Ok, we have received many inquiries from the DailyHoroscope App users lately regarding the question of the new “astrology” sign.

The Question

Lately some prominent news channels picked up a story about 13-th sign Ophiuchus and that due to various reasons (we don’t want to get into that) the dates for the zodiac are wrong and have to be changed/moved/recalculated.

The wave of confusion hit the Internet. Being developers of a very popular horoscope app for smart phones, we felt we have to step in with some sort of explanation not only for people who wrote us wondering about this but for everybody. We ask you to share this story on Twitter and Facebook (use the badges) so that we can put an end to the confusion.

The Answer

Short answer for those who are not interested in the details:

There is no new astrological sign. Astrology and Astronomy are completely different things. Astronomical interpretation of the boundaries of the constellations is in no way equivalent to Astrological interpretation.

We let the common wisdom speak instead of us. So we give you a quote from Wikipedia:

Unlike the zodiac signs in astrology, which are all thirty degrees in length, the astronomical constellations vary widely in size. The boundaries of all the constellations in the sky were set by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 1930. This was, in essence, a mapping exercise to make the work of astronomers more efficient, and the boundaries of the constellations are not therefore in any meaningful sense an ‘equivalent’ to the zodiac signs. Along with the twelve original constellations, the boundaries of a thirteenth constellation, Ophiuchus (the serpent bearer), were set by astronomers within the bounds of the zodiac.  (source)

You can read the full Wikipedia article about different Astrological and Astronomical systems.

UPDATE: 01/14/2011 Some people reacted in comments that Wikipedia is not reliable source and criticized us for citing from Wikipedia. So to answer this:

1. We quoted the wikipedia because we could not have said it better ourselves and many people still think Wikipedia actually is a very good source of reliable information – information that survived a lot of critique from millions of editors.
2. For people who do not trust Wikipedia or what we say, we explain below that we follow Tropical zodiacal cycle and will keep following it and this “recent change” which is not a change but rather something that was known for long time does not apply to Tropical (Western) astrology. Once you know that, you are free to use any source you like to learn more about Tropical zodiac and the dates.

end of the update.

The mass confusion that the news about “new zodiac sign” caused when the news reached respectful publications is another example of a very bad journalism. Where journalists are running after sensation blindfolded and the editors join them in their hype hysteria and allow publishing of misleading information. This is another warning sign to never completely trust media!

Please help us STOP the mass confusion with “new zodiac sign”. Please share with your friends on Twitter and Facebook using the badges on the top and help us stop bad journalism and resolve the created confusion!

UPDATE (01/16/2011)

Although this is supposed to be more of a technical blog, considering the recent confusion, we decided to publish a more elaborate explanation about this whole confusion and why you should not be worried and why nothing has changed. Please read What’s my zodiac sign? Sorting out the Ophiuchus confusion.

DailyHoroscope App

We will not change anything and we will keep following Tropical zodiac system. If you are confused about your sign, when you click on a sign, for each one there is a range of dates when this sign is in effect. It is quite easy to find yours. We will consider adding a simple calculator like we have for Chinese and Druid signs to aid in Zodiac sign calculation in a future release due to this confusion.

If you have Android, iPhone, BlackBerry or Windows Phone 7 smart phone. You should try our DailyHoroscope app. It is a the most popular horoscope app on Android and BlackBerry. You can see the download options on this download page or you can use the badges below!

You can follow us on Twitter @comitic @DHiPhone @DHAndroid @DHBlackBerry

We would like to use this post to explain recent issue DailyHoroscope users have experienced.

Many users could not post the horoscopes to their Facebook profiles/wall, getting strange errors with some random website names and just weird application names.

Many of you have written us about this problem (THANK YOU! We really appreciate your feedback!). We have investigated this issue since then but there was not a lot of information and since this problem was not persistent, meaning that it was only happening sometimes, it made it so much harder to track and understand the reason to this problem.

We think that we have now a good idea about why this is happening and how to fix this. Thanks to active Facebook developer forum.

At this point we would like to state and clarify the following:

• This issue was not caused by the recent update.

This issue was caused by something internal to Facebook API implementation, which however coincided with the recent update and of course many users thought this is because of the last update. We know that this is the case because other developers integrating with Facebook APIs experienced the same problems both on iPhone and Android.

• This is not malicious behavior of DailyHoroscope

To the remaining skeptics out there, who still think that this was some malicious behavior of DailyHoroscope. This issue is easy to reproduce on the Facebook website itself – just open the following URL in your browser: http://www.facebook.com/connect/uiserver.php

• We fixed the issue (we really hope so…)

While we think that we have successfully fixed the issue using a workaround to prevent this bug in Facebook access APIs from happening again, we can not be 100% sure because in the first place this error was not happening all the time and although we tested the fix a lot, we could have just been lucky (or unlucky actually) to somehow fall on all the cases where this bug in the Facebook API does not happen.

If you still are experiencing problems after the latest upgrade - 1.8.3, please write us to contact@comitic.com with as much information as possible so that we can further analyze this and hopefully fix this issue for good.

