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!