I release the app to the App Store with fear and trepidation, I must admit. What if nobody buys it? What if people think the price is too high? What if people think my website for the app is too unprofessional? What if people have problems with the app?

Here’s a screen shot I just took from with the App Store app, showing my app as a new Music release:

Pretty cool, huh?

Diacarta is a calendar app that lets you create and view calendar events in a rather unique way. I don’t want to try to describe it when a picture is worth a thousand words, so here:

You have an AM and a PM for every day, and you can graphically see when your appointments are, and you can associate one of many icons to each appointment. It’s a very beautiful app, but there were a couple of problems:

1. When an event goes over an AM/PM boundary, it is confusing to see what is going on.
2. Some very basic icons are missing. There’s no icon for a meeting. Or for games.
3. I still don’t know what the button in the bottom-right of the screen does.
4. No iOS 4 support. It would be nice if it had fast switching, but it doesn’t.
5. Many of the icons are small and hard to touch. Often, there’s space around them that could be included as touchable area, but isn’t.
6. I thought I’d be able to change the start and end times of an event by dragging my finger on the circle. No such luck.

All these things are forgivable, though. There is one thing that is not forgivable. There is no iCal or Google Calendar integration! I spend quite a bit of time looking for it, because I just could not believe that a calendar app would not have this feature. It’s not in there. So now I have to see if they’ll ever come out with an update with Google Calendar support. I won’t use the app until it does.

Update: The developer contacted me and told me that several updates are in the works. Several of my wish list items will be addressed, including the big one! Can’t wait.

So I fixed the bug and now I’m going through the app again to make sure there aren’t any other bugs I’ve missed.

This will be the first app I create for myself that I’m going to charge money for. I’m almost hesitant to release it for fear that it won’t do well.

I hope to resubmit to Apple this weekend.

I saw one journalist write about these new ads, and the fact that his (almost) Luddite friend wanted an iPhone 4 because of the FaceTime commercial. (Sorry I forget where I saw this.) It’s all about the emotion. Who can help feeling a throat lump when a father convinces his daughter to smile in spite of her new braces? Or to feel a pang of sympathy when a far-away soldier beholds his unborn child on a monitor? This is powerful stuff.

Never mind the fact that this is a feature that many of us will use once or twice for the novelty, and then ignore. The only people I know with iPhones are people that I mostly correspond with via IM and email anyway. I rarely talk to them on the phone. Now if my parents got an iPhone, that would be great. I could get my children to video chat with them, and it would be great. But I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

FaceTime will draw people to the iPhone 4, but I think it’s the Retina display that’ll keep them coming back for more.

As an app developer, I want to monitor many sources of information that’ll help me as a developer. Staying hunkered down in my home office as I pound out code might get me some success. If I know what’s going on in the iPhone world around me, however, I’ll be able to direct my energies better. That’ll probably lead to more success. I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds by both other iPhone developers and also by iPhone news sites. I like to know what developers are thinking, and I like to know what users are thinking. Plus the coding tips I get from developers are great. One of my favourite developer blogs is iPhone Development.

There was a hole in my vision, though, that I only recently filled. Even though I subscribed to news sites, I still wasn’t getting a taste for the apps out there. I used the apps I had, and only rarely did I find new ones. This had to change. So I got myself an iPhone app called Chomp. It puts a set of apps in front of your face to review, and you can review, ignore them, or dismiss them forever (among other things). While I do review apps every once in a while, I mainly use this app just to see what’s out there. I quickly look at each app and usually I dismiss it forever. Sometimes I bookmark it and sometime I get it. It’s nice that the app has a feature to get the app right then. I’ve found several apps I like using Chomp, and when I get a spare minute or two in the day, I often boot up Chomp and go through a couple dozen apps quickly. The Chomp interface is good for that. While Chomp does allow you to select a category of apps to review, I also wish I could select a category of apps not to review. I’d like to be able to look at all app types except games. I don’t really care about iPhone games.

Ever wanted to know how to put a custom image into the navigation bar? It’s actually pretty easy. Create a UIButton object, and stick that into the UIBarButtonItem object. The trick is to remember to set the size:

And Bob’s your uncle!

There are several ways of generating QRCodes online, including this one for generating MeCards, and this one for generating text, URL, SMS, and phone number ones.

Integrating QRCodes into an iPhone app is pretty easy, because there’s already an open source project that does it. It’s called ZXing (or Zebra Crossing).. It’s cross platform and includes Android and other versions too. We just need to concern ourselves with the iPhone version.

