick here, let me first start by apologizing because the goal of this project was to document from start to finish all of the steps that we took to take a bootstrapped start-up from beginning to end and show you how we built the Fantasy Demon iPhone application for and we have missed a couple of opportunities to add some things.
I can say that what I’ve learned so far when it comes to bootstrapping a start-up company is to strictly focus on what matters and clear away the rest.
Our start-up approach is very 37signals.com like in the fact that both of us doing this project are busy and life is busy so socking away time to do this project has been short bursts of code here and there and that code needs to be only what’s valuable –> NO FAT CLICKS, meaning no extra stuff that doesn’t matter.
Jason has built all of the code and we’ve talked everyday about how he’s doing so he’s currently bearing the brunt to get a shippable product for the iPhone but soon I’ll be bearing the brunt as I’ll be slammed with marketing efforts and he’ll be bug fixing and polishing off our next two modules (My Teams & Draft Guides).
Stay tuned for tomorrow night when I go thru the first ever demo of our product and I hope you will give us feedback.
The fine folks at Rainbow Rabbit are working on a last round of graphic changes before we submit the “Lite” version of the iPhone app this weekend. I could show you the updated screenshots now, but thought I’d tease you all and make you wait. Ha! Don’t worry, I’ll have another update with the finished screenshots this weekend.
For now, I figured I would discuss some of the updates I have been working on over the last week or so (sorry for the long delay in updates):
By this weekend’s release, I will have the updated graphic interface for the Tools section from Jane, and will have tested and removed all memory leaks etc prior to submittal. This version will be the “Lite” version we will give away for free. The pay version will include access to the Guides (pay feature), and creating your own teams on the phone, plus the draft tool. These latter features will require an account on our central server so we can keep the data synced in case the user deletes their data accidentally. Plus, later on, they will be able to access the same information via the web site.
Ok, so I finally have soe screenshots from the iPhone app to share. The app is “raw”, meaning it has zero graphic work done. I still need a company logo, web site design, and WordPress theme. Once those are done I can build the needed iPhone graphics or outsource to a designer.
Features include browsing and search the news, drill down the the article (and yes, the links in the article body work), and ability to email the article off to anyone of your choosing. Pretty simple eh? Well, a lot of setup work goes into this. The data is locally cached in sqlite database so the user can access the news that is already downloaded in cases with no connectivity. Also, the web calls are cached, making the system work faster. The web service api is wrapped in a full object layer, and there is code to detect network availability, and email availability.
The iPhone project, “Minneapolis Skyway”, was started by myself and collegue Casey Holey. Casey called me with the idea and I agreed to begin development. After a while, though, I had to regrettfully pass on the project due to time constraints and handed over the code to Jane Mitchell from Rainbow Rabbit. Now, the project has been submitted to Apple and will soon be available for download. You can read the twitter feed here: http://twitter.com/skywayapp, to hit the site at: http://www.skywayapp.com
The screenshots look awesome and I look forward to downloading this app once available!
I got through my list today, despite spending about 4 hours total driving. I filled my tank this morning and it’s already half gone. On the bright side, I was able to pre-pay for two months rent so I should be good on finances until the end of July, assuming the worst (another thanks to the dickheads @ Ratchet).
The api will need a mechanism to prevent unlimited web access, but works just fine. I was also able to setup a SQLite backup mechanism on the iphone so news can be queried in cases where there is no connectivity. So, tomorrow, after the long morning of driving three kids to three different schools from Apple Valley to downtown Minneapolis, I hope to accomplish the following:
I did the primary work today I set out to do, though got bogged down trying to get SQL Server to send email. FUCK I hate that shit. Put simply: it doesn’t work. I will need to write a stupid service that run and reads my email table, sending out via SMTP. Fucking stupid…
So, the News page doesn’t have all the features yet I need. It is missing the paging, and tabs for the different news source. It is also missing the search form. You can, however, perform the search if you know how to type the Urls. They are “News/{Team Code}/{Keywords}”. You can also optionally set a “pg” querystring parameter to perform the paging.
The control output caches, resetting the cache every 5 minutes. So, that said, here is my new task list for tomorrow:
