I Pulled Chewy Xbox from AppStore
Today I had to pull Chewy Xbox from the AppStore.
Like I said earlier, my data provider has been bandwidth limited. Which means that my app only works some of the time. Which means that hundreds of people were trying my app and giving it one-star reviews because it didn’t work.
I contacted Microsoft about getting into their Xbox Community Developer Program, but they ignored me.
I don’t know what to do.
Update: Chewy Xbox, Live Data, and Gmail
Duncan told me that Microsoft is now accepting applications again to get into their XCDP (Xbox Community Developer Program). So I sent them an email a couple weeks ago, but I haven’t received any word. I hope that I get accepted into the program. I think that Chewy Xbox is a really smart app, and I think it’s superior to its competitors in several ways. I think that all competing apps are experiencing the same problems I have, but some of them aren’t handling it nearly as well. Maybe I’ll send Microsoft a follow-up email.
In the meantime, Chewy Xbox will still occasionally work for you depending on how hard Duncan’s site is being hit.
In totally unrelated news, have you tried out Google’s webmail interface for the iPhone lately? There have been a lot of improvements that just came out, and the app is more functional than ever. I never liked using iPhone Mail app to read my Google mail because it wouldn’t thread them. With this latest update to Google webmail, I’m not missing it at all.
Chewy Xbox – Data Source Trouble
Hello all. Right now I’m using DuncanMackenzie.net for my Xbox Live data. He’s been very kind to make the Xbox Live data available for free to developers such as me. But it looks like the free ride may be over. The amount of data he’s allowed to retrieve has been capped, it seems. So sometimes you may see invalid data (just 0′s, in blue) when using Chewy Xbox.
Duncan says that the official XCDP program may be re-opening soon, so if/when that happens, I’ll update Chewy Xbox. In the meantime, you should still be able to use my program, but you’ll have more downtime than before. I apologize for that, but there’s nothing really I can do about it until I get a new data source.
Chewy Xbox is Available!
Chewy Xbox is now available on the iTunes store! Yay. Great day for me. You should check it out. You don’t have to have an XBox or an Xbox Live membership to try it out either. Just start it up and enter some handles you think might be taken.
Okay, it’s been out for almost two weeks now, and I’m only now posting about it. I know I know. What’s up with that? Simply put, there are two reasons.
One, Apple never sent me an email telling me that the app was now for sale. I was waiting for a long time for my contract to be approved, and then one day BAM it was and the app was up, but I never got an email.
Two, I’m having a problem with people not being able to post replies to my Chewy Xbox page here on the site. Maybe that’s why nobody has commented. 
Since nobody has commented, I didn’t know there was anything to comment about. I’ve now fixed that so people can comment.
At any rate, I’m excited that my app is now up and that people are finding it useful.
Waiting on Contract
UPDATE: I’ve since contacted Apple a couple times, and they’ve created a ticket for me. But there’s still no action on it. 
I really shou ld have checked the iTunes Connect website. Because it says that I need to have my contract complete before I can put even a free application up on the online store.
My contract isn’t complete.
Now I could argue that since I became an official iPhone developer almost half a year ago that Apple should have approved the contract by now. But that’s just shirking my responsibility. I should have checked to make sure that it was complete and approved.
So now, my application is approved, but it is awaiting the approval of the free applications contract.
Doh!
I sent an email to devcontracts@apple.com five days ago, but I’ve heard nothing so far. A friend tells me that they used to be quite responsive, but not so much anymore. Time to give them a nudge I guess.
Reuploaded my App
So this morning I fixed the bug that Apple rejected my app for. It took all of 20 seconds. I have to make sure that this kind of bug doesn’t slip through the cracks next time!
I resubmitted my app to the AppStore this morning, hopefully I’ll get the same quick service I got last week!
Here’s hoping!
My App was Rejected
It only took a few days for Apple to get around to checking out my app. Which is a lot better than I’ve been led to believe.
They rejected it for a perfectly valid reason – they entered the app’s legend and found my UI didn’t meet their guidelines. The funny thing is, this is actually a bug, because if they had added a gamer to the app first, then this problem wouldn’t have occured. So Kudos to Apple for checking an edge case that I missed.
Now I need to go and squash another bug and resubmit. All part of the learning process.
I have to wonder, though, if Apple tested all of my application’s functionality, and this is the only thing they found. Or is this the first thing they found, and they stopped testing the app after that. I don’t want to go through this process several times if I could instead fix any problems all in one fell swoop.
Finally Submitted my App to the AppStore
After much ado about provisioning profiles, Entitlement files, icons, and setting values in the Target and not the Project, my app is finally in Apple’s queue for approval.
It was quite frustrating to have my app rejected over and over again as I tried different things. What made it even worse is that the message they give you as to why they can’t accept the app isn’t even accurate.
I don’t know if I misread the docs or what, but I was pretty sure you were supposed to “skip to step 12″, which would bypass the whole Entitlements thing. Plus I did have a 57 x 57 icon, but it wasn’t named “Icon.png”. I don’t know what I finally did to correct the problem I was getting (the message was saying that my app wasn’t signed correctly), but this morning I finally got my app through. Yay!
Now I just need to wait for Apple’s approval or disapproval.
Beta Testing my App
I am at the stage now where I can beta test my app. So I went to Apple’s developer website to figure out how to sent beta versions of my app to friends, and the instructions there were less than lucid.
I understood the part about getting my friend’s Device ID’s, and creating a new provisioning profile. But things got muddy from there.
I found some 3rd party instructions online, but they mention stuff in the Build Settings in Xcode that I simply don’t have. Grrrr…
I know a few of you are waiting for a copy of my app, so please be patient. I’m working on it!
Shakedown
For the past couple days I’ve had some free time between assignments that have been rather short. So I’ve had a chance to work on my app.
I guess it wouldn’t be that big a deal to reveal that it’s yet another Xbox Live friends app. Back when I though of the idea, there were no other apps like this, honest! But since then, a couple have appeared, and I have wondered if I should just give up on the idea.
I decided to tough it out and complete the app, as a learning experience if nothing else. My app will have a couple things that make it unique, so I think that it’s going to be truly more useful than similar apps out there.
One thing that I’ve done recently is to load up the friends and show them to the user, and only then retrieve the information from the servers about each gamer’s online status. This makes the app come up quicker, and we all know how important responsiveness is.
One of the issues I had was that I was doing the server update stuff on a separate thread. Often after doing the update the gamers’ statuses weren’t being properly reflected. Then I remembered that GUI updates should really be done on the main thread, so performSelectorOnMainThread came in really handy to fix that problem.
Now I’m having a couple problems left that I need to fix.
One, I’m using an image in the detail view, and I used a colour picker to match colours, but it still doesn’t match the colour surrounding it, which is very frustrating. I went to great lengths to make sure the colours matched, but now they don’t. I wonder if the iPhone changes colours slightly when loading a PNG? That doesn’t make any sense, though.
As well, I have a problem where the gamer’s avatar image is incorrect. Tracing through the code, it all looks okay, but I’m sure I’ll find the bug eventually.
So yeah, my first app is one I’ve been working on (and off) for a long while. Now that I have some time on my hands, I hope to complete it soon.
On the other hand, having time on my hands isn’t good for paying the bills, so I’m also looking for my next assignment. Several people have said maybe in January. I realize that December is a bad time to be looking, but that doesn’t help me pay for my kids’ Christmas gifts!