Changes

• Fixes a problem where only the first daily or weekly report would be downloaded.

The problem started to occur because apple added a javascript function call into the method to switch between days and weeks. Something to do with rate limiting, I think they now disable the download button while the AJAX request is ongoing.

Development of version 2.0 is still ongoing, you can sneak a peak on the development branch. There are a couple of  things to do before I can merge it back into master: changing the charting to DTChartView and doing the summing per app on a background thread.

In the future I am still hoping that the Open Source community will get a bit more involved than it has been. i.e. totally hands off. I’ve open sourced MyAppSales precisely because I was hoping for contributions, but I have yet to see the first.

This version of MyAppSales is a maintenance release with these goals:

• navigate the AJAX pages to retrieve Daily, Weekly and Financial reports
• adapt to the changes in the financial reports format (reports would be empty)
• Minor tweaks, like use the smaller financial report description when displaying report sums

I am still working on migrating the database into CoreData to be able to make it 4.x compatible. Currently there are lots of caching mechanism that cannot handle when the app is being killed, like when you remove it from the recent apps list. Another problem is that settings will not be saved. So until further notice you have to keep building it against SDK 3.2, it will still run fine on your iPhone with iOS 4.x.

The update is in the trunk of the subversion repository.

1. Pre-configure the account for iTunes Connect such that you don’t have to give your credentials to your partner
2. Filter sales reports such that only the apps come through that the partner is receiving a share of sales for

… and all of this without impacting the other features like review downloading.

Since I have such a partner myself for which I’m now publishing 3 apps, I sat down and – after fighting with Xcode over a second target – added a couple of lines to the MyAppSales trunk to enable the “Partner Version”.

In the PCH file you enable and configure this special version by removing the // in front of the first define. Then you need to specifying your ITC credentials and an NSSet of Apple App Identifiers.

// to enable the partner version, re-enable the following define and fill in the three values below
//#define PARTNERVERSION
 
#define PARTNERVERSION_ITC_LOGIN @"account@server.com"
#define PARTNERVERSION_ITC_PASSWORD @"SECRETPASSWORD"
#define PARTNERVERSION_FILTER_APPS_SET [NSSet setWithObjects:@"335519920", @"329678407", @"374457741", nil]

I’ve added a filter for the specified PARTNERVERSION_FILTER_APPS_SET in two places to ignore all lines on sales report where neither the Apple Identifier nor the Parent ID is in this list. Since the app never sees any apps outside of this filter those also won’t pop up on the apps page.

For the preconfigured account, the app adds this ITC account if there are no accounts defined. So if your partner were to remove this account accidentally it would be configured once more on next app start.

All you need to do after configuring and building a release version is to zip and ship the app and provisioning profile to your partner. Easy enough?

• “Artist/Show/Developer” became “Artist/Show/Developer/Author”
• “Label/Studio/Network/Developer” became “Label/Studio/Network/Developer/Publisher”

There where quite a few hot fixes that I had to put into MyAppSales and also if you look at the code you’ll see that it’s in the middle of being migrated to CoreData. The latter is necessary because the current method of caching everything is really ugly code whereas CoreData will permit me to make the app perform way better and it only fetches data I truly need.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) I’m very busy with a major project for the last few months, so I cannot really muster the time right now to carry through this migration. But because this is a point of stability in MyAppSale’s live that I can publish it as a new version. Lots of people where continuing to use the previous “released” version because for some reason they feared that the “2.0 BETA” in the Subversion trunk might be unstable. When in reality it aways was the code I’ve been using on my iPhone.

Speaking of iPhone 4, you still need to build it with SDK 3.2 until further notice for exactly the reason I mentioned above: ugly caching. It works fine on my iPhone 4.

Here are some goodies that I also hacked into 1.0.16:

• Ability to remove individual reports. For example if something goes wrong during download.
• You can opt to show a report sum on the overview pages. This is slower because for it the app needs to fetch the sales data, so it will impact scrolling. But if you don’t scroll much then its a useful number to see at a glance.
• I’m now using the standard currency formatter for all amounts

Please update your copy from the repository as usual.

This way you still get your daily sales reports throughout the downtime for ITC which was announced to go from December 23rd until December 29th.

Another minor change is that review scraping no longer is requires for the app totals to be loaded because all reviews for all apps are scraped at the same time anyway. This is a minor startup speed benefit.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

UPDATE Dec 26th: Apple caught up on using the ITTS url for report downloading and shut this down as well, giving this message.

So, there now really IS no way to get to your daily reports anymore. We all have to wait until Dec 29th.

