Cocoanetics

My App Rejected While Similar App Approved AND Featured

May 05, 2009

Several people contacted me today about this matter, for example Eknath:

Apple has been unjust to Oliver.

They just approved this app. “Sales Tracker” and not only did they approve it, they put it in featured apps. Very unfair.

I think we should make the noise in dev forums about his.

Eknath

While I had known about “Sales Tracker” since it made it into the store today we made the heart-wrenching discovery that this competiting app also was made a featured app. Being on the front page of the app store is in all likelyhood a very lucrative stroke of luck for it’s maker.

Of course I resubmitted MyAppSales right after Sales Tracker appeared on the store. Only to get rejected once again a week thereafter.

I called the US landline of Apple Developer Support to find out that I have two avenues of progressing. I could either write to the Review Team to aiming to get my own app passed, or I could write to the App Store Notices Team to get the other apps pulled. I chose the former, read my e-mail to learn why I think this is better.

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MyAppSales 1.0.3

May 04, 2009

Two minor fixes make out version 1.0.3 of MyAppSales.

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.

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How to Fix Code Signing Errors

May 03, 2009

Andreas asks:

With Device | Debug and Code Sign “iPhone Developer” I have no problems getting my app onto the device, but with all other configurations I get this strange error message in XCode Organizer.

That’s a weird error that most of us have encountered one time or the other. Here are my hints how to get it fixed.

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MyAppSales 1.0.2

Apr 27, 2009

This update of MyAppSales brings two cosmetic fixes plus on fix for a bug that I accidentially introduced in 1.0.1.

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.

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The Importance of Method Naming

Apr 27, 2009

Recently Oliver’s blog post ‘Shuffling an NSArray‘ came across my twitter feed. I’m not sure I followed the link with the intention of being critical, but after reading, I felt the need to make a couple of points. Namely, a fairly staunch opinion that in it’s current form, Oliver’s -(NSArray *)shuffled method is an example of poor naming choice. I realize that the original post was intended to showcase the ability to extend existing classes with categories (a powerful and worthwhile concept to understand). However, take into consideration that many developers new to a language will copy and paste code snippets without fully understanding them, and the importance of using proper convention in code examples becomes very clear.

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Shorter Back Buttons

Apr 27, 2009

Today, on the train to the big city, I watched the seventh Standford iPhone Programming lecture and got an answer to a question I’ve been having for a long time.

Can I make the back button shorter in a UINavigationView? I like long titles, but it looks ugly on the back button!

The back button of a view that you pushed on the the navigation stack defaults to the previous view controller’s title. You want to make the title explanatory so a long one is good. But if you push another view controller onto the navigation stack you want the space to have an explanatory title on this one, or you need the space for something else.

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MyAppSales 1.0.1

Apr 26, 2009

With so many people using MyAppSales regularly I figured I’d spend a couple of hours working off tickets on the bug tracker. The most important one was causing an app crash if you had sales in one of the newly opened up app store countries.

Fixed link for country icon retrieval
Added 3 letter country names below country flags in report view
Fixed incorrect target name and replaced all code signing identities with the auto-matching ones
Implemented lazy loading of the 4 main view controllers to speed up startup
Now all country codes are loaded from the database but only icons are loaded if the country occurs in a report

The new version 1.0.1 can be downloaded from the customer-only Subversion Repository. Source Code licenses are still available here if you’d like to join all those happy customers. 😉

Apple’s double standard was shown to me once more, spoiling an otherwise beautiful Sunday. CXI Gaming was able to sneak iSales Tracker past Apples SDK Agreement and got approved within 2 weeks. How unfair is that?! I mailed Apple the link and and also resubmitted 1.0.1 just to nudge them once again. I also mailed CSI Gaming congratulating them on their luck and advising them to enjoy it while it lasts. The author of Sales Report told me that his first big update got rejected. Most likely the same will happen with iSales Tracker. So customers who first shell out 15 Euros might never get any updates.

As opposed to MyAppSales, where I will continue to provide free source-level support for customers…

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XIB Lazy Loading – Part 1

Apr 26, 2009

3 Months ago, when I started developing MyAppSales I felt confused by multiple XIB files, so I decided to put all view controllers into the MainWindow.xib. Not only does this not really gain you more overview, but this practise slows down application launch. On the iPhone you should defer work whenever possible.

That’s why I revisited my XIB files for version 1.0.1 and moved parts to external files wherever possible. Here are all the steps.

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Contacting the App Delegate

Apr 25, 2009

Remover asks:

How to send a message from a view controller to app delegate?

That’s a question that everybody asks who is trying to follow the model-view-controller paradigm. There is an easy way to access your app delegate from anywhere in your app.

1 Comment

Petition for Official iTunes Sales Report Download API

Apr 24, 2009

Every developer with apps in the store has this problem: You have to download your daily reports within 7 days or you loose the information. Several methods have been developed to deal with this, some on individual computers (AppViz), some on web sites (appfigures.com) and some mobile (My App Sales). But all of those have the same problem: to get to the report data they have to scrape the iTunes Connect website.

A practise that Apple tolerates, but does not like. Where Apple has a say, they reject apps for the app store that do that, citing 3.3.7 of the SDK Agreement. And they add “There is no public API allowing information from iTunes Connect to be used in the manner demonstrated by your application.”

And that’s what this petition is for. I don’t want to establish a website for it just yet, but first I am trying to get people aware that we all should post a bug report at http://bugreport.apple.com/ and post your “vote” there by requesting “iTunes Sales Report Download API” from them. Apple collects these reports and when a certain number of people request the same functionality then Apple will be compelled to fulfill their user’s wish.

So the petition works liks this

put in a bug report and suggest an official API
comment on this thread

On the free market it is good to have developers compete who has the best report analysis software, but currently competition revolves around who has tricked Apple the best. By providing such an API, Apple would not only make developers really happy but create a basis of fair development of report analysis and charting tools on all possible platforms.

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