Hi Lifetickers,

Hope this finds you well and on the path to achieving your 2011 goals. We thought it would be an opportune time to write a little bit about where Lifetick is heading in the coming months. You may have noticed we haven’t released many features this year and the simple reason is that we are working on one very big feature. Let me tell you a little bit about it.

Some of you may have already guessed from the blog post title, but we are currently rewriting our entire front end in HTML5. Presently it is written in Flex (Flash) and the time has come for us to move away from this technology. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, as many of you may already know, the iPad does not support Flash. This means that the only way to use Lifetick on the iPad is to log in to the iPhone version. Obviously, this is not ideal and we believe the iPad offers a perfect platform for tweaking one’s goals. Therefore, getting the full version available for iPad users is a growing priority. Secondly, HTML5 offers some significant performance improvements. In layman terms, this means Lifetick will load more quickly, ideal for users with slower Internet connections. Thirdly and perhaps with less certainty is the enormous cloud that looms over Flash. Apple set a precedent by not supporting it on the iPad. Ten years ago this might not have mattered. However, in the current market, this may have sounded the death knell for Flash. Many observers have suggested as much.

So what can you expect to see? Well, initially, we are keen to get a limited feature version available, followed by the all singing, all dancing full version. Keep an eye on the blog for updates, but we’ve already done considerable work and you should expect to see something in the next couple of months. We greatly appreciate your patience and support and will from time to time update some features in between HTML5 releases, but for now it is our number one priority. Beyond that we have a number of exciting things to release, but we’d rather keep them under wraps for now.

As a final note, you may be wondering why we went for Flex when we launched Lifetick? The answer is pretty simple. Nothing else really could deliver the smooth animation and style that Flex offered. In fact, even now we are pushing HTML5 to its limits in order to reproduce the stunning visuals that you’ve come to know and love such as pie charts, widgets and expanding goals. So, in short, times have changed and so must we.

Until next time, good luck with your goal setting and thanks for your support.