PocketWGU

Howdy All!  Another year has flown by and PocketWGU is now celebrating its 3rd birthday.  The first beta of PocketWGU was released in an announcement on the WGU's "Information Technology Program Community" on February 28, 2011.  Believe it or not, if you have access to that community the message thread is still there.  We wonder how many of the great folks who posted comments on that thread have already graduated in the intervening three years...  we’re sure it’s a bunch!

There have been a lot of milestones during the app’s most recent year.  It saw its 20,000^th download this past August, and crossed the 25,000 mark last month.  It also received its 200^th and 300^th ratings, and we estimate are that it’s used bynearly 40% of WGU’s current student body.  It remains one of the most highly downloaded mobile apps created for WGU students, and one of the highest rated apps for any university.  We’re both proud and humbled by this, and by the supportive comments we receive from WGU students each month.  Thank you all, and keep ‘em coming!  We’ll get back to work on the next version now…  right after we eat some cake.  

Update (2/6/14):  Version 1.7.9 is now available.
A couple of days ago, the feed we use to retrieve video folders for the iOS version of PocketWGU changed.  The current release (1.7.8) for that platform can choke on some elements of this data causing the app to crash when retrieving the folder list.  We've uploaded a fix (1.7.9) to Apple for their review, and hope to see that become available in the next couple of days.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

Some folk using the iOS version of PocketWGU have seen a return of the "Missing Course Data" issue we noted back in November.  The good news is that this is fixed in relase 1.7.8 (available now!).  It's a bit tricky to explain, but the short version is that if WGU has migrated your account to the latest version of the portal "backend", and you've chosen to stick with, or switch back to, the "Classic" portal interface, then you'll need to upgrade to 1.7.8 to see your course data.  The "Classic" portal interface is the one that has a mostly white background and a blue menu bar.  There was a bug in older PocketWGU versions that only worked with the new interface for students with the new backend, that's now been fixed.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

We get requests for a Windows Phone version of PocketWGU about once or twice a month.  Supporting a new platform is a sizable amount of work.  There are new tools and languages to acquire and learn, new app-store guidelines and submission processes to figure out, and above all else, new chunks of spare time <chuckle> to allocate.  It's a decision not to be taken lightly... but we're gluttons for punishment.  We've always said that we'd do a WinPho version if enough people asked, so let's see if there's enough interest.  

Update:  Fixed in PocketWGU for iOS 1.7.6 - 1/2/2014

Update:  Fixed in PocketWGU for Android 1.9.4 - 12/27/2013

Howdy all, and Merry Christmas!  We've noted that something odd is happening with some of the video links within Course of Study (CoS) pages.  For some reason, the WGU systems are embedding video links (YouTube and Panopto) with URLs that include the "httpss://" protocol specifier.  This is obviously a mistake (there should only be one "s"), but it is breaking many of the video links in PocketWGU.  Either the video won't appear, or in some cases, clicking on the video link causes PocketWGU to crash. 

We have already fixed this for the next releases on both iOS and Android.  These new releases should be out soon.  In fact, we have some other nice goodies planned for those releases as well, so stay tuned!

There's quite a bit that's new in the latest release of PocketWGU for iOS.  For starters, the entire UI has now been modified to fit within the iOS 7 style (while still supporting iOS 6 & 5).  The CoS view now displays content in a larger, easier to read font with a cleaner table of contents.  The new main menu makes it easy to check for unread email (without logging into webmail), to contact your mentor, and to get help or send feedback to the PocketWGU DevTeam (that's us!0.  We've re-vamped the "WGU Direct" section to make it cleaner too, and to add new content including direct links to nearly every social media network on which WGU is active.  We hope you like it!

The great folk in WGU IT have been busy.  Among the many things they've been up to is the creation of yet another new system for serving data to the student portal.  This new approach is even faster (nice job!), and like other new things will be phased in for students over time.  Some of you, especially those who started classes this month, are already using this new version.  If you are also using PocketWGU, you may have noticed that your "Degree" or "Courses" tab is blank.  Oops!  That's on us.

We've published a fix for this in PocketWGU for Android version 1.9.1.  You should upgrade to this version as soon as possible if you use an Android device (including the Kindle Fire).  For those of you on iPhones and iPads, PocketWGU for iOS 1.7.1 is now available.

Thanks!

Howdy all, there's a new version of PocketWGU for Android out with some important changes.  I do recommend that folk upgrade to the latest version (1.8.6), especially if you are using the "Classic" student portal.  Here's why:

WGU changed the structure of the "Classic" portal this week so that students who haven't switched could start using the new format for Courses of Study (CoS).  This is the format that "new style" portal users have had for a while now.  PocketWGU versions before 1.8.6 will still try to access the "old" CoS format for students on the Classic portal, and this won't work.  The new version fixes this problem.

Also, for those of you who haven't upgraded to 1.8.5 yet, this version added a feature that allows you to create and save a "Progress Badge" within the app like the image below.  Once created, the app will let you send the badge via email or post this badge directly to any social site (e.g. FaceBook, Google+, Twitter, Skype, etc.) for which you have installed an app.  Note that the badge is saved onto your device, and not sent anywhere unless you choose to share it.  

Saving the badge to shared storage is the reason that versions 1.8.5+ now require permission to write to external storage on your device.  Google Play calls this "USB storage", but its really saving the badge onto whatever SD card or general storage is on your device.

Enjoy!

So, it seems there are a few active iOS users out there.  The latest PocketWGU version (1.7.0) went live on the App Store last night at about 5pm (EDT) and by the end of evening over 2,000 people had already ugraded.  That's 20% of 10,000+ who have tried the app in its 2+ years of existence, all upgrading in a few hours after release.  Our experience has been that users upgrade to the latest releases of PocketWGU pretty quickly, with about 75% adoption of the latest version within a month of release, but 2k users in one night is still pretty high.  Thanks!

As for what's new in 1.7.0, users on iOS 5 and 6 should only see a few minor changes to the UI.  These were done to make the code easier to support on Apple's upcoming release of iOS 7 (due this weekend).  The DevTeam has tested 1.7.0 extensively with the v7 "GM" release and things seem to work, let us know what we missed.  The new look of v7 is quite different (translucent and flat), so we still need to make some further UI improvements over the coming months, but we wanted to be sure that the app at least worked when the new OS came out.