Attendance, one of the recommended apps from last year’s faculty iPad pilot, has recently received a complete overhaul. According to David M. Reed, professor of computer science at Capital University and the app’s author, incorporating new feature requests from users required a rewrite of the original app. The new app is simply titled Attendance2 and uses a different data file format than the original. The end result is a sort of good news/bad news for users.
On the positive side, Attendance2 is faster and adding class information is easier than in the previous incarnation of the app. On the bad news side, the new app cannot read data from the old, so anyone switching to the new version will need to start fresh with their entries. Attendance2 also doesn’t have the ability to create random groups, a popular feature in the old version, but it is expected to be added in a future update. And while the author does plan to maintain the old app, at least as far as bug fixes go, he will not be adding new features to it. The Chronicle article, Attendance2: An Update for the Attendance App for iOS Devices, offers a great rundown of what you can expect from Attendance2. You can also view an introductory video on the author’s website.
Just wondering if anyone has used this app (Attendance2). I had been using TeacherPal/TeacherKit, but have become very unhappy with it. Many features don’t work properly, and it seems it hasn’t been updated and improved in quite a while.