Labor Mate 1.6 has been approved by Apple and is now available in the App Store. This version fixes the problem with the No button displayed after touching the Reset button.

User feedback in iTunes for Labor Mate is typically good. Most user rate Labor Mate with 4 and 5 stars. But every now and then a bad review comes in. A bad review is expected from time to time. After all the app isn’t for everyone. Still, there are times when I’m confused by user feedback. Take for example this feedback from Whidbey Island Filkin-in-Law:

“This works great for false labor; I used it every night for a week – sometimes for three hours at a time and I thought it would be neat to mail the info to our midwife. However, when my labor actually started and my water broke two days ago, I thought of this AP and how it would be the last thing I’d do @ 3 min apart & how my review might say: if you’re using this, it is false labor…”

I admit I would not expect my wife to use Labor Mate while she is having contractions. That’s why I tell people Labor Mate is typically used by the expecting mom’s birthing partner, be it her husband, boyfriend, life partner, a friend, and so on. A mom-to-be has too much going on to worry about timing contractions. Let someone else do it. (Though there is nothing wrong with a single mom timing her own contractions. Everyone’s experience is different.)

So while I agree with Whidbey Island Filkin-in-Law that the last thing a woman would want to do when contractions are 3 minutes apart is to touch a start and stop button on an iPhone, I don’t understand the 1-star rating. Whidbey Island Filkin-in-Law used the app every night for a week up to 3 hours at a time. She obviously found value in the app and yet she rated it with a single star.

Reviews like this one aways leave me scratching my head and wondering.

I will be donating all proceeds from White Peak Software product sales on Wednesday, January 20, 2010, as part of the Indie+Relief program. The proceeds will be donated to Doctors Without Borders to assist with their efforts in Haiti.

How can you help?

You can help by purchasing one of our products: Labor Mate, Killink CSV Editor, or SMTP Diagnostics. Don’t have a need for one of our products? Then visit the Indie+Relief website for a list of other independent software companies participating in this Haiti relief program.

Get great software and help with efforts in Haiti at the same time.

Labor Mate was originally release in October 2008. My expectations for it were low. If it sold 100 units in the first year then I would consider it a success. But my expectation were exceeded. Labor Mate sold 4997 units in the first year, and it has sold 9201 units in all as of yesterday.

In January 2009 Labor Mate broke into the Top 100 for the Health and Fitness category in the U.S. store. It stayed in the Top 100 daily for nearly 11 straight months peaking at number 34 in the U.S. store. Labor Mate has also been in the Top 100 for the Health and Fitness category in a number of other stores including the U.K., Japan, Sweden, Netherlands, and Italy among others. All of this changed in mid-November. Labor Mate’s fall from grace had started.

A couple of things happened in November bumping Labor Mate out of the Top 100 in its category. First, it received a couple of ridiculous, negative comments in iTunes. I’m not sure of the real impact but the slide from the Top 100 started at the time of the comments. Second and only a day or two later, BabyBump made the What’s Hot list. I believe it is this second point that has taken the biggest toll on Labor Mate’s Top 100 streak.

BabyBump was released in October 2009, just over a year since the initial release of Labor Mate. BabyBump includes features that I have long planned for Labor Mate but have yet to implement. And honestly it looks better than Labor Mate in my opinion. Creative design has always been a weak skill set of mine.

At the end of the day, BabyBump did it better. This was a major wakeup call for me. I let Labor Mate, the one time market leader in its space, grow stale. I had a top ranking and it was mine to lose. And lose it I did.

A major mistake I made in 2009 was to focus most of my attention on contract work and not enough time on my own company. This lack of focus was a setback but also a major kick in my ass. Unfortunately it took Labor Mate’s fall from grace to light the fire under me (and in me). I have learned from this lesson and will do better going forward. For starters, I have since hired a part-time designer as the “Creative Director” for White Peak Software and the first project we worked on together looks great. It will be in the app store soon.