This release is all about startup speed. On my own iPhone 3GS I managed to get from 12 seconds down to about 2. Also I was intrigued by the request to add a Tweetie-2-like Pull-To-Refresh mechanism, so that’s in there as well.

Changes:

• ADDED: Added Pull-to-Refresh on all review table views. Just like in Tweetie 2.
• CHANGED: If a review text or rating changes then the review will now be updated and marked as changed.
• FIXED: Country assignments for some report regions where incorrect causing financial reports to be incorrectly rejected as duplicate. Fixed translation language for China.
• FIXED: Changed from GET to POST for Google Translations to support extra long review texts.
• FIXED: Bug would cause link between InAppPurchase and App to disappear upon restart
• CHANGED: Rewrote totalling to cache and replace averaging
• CHANGED: Numerous performance improvements
• ADDED: Lazy loading for reviews for additional speed improvement on startup
• ADDED: Transparent 2-stage loading of reviews to speed up opening of review page for an app
• CHANGED: Made more UI elements opaque to speed up table view drawing
• ADDED: Financial and Monthly Free download on Import/Export homepage

Generally if you have any issues after applying this update then please go to the settings page and tap “Empty Caches”. This removes all the cached .dat files keeping information for faster access.

Now that I am coding full time I can spend hours and hours on lots of things. I have to literally force myself not to take on too much before releasing a new version. I’ll have to start updating all my other apps, create some new ones and then there are some looming contracts.

Changes:

• FIXED: Prevent app from saving incomplete reports without a date. This would cause a crash on subsequent starts of the app. There are also additional measures to prevent loading such a report should it be present in the database.
• FIXED: Added missing country FI as identifier for Europe region of financial reports.
• FIXED: Added missing country CO as identifier for USA region.
• FIXED: Correct spelling of country Vietnam. This would cause a financial report with this country in the first line to be detected as “rest of world”.
• CHANGED: If you have reports from more than one app grouping (aka Apple account) then reports for those no longer show the apps of other groupings.
• CHANGED: Apps and IAPs are now child classes of Product to allow for polymorphism.
• ADDED: IAP Products are now kept in a separate table from apps
• ADDED: IAP support on the overview and country detail report views
• ADDED: IAP support for export via built-in web server

The other reporting apps I had a look at tread IAPs just like regular apps, because at first glance they look the same in Apple’s reports. They have an apple identifier, but it’s not valid to open iTunes with it. To tell IAPs apart from apps you have to look for the IA1 transaction code and the filled in parent code. In the table the transaction is represented as 101 because it needs to be numeric.

Personally I am opposed to showing IAPs at the same level as apps and therefore MyAppSales shows you IAPs as part of the total royalties and average daily sales on the app page and also integrates it into the report views. If you don’t have IAPs you will not notice any difference in the UI.

Still you are encouraged to update your working copy to the latest version in the repo’s trunk or the release-1.0.13 tag because of the multitude of small fixes contained and for IAPs to be handled correctly should you ever have any on any report.

Bug reports or feature requests please add to my bug tracker.

Changes:

• FIXED: Apple modified form field names in iTunes Connect yesterday which would cause permanent “no day options found” error message
• CHANGED: Added code to get the field names from the HTML so that similar changes would not cause this problem any more.
• FIXED: Push Notifications via the Notifications would cease to function. This was a bug on the server-side. Any new subscriber would overwrite the previous subscriber.
• ADDED: If there is a Notifications account set up then the app will now check if it is subscribed at every launch. It will then subscribe if it is not – for some strange reason.

Any version prior to 1.0.12 is no longer able to download reports as of today. So if you put off updating until now then you have no choice any more.

To update either do a fresh checkout or update your existing working copy. If you have not linked your checkout back to the repository please do so and then “SCM – Update Entire Project”.

I’m also announcing the MyAppSales VIP List. If you are a CEO or otherwise important person and cannot be bothered to update your working copy of MyAppSales via XCode then this is for you. I have very limited space available on my device list but for VIPs on this list I will be making AdHoc builds for each future version. You may apply for inclusion via e-mail.

Changes:

• FIXED: Users with multiple vendor IDs would get an error message because of the extra vendor selection screen in iTunes Connect. Now always the highest vendor ID is used.
• FIXED: Users who enabled passcode protection would never get any reviews being downloaded.
• ADDED: In-App-Purchases have a alphanumeric trasaction code. This is now changed from IA1 to 101 so that it can be saved to the database. There is no reflection of IAPs in the UI yet. Previously such lines would have gotten ignored.
• FIXED: Added agent string so that app icons can be be retrieved. This fixes Apple’s recent change requiring an “iTunes” agent string.
• FIXED: Even if the language code for a store was the same as the chosen target language reviews would still be tried to be translated.
• FIXED: Users who updated from earlier versions have a service type “HomeDir”. The previous workaroudn was to remove the account and create a new ITC account in Settings. This is no longer necessary and done automatically.
• FIXED: Deselect report row if chart has no row.
• CHANGED: Shortened Back Button to “Apps” on review screen.
• ADDED: You can now forward all reviews for an app via In-App-Email.
• FIXED: Removed gray shadow of app subtext on app tab which would cause blurry look.

