Return from the Dead

Observer Pro 1.0 shipped on September 15th, 2011. After a minor bug fix update, Observer Pro has continued to work through several major updates to iOS. Despite my intention of continuously improving Observer Pro through feature updates, I found it difficult to make the time to do the work. The pressure has been building over the years as I, and other Observer Pro users, have wanted more from the app.

On top of that, when iOS 7 shipped, Observer Pro instantly looked dated and parts of the app started exhibiting incorrect behavior. I knew it was time to get to work in whatever way was possible. So, I fired up Xcode and opened up the Observer Pro source code and compiled it for iOS 7 just to see how things went, to see how much work I had ahead of me to at least ship a compatibility update. Well, things had changed so much in the world of iOS development that there was a significant amount of work to be done just to get it to run correctly when built using the iOS 7 SDK.

This effort was further motivated after installing the iOS 8 beta on one of my older devices to see how the App Store version of Observer Pro would run. Turns out, it doesn't run at all under iOS 8. This is a big problem! I love using the latest and greatest software, but if I upgrade to iOS 8 then I'll lose Observer Pro. Of course, this would also be the case for the thousands of users who have come to rely on Observer Pro for their astronomy planning.

With the prospect of so much work just to ship a compatibility update, I began thinking maybe this was a good time to reimagine Observer Pro for today's world. To create the version of Observer Pro that I would want now that I've had years of using Observer Pro 1.0 and feedback from other users. Making time in the evenings and weekends, that's what I am currently doing.

I know this is really a long time coming. Thank you for your patience.