Just a quick note as we are totally into work now:

Added in iPad version
• Page flip
• Balloons on calendar with expanded schedule information

Fixed:
• Sample data notifications
• iCal multiple day events showing in iStudiez Pro (iOS 4)
• Crash while adding/cancelling holidays
• Corrections made to the German localization

Apple supports students by recommending iStudiez Pro among most useful apps during the busy back-to-school days. Back to School Apps promo takes you from the landing page of the App Store to the specially allocated section where featured apps are arranged into several sub-categories among which are Fill Your Backpack, Make Science Fun, Higher Education and more.

Not so long ago Apple introduced a special program for developers that we view as an intention to let both developers of respective apps and educational institutions benefit from 50% discount on volume purchases.

Once we’ve been notified about this option by Apple, we pondered it’s pretty nice idea and decided to take part in this initiative. So now, as soon as there’s a need for an educational establishment to buy more than 20 copies of iStudiez Pro at once, they can enjoy special purchase conditions.

Everyone who’s interested is welcome to learn more from the official FAQ or go directly and redeem their Volume Vouchers here.

This is a minor update that only includes fixes of most annoying bugs that you complained about. So we fixed:

• Ghost notifications
• Crash while importing instructors from Contacts
• Crash while viewing/tapping holidays in Calendar
• Bug with delayed refresh of App Icon Badge

We’ll of course include some interesting new options in our next updates, we listed all the requests that you have sent to us so far in the order of preference and will do our best to introduce the most crucial and attractive first.

“The features and tutorials you’ll discover in the issue will equip you with the skills to go out and start pushing your content onto the 3 million iPad users ready and waiting to be entertained, challenged, aided or informed by your brilliant app idea.”

We were asked to share our experience in creating user-friendly interface for iStudiez Pro (iPad version) by Computer Arts publishing company. Some of our thoughts and tips were put into the iPad – the creative pro’s guide printed magazine.

We’ve seen the content and we must say it is really professional work and can be really helpful for those who only start developing apps for iPad, but we cannot disclose any sneak pics here according to the agreement with the publisher. However, we can at least publish the magazine cover here.

Thanks for Computer Arts efforts and true interest in our small input.

Recently FoxBusiness.com which is the official Web site for the FOX Business Network, posted a nice review where they describe and recommend TOP 10 apps for college students, and iStudiez Pro is one of the apps being reviewed.

Nice news and thanks to Fox Business team, we enjoyed the nice slideshow 🙂

To cut it short, we made iStudiez Pro compatible with iOS4. Which does not mean that if you are not updated to iOS 4 the app will not work on your device. Of course, it will. So just a few words about the details.

iOS 4 compatibility:

• Retina display. This was quite an effort, we should say, especially taking into account that Michael had to re-draw ALL of the art of the app in order to make it look sexy with Retina display. So basically all icons, buttons, textures, everything you see was resized (we wonder whether we’ll survive when Retina display comes to iPad, but that’s another story…)
• Multitasking support comes with something that many of you asked for a long time, iStudiez Pro now opens where you left it, on the last viewed screen. Wasn’t that hard, really…
• Integration with Calendar app on iPhone (turned on by default, but can be turned off via internal settings in the app). From now on you will be able to manage (add, edit, delete etc) in iStudiez Pro all events that are entered in the Calendar app. As soon as Apple allows it now, we are happy to present this option to you in this update.
• And you no longer need to always stay connected to the Internet to be notified of your upcoming classes and pending assignments. Local push notifications are available in iStudiez Pro for those who use iOS 4.

We’ve also made some improvements which are universal for iPhone/iPod and iPad versions of the app. When you’ll be making a backup of your data, all the cancelled classes and notes will be saved, no more lost. ..oh yes, and exams will now show up during your holidays period 🙂

We also fixed grades calculation, updated some localizations (Dutch, Italian and Russian) and improved general stability and performance of iStudiez Pro.

P.S. To answer before you ask: yes, we are still working on desktop version 😉

Another great news to share is that iStudiez Pro now being officially recommended by Apple on the Apps For iPhone page. Just choose Apps For Students section and you’ll see iStudiez Pro description with the Make your grade slogan.

Must say, we are really pleased with being recommended by Apple, especially with the nice description that they’ve posted below the screenshot:
“The award-winning iStudiez Pro lets you manage every type of school schedule, keep track of all your assignments, and stay on course for the next big exam. And you’ll always make it to class on time with multiple alarms and push notifications that display on your iPhone no matter what app you’re using.”

That what makes you feel there’s always space to do more…
“Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them” – remember? 😉

We would like to share our joy with you guys, as the news gives us motivation to go further.

iPad sales started in Western Europe on the 28th of May and we are lucky with iStudiez Pro to be featured as app of the week in App Store in Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Ireland, UK, Denmark, Finland, Spain, Portugal (and hopefully in more countries, we couldn’t track all).

Such a nice surprise energized us this weekend and we would like to say that we are thankful to Apple for the support and promotion of our app. 🙂

P.S. Now working like mad on desktop and sync…

We do not approve of using the jailbroken devices and here are some reasons:

• Jailbreak contradicts EULA
• Jailbreak is dangerous in terms of viruses and worms (it affects jailbroken iPhones running the SSH app with the default password)
• Jailbreaking you device voids your warranty and you cannot expect any help from Apple if you start experiencing any hardware problems with your jailbroken device.

The above mentioned is not something that we as developers should be worried about as it is your decision and your responsibility. What’s most important is that jailbreak destabilizes your OS and leads to unpredictable performance problems.

Let us put it this way: we really messed it up with 1.3 and 1.3.1, but luckily 1.3.2 which got through approval very fast is stable and secure update. But despite it being stable and secure we still received hundreds of letters to our support with complaints about losing of data and crashes on launch of the app.

We were really surprised as we successfully managed to load on our devices the data backups that were sent to us with such complaints. And then it occurred to us that a jailbreak might not be something that we can just silently disapprove of (our devices are NOT jailbroken, you got it right).

You see, when we hear you lose your data, it makes us really worried about you as we understand how much you rely on iStudiez Pro and how much efforts you put into your studies.

Ok, so we found a buddy with a jailbroken iPod and tried loading one of the backups that we received. Yep, it crashed, all data deleted. Yep, a shock.

It took us a sleepless night to dig out the reason and when we turned the multitask app off, backups started to load normally.

So our solution to users who happen to have jailbroken devices and can’t load backup: restart your device in safe mode and load your data backup (it will load successfully).

That’s it guys. One simple app unapproved by Apple caused such problems for hundreds of people that we care about. Why don’t you just think it over taking into account that OS 4.0 will support native multitasking?

What upsets us the most is a number of negative reviews that were most likely written by users with jailbroken devices and may mislead the others and lower our motivation (which is not happening, but it might have and we are sure you don’t want that ;))…

Wow, finally we let it out, now getting back to finalizing sync feature….