Hanx Writer Makers, Hitcents, Use Raygun For Awesome Error Reporting

The Hanx Writer hit the top spot of the App store this week. The app replicates all the noises typewriter lovers have come to associate with the computer keyboard predecessor. The clicking of the keys and the chiming when you come to the end of a line makes for a nostalgic experience, the app comes with a single font, color and typewriter in the free, default version, but you can unlock more font and typewriter features with in-app purchases.

Jonathan Peppers is the Senior developer in the app department at Hitcents, working on cross-platform C# applications. He is a Xamarin MVP and author of the book, Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development. Hitcents is the software company behind the Hanx writer, with about 60 people in Bowling Green, KY. There are two sides to the company: building custom software for clients such as line of business apps, and building in-house apps and games.

“Raygun is a “real” error tracking system, compared to what we have developed ourselves for apps in the past,” Jon explains. “There’s an SDK for nearly any platform you’re developing for, which reports errors to the Raygun backend service. You can choose to receive emails when errors occur, and they provide plenty of reports and filtering on their web dashboard to help figure out what went wrong.”

“So far, having a reliable SDK that is reporting errors on multiple platforms has been the best feature. We have apps on iOS, Android, web apps in Ruby on Rails on Linux, and ASP.Net on Azure. Getting reliable error reporting on all these platforms and being able to aggregate them under one application in Raygun gives us a better view of the whole picture.”

“Before we started using Raygun, I felt like we were pretty blind to some of the errors that were actually happening in production. In customer facing apps, we have seen the number of errors we’ve fixed from Raygun reports affect monetization in a positive way. With apps we’ve built for clients, many times we can proactively react to an error from a Raygun email during Beta testing. Clients are generally impressed, because we have a head start on fixing it before they have time to report it to us.”

“If you have an application that has a significant number of users, or really want to provide an excellent error tracking service to your clients, Raygun is a no-brainer. We feel like the monthly cause easily pays for itself by improving your app’s monetization or keeping your paying clients happy.”

“My team generally complains about using new things as they are learning (such as new source control). They have never complained about Raygun, so it must be a great service. Generally, everyone wants an email when something goes wrong in their code, and Raygun’s SDKs are easy to setup in your app.”

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