So if you have translated reviews behind one app, you notice the new forward button in the upper right-hand corner…

You can now e-mail the developer (or yourself) all the reviews as an invaluable source of inspiration to improve your app! In-App-Email also supports landscape view by the way.

Version 1.0.11 is tagged in the Subversion Repository. You can either update your source from there or opt to update from trunk where development is continuing. Tagged versions are always a stable milestone while in the trunk I make no such warranty.

Note: if you checkout a project from any repository you have to set the project root to be the repo you set up to establish the link. I noticed quite a few users always doing exports when it is so much easier to only push “SCM – Update Entire Project” to get the latest version. So please go into the project settings and make the connection.

Changes:

• ADDED: Smart Multi-Account capability. You can now add multiple ITC accounts and the reports will be downloaded. Note that the UI is still the same, so reports will appear individually, always showing all apps. This will be addressed in a future version.
• FIXED: The Passcode Lock also appears if the app resigns active status.
• FIXED: Some financial reports from January 2009 or before would cause a crash because Apple was using full country names previously, some with strange abbreviations.
• ADDED: When a new report is downloaded my server is anonymously pinged and saves the availability time. The first time a new report is encountered a push notification is sent out.
• ADDED: Different types of accounts are now supported. To begin with you can setup multiple ITC accounts and one Notifications account.
• ADDED: Notifications via the 3rd party app Notifications can now be subscribed or deleted via adding and removing of the account in settings.
• ADDED: The myappsales:// URL scheme is now supported to open MyAppSales to a specific report screen. This is used by the push notifications to open up the daily reports page where you can see the new report appear.

If you are upgrading from a previous version then it will appear as if MyAppSales is downloading all reports again. It does not really duplicate the reports and you can just let it run. But you may also quit the app via the home button after the first such download. This is necessary to establish the smart app groupings. MyAppSales figures out which apps belong to which group (aka account) and will use this fingerprint in the future to intelligently establish which account a report belongs to and if it is a duplicate. This approach also allows to detect from which account manually imported reports are coming and sets up the app to get reports from totally different sources in the future. One such service will be allowing you to share sales data on specific apps with selected users.

I have to use a 3rd party app to do the push because only Apple approved apps can do push notifications. But I can piggyback on their service to make the experience identical as if MyAppSales had notifications itself. The only differences are that you have to set up a Notifications account and that MyAppSales cannot directly deal with notifications while its open. So if you are the first to see a report and you get the notification just click “Cancel”.

It is recommended that you make a local copy of the database via the built-in webserver. There should be no problems in updating, but in some rare cases manual changes might be necessary. And it never hurts to have a backup.

Version 1.0.10 is tagged in the Subversion Repository. You can either updated your source from there or opt to update from trunk where development is continuing. Tagged versions are always a stable milestone while in the trunk I make no such warranty.

• Customers complained of some really “bad English”. Native English speaker Michael Kayne of SendMeToSpace.co.uk volunteered to proof-read and massively correct all of this.
• Due to a partially intentional “bug” some people who bought the full version saw advertisements on the end-of-round screen. Since they gave rather passionate feedback against that we decided to end this experiment. First via disabling ads on the AdMob dashboard, and now by removing the ad code altogether from the full 1.1.2 version.

As usual we dropped to price to $1 until Apple gives it the nod. We sent them the binary yesterday.

Changes:

• ADDED: Background processing of review texts with optional language translation.
• ADDED: New setting to choose target language or no translation.
• ADDED: If you change target language you get the option of deleting previous translations and redo them for the new language.
• ADDED: Downloading of Monthly Free reports which complement the financial reports showing downloads of free apps.
• ADDED: Downloading of Monthly Financial reports
• FIXED: Flag would not show if there was no sale in last 7 days.
• FIXED: Many other small bugs related to reviews, translations or financial reports.
• CHANGED: Apple uses 50 pixel country flags now, changed code to get flags of new stores from new URL
• CHANGED: Revamped duplicate checking code to be more robust.

