Dog fooding Trout

I went to iOSCon 2014 a few weeks back in Shoreditch. It was a well arranged event and well worth the (earlybird) ticket price.

But as an experiment I thought i would do an intense session of dog fooding Trout for iPad as I haven't had a chance for a while. 

So starting with the keynote... 

So far so good and nothing that annoyed me.  But by the end of the day i was left with quite a collection of individual talks

Now I encountered a couple of interesting things.

1. I can auto-arrange my nodes to tidy up but in doing that I lose all my manual layout. 

2. Im running out of space on the iPad surface 

So come Day 2 of the conference I grab the root node , dial down the arrange radius and shunt all the things into a corner.  Lots more space to work again.

But by the end of the day things had got real crowded 

So when I got home I used the desktop version which can have a much larger surface to layout the nodes and more importantly gather soft links which the iPad version was unable to do across field of about 210 nodes.

So lessons learnt from this exercise.

Trout iPad does do what its designed to do and there were no crashes.
About 200 nodes is the limit of what it can handle on the iPad for crowding reasons.
More colors! . Trout needs a way to add (or remove colors)
The UI to add a Sketch or take a photo should be a lot easier. I often missed photos as the opportunity had passed. 

Anyway I got an idea for a few new improvements and features for the future.

You can get Trout here for OS X  and iPad.

Trout for iPad - http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/trout/id384470167?mt=8

Trout for OS X - http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/trout/id445221676?mt=12