So what about Labor Mate? Is Labor Mate dead? No, far from it. Just a few weeks before the fall from grace, version 1.5 of Labor Mate was approved. This release added support for 8 additional languages, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, and Russian. So while sales in the U.S. have dropped, sales worldwide have improved and Labor Mate continues to sell an average of 31 units per day worldwide. So despite not being in the Top 100 of the Health and Fitness category in the U.S., sales remain steady. Also, I have big plans for Labor Mate 2, which I will start working on soon.

I’m pleased to announce the release of Labor Mate version 1.5, which is now available in the App Store. This release fixes a few bugs but more importantly it adds support for 8 new languages. Labor Mate now supports the following languages:

Dutch
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Spanish
Swedish
Russian

Labor Mate is available for only $0.99 in the iTunes App Store.

I recently went through the process of translating Labor Mate into 8 different languages. Unfortunately the phrase “Labor Mate” doesn’t translate well into other languages such as Japanese and Germany so the translators came up with new localized app names. The problem I had though was displaying the translated app name on the iPhone’s springboard.

After a bit of experimenting I finally got the translated app name to display. Turns out the steps are fairly simple. Here are the steps I took to localize the app name:

1. Added the property LSHasLocalizedDisplayName to Info.plist and set to True (mark the checkbox). Note that Xcode might change the property name to “Application has localized display name”.
2. Add a new strings file called InfoPlist.strings.
3. Make the file InfoPlist.strings localizable.
4. Add the languages that will have a translated app name.
5. For each localized version of the InfoPlist.strings file, add the follow string key/value pair: CFBundleDisplayName = “App Name”;
6. Be sure to set “App Name” to the translated value.

That’s it.

Speaking of language translation, I hired the fine folks over at iphone-i18n.com to translate the app description, keywords, and in-app strings for Labor Mate. I met Chuck and Judith of iphone-i18n.com at 360iDev|Denver. They impressed me with their knowledge of internationalizing and localizing applications as well as their specific technical how to knowledge for the iPhone.

If you are an iPhone developer looking to translate your iPhone application into other languages then I highly recommend talking with Chuck and Judith at iphone-i18n.com.

The newest version of Labor Mate, version 1.4, is now available in the App Store. This new release includes an improved user interface as well as some bug fixes.

Wow, has it really been 3 months since my last blog post. I’ve gotta work on improving that.

Speaking of improvements, a new enhancement is finally coming to Labor Mate. The next release will finally include a chart showing the duration and frequency of contractions over the last hour. Here is an sample of what the chart will look like:

One thing to note is that intensity is not something captured by Labor Mate at the moment, so the chart will initially default the intensity level to 5. That is 5 on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is a not so intense contraction and 10 is the OMG, GET THIS BABY OUT OF ME contraction. Here is the same chart with no intensity.

Obviously these sample screen shots are not from an iPhone or iPod touch. I decided to prototype the chart in a Mac desktop app, which is what you see pictured here.

I hope to have the updated app submitted to Apple before the end of the month. Stay tune for more.

stevenwt2 writes this about Labor Mate in his feedback at the App Store, “Used it throughout a night of contractions and it worked flawlessly. No crashes, no problems, and it was easy to keep track of an average. If there was anything to update about the app, I would want the ‘Summary’ screen to be able to average based on a time period or number of contractions (average over last 5 contractions or over last hour, etc.) as an average over the entire night can be a little misleading. However, that is looking to the next version – good luck.”

Good news, stevenwt2. The average is already calculated based on the number of contractions.  In fact, the duration average shown on the summary screen is based on the last 3 contractions and the average frequency is based on the last 6 contractions.

Thanks for the great feedback and congratulations on the arrival of your new little one!!

wayneeglonbrown posted the comment “would be good to be able to delete one put in in error” in the App Store. This is not the first time someone has asked for this feature or asked the question “how to delete.”  Good news is this feature already exists. Labor Mate provides 2 ways to delete a recorded contraction.

One option is to use the swipe delete feature common to many iPhone applications. Simply slide your finger across the item and a Delete button will appear. Touch the Delete button and the contraction is removed.

The other option is to tap the contraction item. This takes you to a second screen. At the bottom of this screen is a Delete Contraction button. Touch this button to delete the individual contraction.