Filtering trough your tournaments list

Table Top Tournaments is a great service to find great miniature games tournament, but we usually interested on those we are playing. This is why I've added an essential feature in Brothers In Games T3 : filtering.

You will find the filtering spinner on the Action Bar at the top of your screen. The list is built on the loaded tournaments so if your game system is not in this list, there is no know tournament on T3 the next days.

You can update the app right now or download it form Google Play.

Feel free to give your feedback or comments about the features.

Yet another score counter...

I have just added a new app on the Play Store. This is a personal score counter you can use for any game. You can get it now on Google Play.

Brothers In Games Scorer is a very simple application : it displays a number you can raise or lower simply by swiping up or down. You can also set a value trough a dialog. The app keeps the last score even if you exit the app.

As a simple multi-purpose app, there is no start, high or low value. The app may not inform you if you won or loose by reaching a certain value, but that way you can use it on the values you need as you need. Track a score or life points, it's up to you.

The app was designed to use the touch interface. Rather than just pressing a button, to raise the value and another to lower it, you just have to swipe up or down. I would really love to have your opinion about this kind of interaction. Also, if you would want to see another kind of interaction, feel free to comment this post.

T3 Rebooted

I have published on the Play Store a new stand alone Brothers In Games app focused on Table Top Tournaments (T3). This app is in its early version and still labelled as beta since it requires a lot of optimizations.

A dedicated app.

Purpose of this app

The purpose of this app is to focus on an easy access to T3 upcoming tournaments. The information displayed is based on the content of the RSS feeds. This is just a summary of the tournament information, so the interaction have been redesigned to display all the important data on the list view and provide an easy access to the other features.

Of course, this is a feature you can find in the current Brothers In Games app. But this app is being redesigned so I am extracting the feature. This will have several benefits. First, it will make bug fixes and improvements easier to publish. Second, as T3 is not available in every country or as all of you are not interested in tournaments (or at least those published on T3), this is the easiest way not to overload one single app with useless features. Third, if you are just interested in T3 informations, this is the easiest access you can get.

Availability

BIG T3 is available for Android devices running Android 2.2 and above. Devices running Android 2.x cannot add the tournament in their calendar due to a system limitation.

As it is in Beta, BIG T3 is available in the countries covered by Table Top Tournaments which are Germany, Austria, Belgium, United States, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

App behavior and features

Usage

For a better overview of your tournaments, all the information is gathered on the list view. From any tournament entry, you can

• go to the T3 tournament web page for more informations
• locate the tournament using your favorite map application
• add the tournament to your calendar (available on Android 4+ only)

You need to be connected to the Internet to get the tournaments list. Caching and filtering will come in a next release.

Behavior

When you launch the app, it will look for the RSS feed from Table Top Tournaments. T3 do provide several local feeds, so the app will first check your location to select the country in which you are currently. This is costless as the app look for the last location recorded by the location service. If the country is among the available countries in the feeds, that one will be used, otherwise, it will be the international one.

The data is collected trough the RSS Feed. Depending on your Internet connexion, this should be pretty fast. Unfortunately, the data is incomplete in the feed, the location contains only the city. The app will then send other requests to the T3 server but this will take more time. As the data is updated, you may see the title change as the wording is not the same.

The app does not support yet filtering or country selection, this feature will come in a next update.

If you are a miniature games player, get the app now on Google Play !

Legal notice

BIG T3 app is provided as is. It requires an Internet connexion so your provider charges may apply.

Brother In Games apps are free to use as long as you accept them to display adds.

Brother In Games is not affiliated with Table Top Tournaments.

Brothers In Games, New Features

This blog may have been silent for 3 months, ant that was because I was working on the features to improve Brothers In Games, especially the friends part. So, in those 3 months, for testing purpose, I released another app, KipinTooch. Brothers In Games and KipinTooch will share common features about contacts and calendar management.

So now I started to include some of those features in Brothers In Games. The next updates will be focused on the user (you) and your... brothers in games.

You can get the app on the Play Store.

Introducing the Dashboard and the location.

What's new ?

The last release of the MiniWar Companion is on Google Play, and the two first modifications don't need any download. The name have changed and this is the last time we'll talk about the MiniWar. The app is changing to Brothers in Games as that is its final purpose, help gamers play together.

This modification comes with a change in the launch icon. I try to reflect what the app is, not only it's an Android app for now.

Concerning the app itself, this update introduces the foundation of the real companion app with a Dashboard as the home activity. Of course, the Dashboard isn't fully functional yet. Here you have a preview of what will be available. In the next update, you can manage your own events.

The other feature introduced in this update is the usage of the location to filter for you the next local tournaments. Don't worry, this is only informative, you can still filter the feeds the old way.

