Lunarium Blog

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 K...

iLuna was the first smartphone app I ever created. The iPhone version of it was released to the App Store in February 2009, while the Android version was released in the end of the same year. Since then, thousands of people became the users of iLuna, many of them use the app on a daily basis. In fact, it is the most popular of my apps. All my attempts to create something that would be at least as popular as iLuna weren't successful. With all the previous updates to the mobile platform, from iPhone SDK 2.0 to iOS 7, from Android 1.0 to Android KitKat 4.4.4, iLuna just kept working. It was good, because all those thousands of users could rely on the app. But it also gave me an opportunity to delay the updates. Some of those updates were requested by users long time ago, like, for example, the possibility of exporting information from iLuna into a calendar. The app wasn't even updated for the bigger iPhone 5 screen, so it wasn't using the whole screen on the newer devices. ...

Sorry, I am keeping silent for two long, so wanted to give you a heads up. I am working on a completely new version of the Five Signs app which could be a completely new app, but I decided that it will be nice to make it available for free to those who has already purchased the app. The new version will come with Facebook integration and a couple of very new features that I hope will make the app a lot more interesting for it owners. The new version of Five Signs will initially appear for iPhone, but soon after that I am hoping to complete the Android version of it.

Finally, I decided to create an application that I always wanted to have myself, instead of trying to guess what other people might find useful. Meet Lunar Diary . The problem with lunar days is that their traditional descriptions are often quite contradicting, and still I find it important to take into account lunar days when planning something important. I know that the 29th lunar day isn't good for anything, but the 21st day is good, especially for traveling. Quite often I notice that some event is very close to the topic of the lunar day when it happens, but then I forget about it, and the valuable knowledge gets lost. Lunar Diary allows to quickly write a note and associate it with a specific lunar day, and store any number of such notes. This way, the user can accumulate the personal knowledge and experience of different lunar days and use it as a guide - the more valuable the more notes are collected.

You might have noticed that I haven't updated Lunarium in any significant way for a while. That's because while I was rolling out New Lunarium, my other projects were patiently waiting, and finally the time came to give them an opportunity to be born. Mostly those are iPhone/iPod touch projects. A couple of them were completed, both are based on numerology: Your Life Graph and Life Path . Although the names are alike, the apps are different. I am going to make a separate posting to explain why I appreciate numerology so much. Also, I was able to complete my first Android app, that's iLuna for Android . iLuna for BlackBerry is still in development and is a bit stuck. I am somewhat disappointed by BlackBerry platform, it is so... 1990-sh compared to iPhone and Android. But I hope to do something for that platform as well one day. Nokia with its adoption of Qt begins to look interesting but Qt licensing isn't very exciting I'd say, at least for now. I was planning to ...