Posts tagged ‘iPhone’
Motivation : Lacking
I just read an article over at Funky Visions about motivation. Why bother polishing an app to the n’th degree if it seems like it won’t make a difference?
I can totally relate.
I’m working on my latest app, and I’m getting close to done. I just need to fix a few bugs, maybe add a small feature or two, and get better icons for it. At this stage of the app creation process I tend to drag my heals. What if I release this app onto the store and nobody notices? What if it sells as well as my last app (very poorly)? Sometimes I think I’m better off not releasing the app at all versus being faced with disappointment when the app fails to impress.
I can’t say that I’ve found a solution. I’m trying to polish this app a bit better than the last one. I’ve got a cool new skinning feature that lets the user decide the colour scheme of the app. I’ve just added Bump functionality so that users can share data with other users. I’m in the process of hiring an artist to do some work that I did myself in the last app. At the end of the day, though, I can’t say I’m any more comfortable releasing this app into the wild than my previous app. I’m still trepidatious and don’t want to face the disappointment.
The biggest remaining problem is that I’m not a marketing guy. I see lots of articles about how not to market your app. And how releasing an app without a marketing push behind it is suicide. I’m still trying to figure this stuff out. Lots of the advice I see out there is for people who already have contacts. Who can already send out a tweet and have thousands of people read it. But I’m a nobody. Nobody reads my stuff. It’s hard coming up with a plan. Hopefully for this next app it’ll have some better coverage. I’ll have to see.
Diacarta App [Update]
I just downloaded one of the coolest looking apps ever onto my iPhone. But I don’t use it.
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:
- When an event goes over an AM/PM boundary, it is confusing to see what is going on.
- Some very basic icons are missing. There’s no icon for a meeting. Or for games.
- I still don’t know what the button in the bottom-right of the screen does.
- No iOS 4 support. It would be nice if it had fast switching, but it doesn’t.
- 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.
- 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.
New App Almost There
I submitted my Crate 33 app to Apple on Monday but yesterday I pulled it because I found a bug. Disappointing, I know, but don’t want there to be any obvious bugs in my app.
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.
iPhone QRCode Integration
For one of my jobs I had to integrate QRCodes into the app. A QRCode is a 2 dimensional barcode, like you see here:
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. 
Apple Announces iPad
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.
Nice Rebuttal
This is a nice little rebuttal video someone made to a recent attack ad against the iPhone.
Featured App: Pollen
The Pollen app was the first app I did for a client who knew exactly what they wanted down to the pixel. Their wireframes were so detailed, it looks like they looked into the future, took screenshots of the app, and put the screenshots into the wireframe.
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.
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!
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, Part 2
Well, I figured out how to create an ad hoc provisioning profile and distribute my app.
The only problem is that it only worked for one person. The other two people I distributed the app to couldn’t get it to work. That is pretty strange since I put all of their devices into the profile. All of them should have worked, or none. So I don’t know what’s up with that.
My next strategy is just to submit the app to Apple’s AppStore.