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.

Recently Apple introduced the iPad to a waiting world. The commentary I’ve seen has been mostly negative, but I don’t think this product is going to fail.

Could it use some changes? Sure it could. A camera would have been really nice. Multi-tasking would have been especially nice. (Imagine having several running iPhone apps embedded into the iPad’s desktop!) Flash would have been nice, but from what I’ve heard HTML5 will provide a decent replacement.

So where does that leave us?

I’d love to have one of these, and can do without the multitasking or Flash. But I would really really like to have a camera. So we’ll see. I’ll probably be getting one anyway. I’m currently working on a new iPhone app which would work well on the iPad if I can think of a good interface.

I’m hopeful.

This list computed using the simple UNITS SOLD x UNIT PRICE formula may yield a few ‘outliers’ and the science is not perfect [...]. In any case, the findings are staggering: the money makers are real apps, all very solid, all but one with a price tag greater or equal to $2.99, but often well above $10.00. The top app costs $899 and the second one $99. These apps solve real issues, and are made by solid developers. And guess what, they are deriving serious revenues too!

The key takeaway here is for the developers and businesses that are hard at work developing apps: if your app brings something real to the table, be it a game or a utility similar to the ones you find on the left, then price it accordingly. The price is right when there is a salary at the end of the month. Don’t succomb to the temptation of the $0.99 app, it’s a lure and only serves to feed the get-rich-quick fairy tales that even kids would find hard to believe.

The only app I every put up on the AppStore is Chewy Xbox, and it was free because Microsoft said it had to be (because it accesses their Xbox Live information). And I’ll be re-releasing the app soon, with some improvements. Most of my work was done for other people, and I now have a full time job doing iPhone work.

So I can’t say from experience that apps that sell for more than $0.99 do better than the 99 cent apps. But if I ever do end up selling an app on the AppStore, I plan to sell if for more than 99 cents. Because I think all the time and effort I’d put into an app is worth at least the price of a coffee.

You can see some featured apps and a featured client on the main page, and soon I’ll be creating a portfolio pages that showcases all of the iPhone apps that I’ve worked on.

But for now, just relax and enjoy the new site. I think it looks pretty sharp.

They specified fonts, image sizes, backgrounds, timings (for the progress indicator), and everything else down to the smallest detail.

This made estimating the app a lot easier. It also made actually creating the app a lot easier too. There was no second-guessing the client and then having them come back with changes.

It was really nice.

Here you can see the splash screen. The problem was that the splash screen wasn’t showing for long enough. The client actually wanted people to look at the splash screen. So they requested that I make the splash sequence longer, and that I add the progress indicator.

Here you see the first image after the app is done loading. It’s a map of the country, showing pollen concentrations. I download the latest image from the internet and fade it into place over the last image downloaded. I think it’s a pretty cool effect, and it wasn’t too hard to do.

Here is the video list. It changes depending on what’s available on the client’s site. So more pollen report videos become available over time.

Last up, this is the info page with information about the app and the pollen website and service. The link brings you to the website, prompting you first.

Aurnhammer LLC, based in New York city, was one of my first clients as a freelance iPhone developer. I started work for them back in December of 2008, working on the P!nk app. I also worked on The Fray, the Stanley Level app, a real estate app, a vodka app, and a casino app.

I learned a lot about how to manage the client relationships. I do all my work from my home office in Ottawa, so we needed to use email, phone, skype, and other web based tools in order to communicate. I learned that having good bug tracking and project management systems is a must. I now use unfuddle with my new clients if they don’t have a system in place.

Senses was one of the first apps that I created as a freelancer. It was definitely a learning experience, but I enjoyed it immensely. Like the P!nk and The Fray apps, I had to use audio. This time I had to play audio for the right ear and the left ear and to change the volume according to what loudness is being tested. I also learned more about both user and client interaction. They client was based in Australia, so often we would have IM chats in the morning for me, but late at night for them.

But sometimes you just need to slow down. By using the device. Of course, I was testing on the device today and made a critical error.

I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I was getting error messages in the debugger console like this:

putpkt: write failed: Broken pipe

Or this:

mem 0×1000 0×3fffffff cache
mem 0×40000000 0xffffffff none
mem 0×00000000 0×0fff none

Or even like this:

Sent: [1251990710.449:32] +
Sent: [1251990710.449:32] Hc-1
Recvd: [1251990710.454:32] OK
Sent: [1251990710.455:32] qC
Recvd: [1251990710.460:32] QC0
Sent: [1251990710.460:32] qStepPacketSupported
Recvd: [1251990710.463:32] OK
Sent: [1251990710.478:49] QEnvironment:SHELL=/bin/bash
Recvd: [1251990710.481:49] OK
Sent: [1251990710.481:49] QEnvironment:TMPDIR=/var/folders/UF/UFCJNauIGPu+F7L7bsqhZU+++TI/-Tmp-/
Recvd: [1251990710.485:49] OK
Sent: [1251990710.485:49] QEnvironment:Apple_PubSub_Socket_Render=/tmp/launch-o19tpZ/Render
Recvd: [1251990710.488:49] OK
etc…..

It was quite frustrating.

So I looked around on the forums, and there were several questions about these errors, many of which went unanswered. (Forums can only get you so far sometimes.) But eventually I found the answer: you can’t debug your program if you’re using an ad hoc profile.

So I used the appropriate profile, and now I debug to my heart’s content. iPhone development seems to be straining with this kinds of gotchas. I just hope I remember this solution next time I find this problem. Writing it down will help, I hope!