iLuna: the Next Steps

Right now, I am working on iLuna for Android. It so happened, historically, that the Android version was a bit simpler than the iPhone one (well, at the time I created it, Android was still in version 1, and there was one and only Android phone in the whole world). It offers all the same information, but, perhaps most significantly, it's missing the Month view that allows to see at a glance the whole month, and to navigate by a month at a time.

So the first thing I am going to do is to bring iLuna for Android to the same level of user interface sophistication where iLuna for iPhone is right now.

The next task is internationalisation (i18n). That's something I should have done years ago, simply because Russian is my first language, and I could easily do a Russian translation myself. So I did it, for the current Android app, but I haven't applied it to the iPhone one yet. I've also got a Korean translation, but I still need to implement it in both apps. Why exactly Korean? Well, it looked like the best choice on the website of the translation company I used. Whether I was a right decision or not, the future will show.

So the current target for me is to have both apps with a similar user interface, and translated into Russian and Korean. I will then be gradually adding other translations, beginning from Spanish.

In terms of content, the next step will be adding the Lunar Mansions. Then retrograde Mercury will be added too. It isn't exactly a lunar thing, but creating a separate app for retrograde Mercury doesn't look like a good idea, and this information was requested by the existing users of iLuna. It is quite important too.

In terms of functionality, the next step is adding the possibility of exporting the information to a calendar. The other steps will be creating notifications for the selected bits of information, and the possibility of sharing the information in various ways.

This is the roadmap, but I can't tell you how much time it will take to implement it, because I can only work on iLuna in the evenings and on the weekends, after my regular job (which is about creating mobile apps for various businesses).

One decision I've made however is that I should send out a Lunarium Newsletter at least weekly, so if you want to keep in touch, you are very welcome to subscribe to it.

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