Included in the project is a bunch of actions too, depending on what is encoded in the QRCode. It’ll attempt to parse the code and generate an email address or a MeCard or one of several others things as well. All the action happens in the DecoderViewController class, and presentResultForString is the method you want to look at to see what it does with the results of the image scan.

You can actually use your iPhone to take snapshots of QRCodes right from your computer’s monitor. I’ve used this method to test my app, but frankly it’s not always reliable. As well, it works a lot better with the 3GS camera than the 3G camera, because it’s just better.

I’ve been playing around with the iPad for a couple days now, and I really miss my apps. There is no Read It Later, no Reeder, and no Tweetie. So I still found myself pulling out my iPhone for many things, while the iPad was more of a novelty to play with every once in a while.

Not anymore! I think I found my iPad killer app. YouTube! Disappointed, aren’t you? You thought I was going to reveal some hidden gem that nobody knew about, right? Well, just hear me out.

Watching YouTube on my iPhone is alright, but everything is SO SMALL. Watching YouTube on my computer is great, but then I had to lug out my computer just to watch a small little video. Using a laptop to watch a video is alright, but you can’t curl up with a laptop.

The iPad, on the other hand, lets me curl up in a stuffy chair or lounge on my leather couch. I call up my subscriptions and check out any new videos that come up, and the videos look big because I’m holding the screen right there in my hands. Plenty big! It’s just a pleasant experience, and I’ve found my new YouTube watching methodology.

If you have an iPad, and haven’t used YouTube much, check it out. If you don’t have an iPad, well that’s too bad.

Killer App Two?

The iPad is also becoming my blogging tool of choice. It’s just handy for that. I started typing this article on the virtual keyboard, but partway through I grabbed the physical keyboard and sat down at the kitchen table with it. Now I’m typing happily away. Too bad there’s no lap solution for typing on a physical keyboard. I tried it with this dock thing, but the iPad kept losing the connection with the dock because of my shifting around.

The WordPress iPad app is decent, though not the most intuitive thing I’ve used. (Figuring out how to publish a post you’ve written is not an easy task.) I’ll continue to use it to post articles. Good stuff.

First impression? It is heavy. I’ve seen some bloggers complain that it’s heavy, and other bloggers complain about the complaining. Maybe it’s because of my atrophying arm muscles, but I think this thing is meant to be held on your lap. It’s not something you can easily wave around.

Second impression: it’s a well made device. The glass is nice, and the aluminum back is nice. The software works as you expect it to. I tried the ABC Player app, but of course Canadians can’t see the content. I’ve tried several news apps – AP, Bloomberg, USA Today, WSJ, BBC News, and NPR. Some were better than others, but on the whole I enjoyed them. Twitterrific was nice, and made good use of popups. The Marvel Comics app doesn’t even include a free comic, which I would have expected. How am I supposed to know reading comics is a good experience or not? I tried an RSS Reader app to read my Google Reader RSS feeds, and had to say I was disappointed in the app and deleted it.

Which brings me to my next point.

The iPad still doesn’t have the exalted trinity of apps I use on my iPhone: Tweetie, Reeder, and Read It Later. (The only reason I use Tweetie instead of Twitterific is because it has Read It Later support. Otherwise I’d be using Twitterific.) So because the iPad doesn’t have these three apps that I so rely on, I still need to pull out my iPhone to get my serious usage accomplished. I hope that iPad versions of my favourite apps come out for my iPad soon.

Oh and one last thing: I really like landscape mode a lot better, and usually have the iPad locked in landscape mode.

I like the iPad, but can’t see myself using it a lot until I get my favourite apps.

UPDATE: You can’t open multiple tabs in Safari on the iPad and have everything stay in memory. Just like on the iPhone, it loads the page up when you switch tabs. This was disappointing – the iPad really needs more than 256MB of RAM.

The first thing I did was take a prototype app they already had commissioned, and finish it off. This app became Mood of the Nation. I took the raw app and changed a lot of the code, streamlining it and also adding a bunch of functionality as well.

This is the main page which shows a graph of recent activity. You can swipe the image left and right to get more graphs. You can set up your account with the button in the bottom left corner, and also set preferences.

In the second tab you can set your mood. When you send an update, you can also send your mood to Twitter and/or Facebook.

Here you can track what everyone is saying regarding Mood of the Nation on Twitter.

The app also has question-of-the-day functionality. The app queries our servers for questions to ask, and after you’ve answered the question you can see everyone else’s answer as an aggregate.