Privacy concerns

The app is collecting your location information to filter the feeds on the device. This is done on the device, no information is sent trough the network, neither your location is saved on your device. The app collects the last known position from the location service of your device, it does not actively request your position. This is not the most accurate but it is enough to determine the country, and it is the cheapest in term of power consumption.

From MiniWar Companions to Brothers in Games

Yes, we changed the name of the blog. Soon, this modification will be spread to all our media. Yes, we are still providing the Companions apps and this name change is meant for the evolution of the app and services.

Brothers in Games will not only help you manage your tournaments. Not only Table Top Tournaments announcements. The redesign of the MiniWar Companion was meant to improve our app by providing you some useful informations within the app. Unfortunately, we know that most of you are in a country which does not use T3 services, so that app is useless.

That is how we came to Brothers in Games, and soon, you'll have more informations.

Offline tournaments and filtering now available for the Companion.

Those are the changes we made for our last release.

We gather additional informations about the tournaments from TableTop Tournaments website. The location will now be more precise in the city of the event.

French tournament details with the street informations.

Unfortunately, this information is not in the feeds, so it takes longer to get them all, and you'll experience it on the first launch. But in the same time, the app save all tournaments information on your device, so you can check it offline. On the next launch of the app, you'll get everything faster.

Of course, the street information is used for the location of the tournament. This will give you a more precise location on the map, or for navigation purpose.

As the data is cached on your device, the app will try to get updates once a day, on the launch of the app.

We have also changed the filtering feature, now you can filter by country and game system. The filters are not dependent on each other, they always list all countries and game systems available on your local list even if the combination leads to an empty list. If you can't find your country or game system in the filter, that means that there is no tournament in the app for your country or game system.

Looking for an Alkemy tournament in Belgium ?

As we do not control the content of the fields from third party datasource, you may find the same information in the filters but in different languages. Yes, we rely on the name as it is, so filtering by one language will hide the other entries. We are aware of this issue and are working to find a solution.

Two unfortunate filters for the same country.

Your filtering will be remembered when you'll leave the app, so on the next launch, they will be applied. For convenience, the filter button does not appear in landscape mode on small screen devices. This is made on purpose to let a readable display. Of course, previous filters will still be applied.

We hope that you'll enjoy this upgrade. Feel free to comment your opinion about the app. If you still don't use MiniWar Companion, get it now on Google Play.

Better details, easier access to actions.

We just released a new minor update with an improvement of the tournament detail dialog. It is now easier to access to the actions available.

The new tournaments derailed display.

From any tournament, there are several actions available:

• If a web address is provided, you can view the website. The app will launch the default web browser or ask you to choose one, and will open the web page.
• If a city is provided for the tournament, you can locate it on a map. The app will launch your default map app or ask you to choose one, and will rely on the search capacity of that app to locate the city.
• If a web address is provided, you can also share a tournament with your friends. The app will let you choose among the apps which can handle text messages (SMS, emails, instant messaging...).

If you are running any version prior to the 1.6, those actions are available trough a long press on the tournament element on le list view. A menu offering the available actions will pop up.

The menu obtained after a long-press

The location action is also available trough a tap on the place block on the tournament detail dialog.

Those interactions are still available, but we think that a long press is not a nice way to interact with the device. So, we added a few buttons one the tournament detail view. Any button will be displayed if the action is available. Of course, for T3, they are usually all available.

As images on buttons may not have an obvious meaning, you can just long-press on those buttons to display what their action is.

Feel free to give your opinion in the comments, we would love to read your feedback.

New release of the MiniWar Tactical Companion

After a long black out, we are back on this app. We have plenty of ideas about the MiniWar Tactical Companion and finally managed to find time to work on them.

The last release is one year old, and it is pretty difficult to really make the old app evolve to today's standards. Our main concern is to avoid any data loss or to introduce any harmful regressions. So we checked the app usage and it appears that only a few used the app to schedule some personal tournaments, and your main activity is checking Table Top Tournaments feeds.

We understand that the personal tournament page does not provide any feature that a calendar entry would. So we decided to put that aside for now and focus on how to discover new tournaments. How to make the app better on that point.

We just released an update of the app which now focus on T3 feeds. Stating the app will now display the International feeds. As previously, you can check the other feeds (and the bug for the US have been corrected) or filter by a gamesystem. If you are using the Alkemy Companion app, it will still open the Tactical Companion T3 feeds filtered for Alkemy gamesystem.

Improvements will come fast. But if you have any ideas or wishes for the evolution of the app, feel free to tell us about it on the comments.

You can download the MiniWar Tactical Companion from Google Play.