There is a known issue with the new downloading pipeline which is actually Apple’s problem. It seems that under some circumstances (too much load?) their ITC website does not properly pass on credential cookies to ITTS which is where the daily and weekly reports are hosted. So every once in a while you might get a red message stating that an unrecognized response was received. This is due to the fact that ITTS is sending an HTML page stating that the session has expired when it actually just has started. The present workaround is to simply hit the refresh button on the reports page, the second time it generally works.

As usual you can get these updates via SVN, it’s tagged as well as the current contents of trunk. And of course I am still happy to receive your donations if you think I am doing a good job maintaining and improving MyAppSales.

Buckle up, this is “The Review Release”!

Changes:

• ADDED: Tapping on a row on the apps tab now shows the reviews sorted chronologically, new reviews have a red headline
• FIXED: A bug would cause a chart to hang if the user had sales in excess of a couple of thousand dollars per day or week. Yes, there are really such iPhone Developers who make boatloads of money and they use MyAppSales.
• CHANGED: Added compiler directive to prevent trying to build the project below SDK 3.0. I figure you are all developers out there and no serious developer would still have his iPhone on an OS below 3.0.
• CHANGED: The iTunes Connect downloading pipeline is now an NSOperation using synchronous calls. Added a ton of additional error catching code.
• ADDED: Buttons on the review screen to directly page to the previous or next report of the same type.
• ADDED: A multi-threaded review scraping engine which is also based on NSOperation. This is amazingly fast compared to competing engines, and all running completely on a background thread. So this can run while you are checking the new daily report.
• ADDED: Settings to allow enabling of review downloading and setting of the interval.
• ADDED: Badges on the app icons show the existence of new reviews.
• CHANGED: your database will be upgraded to schema version 3 with new tables for the review stuff.
• FIXED: The sync button on the review page is now properly disabled when the sync manager is active.
• ADDED: Monthly Free reports now get downloaded as well.

Known issues:

• Financial reports are still experimental and thus don’t get downloaded automatically. Sometimes they are labelled incorrectly and there are lots of other unsolved problems. Check the bug tracker to find out which.
• Sums are generated every time after there are new exchange rates or new reports. This might cause short periods of lagging.

As usual, before you upgrade, please make a backup of your apps.db. The upgrade should be straightforward, but it never hurts to have a backup.

The release is tagged in /tags/release-1.0.8 and you may checkout this exact version either from the terminal or via XCode. Or you can simply “Update Entire Project” in XCode’s SCM Menu provided that you have linked your working copy with the repo.

If you have not donated yet to keep me improving MyAppSales, then please do so now to get access to this fabulous update. If you already did, you are welcome to show your continued appreciation by another small donation.

Also I added an AccountManager class which allows me to enumerate and deal with multiple accounts. Currently only the first you set up is checked, until I can figure out a safe way to prevent duplicates or wrongfully detected report duplicates from multiple accounts. I am thinking of doing sort of finger-printing letting the app figure out which apps belong to the same account. Something smart like this is necessary because a user is at liberty to delete an ITC account and also a future import mechanism will be FTP and there you also don’t know which account those files are from.

There where so many little changes that I simply did not want to wait any more to tell you what’s been going on there. So please be easy on me regarding unfinished features. It’s coming, be patient grasshopper!

• ADDED: Experimental support for monthly (financial) reports. Manual import only.
• ADDED: Possibility to lock MyAppSales with a passcode (aka PIN)
• CHANGED: Ssettings are now saved in NSUserDefaults as opposed to a plist in the app’s doc dir
• CHANGED: Split the database code and the iTunes Connect code into discrete classes in preparation for future multiple data sources
• CHANGED: Replaced keychain wrapper with new custom AccountManager class that allows me to enumerate over accounts in preparation for future additional data sources like multiple ITC accounts as well as applyzer, admob et al.
• FIXED: The lower part of the cancel button behind “Empty Cache” was irresponsive
• ADDED: Smart detection of iTunes Connect downtime due to maintenance
• ADDED: now the iTunes Connect cookies are checked to see if a login was successfully as opposed to scraping
• FIXED: Login failing after clearing the cache
• CHANGED: It is no longer possible to combine multiple reports into a single text file for import. The first line of a report is used to determine the report type and dates for the whole file.

If you have a large database and use the passcode lock you might experience a second or so delay right after program start when entering the code. This is normal, and caused by summing app totals being done right after app start. I’ll have to move this to a background process eventually.