We would like again to thank all the users who have reported this problem to us and provided further information when we tried to debug and fix this issue. Thank you!

We also hope that the users who reduced the rankings of the application will consider raising them back. Thank you for your continuous support!

A new version of DailyHoroscope is coming to Android soon.

Not too many updates in this version though. The core development guys behind DailyHoroscope had to shift the focus to other things but they are getting back on track to bring more updates, improvements and new features!

We also have added the tilt effect which was a breeze with the provided sample by Microsoft and this tilting effect is very, very nice! We even consider making a separate presentation of it on our blog, to show some really cool tilting effect it produces!

Have a look at it in the video:

We have added screen transitions to the DailyHoroscope that should go hand in hand with the main system UI screen transitions.

The system screen transitions are not immediately accessible to developers but developers are welcome to imitate them according to the user interface/user experience guidelines. And it is relatively easy to do so since all the power of SilverLight is at the developer’s fingertips. We have almost no experience with SilverLight and also very little experience with C# – these are the main technologies for Windows Phone 7 development. But with great tools Microsoft released, which are quite intuitive and easy to use and with the great help from the samples and the developer forum, we were able to dive into straight into the open waters of Windows Phone development.

So for the screen transitions, we were referencing this walkthrough by Jeff Brand.

You can see the end result in this video:

P.S. We think the video does not do justice to how it actually looks, as it looks so much better on the simulator and will probably look even better on the device!

We are glad to let our users know that we already started working on a version of DailyHoroscope to run on the windows phone 7 and we will be launching with the first device, which should be really soon. The rumors are somewhere in October – meaning in just a few weeks!

Here’s the first stub we took, it’s not much but we are working on it and it is starting to take shape. We have to develop relying only on the simulator so far and we can only hope it will look and work the same on the actual devices.

Without further ado, here’s the short video for DailyHoroscope fans!

UPDATE: this was just an initial stub and we continue to work on the app and it should be much nicer when we launch. We have already added some UI niceties. You can see the result of adding screen transitions for DailyHorosocope.

We have good news that we wanted to share with you as soon as possible. They say one image is worth thousand words, so here it is:

As many of you know, sharing to Facebook using the regular intent mechanism on Android is well, impossible because Facebook applications screwed up is not using the intent parameters properly. We are almost done with an explicit sharing option to Facebook to be available in the next update to the DailyHoroscope for Android.

Maybe by the end of the next week, who knows

Today in the early noon we have released the new version of DailyHoroscope.

The new version has reworked icons and the red color is back by a popular demand!

We also changed the former drawer icon to grey icon to be more universal and match with all the current themes and any future ones as well. We also decided to drop the drawer in favor of popup window which seemed to make more sense and fits better with the new Android 2.1 and 2.2 user experience.

We have also tried to fix a bug that occasionally resulted in the application crash. The crashes were very rare and we were able to get the information about the crashes with the recent change Google made to application control panel to include application crashes. After analyzing the logs we applied a fix. This should result in even more stable working of the application.

In the late afternoon, we realized that there was a small bug in the released version and we immediately started to work on eliminating it and soon posted the updated version to the Android Market.

Enjoy the application and as always – don’t hesitate to let us know what you think in the market comments, emails or here on our blog.

DailyHoroscope application for Android, BlackBerry and iPhone gets a more universal date. We have set the date by default to an American standard which is month/day/year e.g. for the April 21 2010 (today) that would be 04/21/2010. This confused some people, not to mention is somewhat specific. So today we have updated the date format to be more universal. From today it will say “Apr 21 2010” and not 04/21/2010.

Thanks for your feedback, we really appreciate it and listen to all of it!

You are welcome to try out the newest beta release of the DailyHoroscope for BlackBerry. You can download it over the air (OTA) by opening the following link in your BlackBerry browser:

http://bit.ly/dhberryNN

.: Notes about networking :.

When you first open the application, it can seem that it is “stuck”. This is because it tries detect and establish networking connection. Wait for 20-30 seconds and try to open your sign. If it works – great, enjoy the app. If however it does not work and you get error dialog, please try clicking on the sign again. If is still does not work, please go to “Connection Settings” and click the “Reset networking setting” button. Get back to the main screen and try loading a sign again.

If that still does not work for you, you can try to set the connection method manually in “Settings” menu, although we recommend using “Automatic”.  By default, networking method should be set to “Automatic”. You can switch it to other available options and there is “Test” button right beneath the selection. Press on the “Test” button to test your setting, you will be told whether the setting worked or not by either seeing:

“Connection established!” or “Connection FAILED” messages.

***Please note the first time you try to use the application it can prompt you with a permission dialog to connect to a web server. If you accidentally clicked “deny” then the application won’t work. You can change these application permissions by going Options -> Advanced Options -> Applications -> DailyHoroscope, then click the Edit Permissions menu item. There you can check whether it has “Connections” option set as “allow”

We truly hope that this new version will work for you. In case you still experience problems, please do not hesitate to contact us. If this version fixes your problem, please also spare 10 seconds and write us back that it worked. We ‘d really appreciate it!

Thanks for your patience and continuous support! We hope you will truly enjoy the application.