If you have multiple old text files to import it is best to feed them in original format to MyAppSales. Should you have several reports mixed into one, here’s a quick shell script that splits those into multiple files and zips them for single-file-importing:

split.sh

# Usage: ./split.sh single_text_file.txt
cat $1 | cut -f13 | grep / |sort -u > days.txt
for I in `cat days.txt`
do
        NAME=`echo $I | sed -e "s/\//-/g"`
        echo "FILE: $NAME";
        head -1 $1 > $NAME.txt
        cat test.txt | grep $I | sort -u  >> $NAME.txt
        echo $I
done
 
zip import_me.zip *-*-*.txt

I have begun to tag the releases on the svn repo. In the trunk you will always find my latest experiments. If you want to get stable code you can now get that from the tags folder.

To summarize: In this release you will find a little bit of eyecandy. But I am proud of the passcode locking feature which has only been requested last week and now it’s already implemented. (Honestly I needed it for another project, speaking of reusable code). I am excited to be approaching a state of the code where I can think of adding data from Applyzer, advertisement reports from AdMob or simple add reviews.

Please let me know what you think by either commenting here or raising a bug report feature request at http://www.drobnik.com/bugs

I’m listening!

And while I was at it, I also made some additional useful additions and some visual changes.

• CHANGED: Look of Apps page changed to be closer to AppStore app
• ADDED: Royalties earned so far and Units sold (coming from Daily Reports)
• ADDED: Sums are being recalculated when there are new currency exchange rates and after sync
• ADDED: Smart Auto-Sync. When started the app only communicates with iTunes Connect if there has not been a new report downloaded today.
• ADDED: “Empty Cache” button on Settings page removes cached app icons, chart cache and other temp files that might have gotten left over in document directory. This also causes the app names to be reloaded from iTunes.

As usual you can update your source code directly from the Subversion repo.

• CHANGE: All __MyCompanyName__ now changed to drobnik.com
• FIXED: Login problems after Apple updated iTunes Connect (quick-fixed previously)
• FIXED: Password not getting properly URLencoded

The last part is especially necessary for you if you have a plus sign or other characters in your password which are not safe in URLs. If you previously experienced such problems please accept my apologies if you managed to lock your iTunes account. This update should fix this problem for you.

The changes which had been necessary to deal with Apple’s update for iTunes Connect had previously been in the repository but now they have a formal version number. As usual you can update your copy from the SVN customer-only repository.

My hero is Lukas Matablewski who figured out the necessary changes. Stefan Sorin Nicolin, who is hosting the MyAppSales svn repo commited the changes to the trunk. So please update your working copy now.

All of this while I am in a beautiful NO SIGNAL region of Austria…

• Before this fix the local timezone would be used when interpreting a report date. This could lead to unexpected behavior when travelling and synching reports in an earlier timezone. Now all report dates are interpreted as from timezone “America/Los_Angeles”, which is the timezone of Apple in Cupertino.
• Cleaned up code of iTunes Connector class as a result of making the exchange rate class a shared instance, ordered the functions therein in a more logical way and added section titles for clarification.
• Now for finding out if a report already was downloaded only the date and type is used. Before this change also time was used but this would change with different local timezones causing duplicate entries.

Refresh your copy from the customer-only SVN to get this update.

UPDATE: WAIT with updating if you have previously existing entries!!! You will get duplicate entries.  (see third fix above. Let me know if you need help cleaning up duplicate entries from your database)

• Removed all NSLog statements
• Revampted calculation of  sums as to make them match with the detail lines

The latter bug was caused by using old currency exchange data to pre-calculate sums but using newer exchange rates for detail lines. This would sometimes cause a difference of a couple of cents which was more than a rounding error. There might still be a difference of one cent but that is because MyAppSales calculates all amounts in floating point without limit of decimal places, but only two rounded decimal places are show on the reports regardless of currency.

Get the new version from the customer-only SVN. UPDATE: I had forgotten to bump the version in info.plist. That’s fixed now.

PS: Dylan Prozenak of AppViz contacted me earlier, regarding my call to action for an open report downloading API:

I had contacted Apple directly about this a while ago and received a reply indicating that they were looking at it. I just filed a bug report as suggested. Probably should have done that first thing.

Hopefully it will make a difference; I’d love to make an AppViz for the App Store and hearing both your story and some friends of mine who developed a similar product makes me shudder. I know how much time goes into these things and then not being able to sell it is like getting slapped in the face; particularly since there seem to be a couple that made it in. Competition can only be good for this space; it keeps us all on our toes and innovating. 

• Added UTF-8 encoding header for import/export web server
• Reduced tab bar icons in size, removed text from the splash screen
• Fixed: On the reports root table the icons would not reflect that there are new reports in the daily/weekly category.

The last one was embarrassing enough to immediately release this version. I am updating the icons from an app-wide notification, but I did not consider that notifications only work if the Nib has already been loaded.

The new version can be checked out from the customer-only SVN.