Cocoanetics

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…

0 Comments

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.

0 Comments

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.

7 Comments

Geolocated Distributed iPhone Developer Database

Apr 23, 2009

Tonight I fore-went (is this a legal word?) my Cocoa coding time to write this very article about a topic that has begun to burn in my heart and I just have to get it out into cyberspace to get a diskussion going.

You and me and lots of other iPhone developers have strenghts and weeknesses. Some of us can code really well, others are great at design and there are also some people who excel at marketing iPhone apps. There are some commonalities amongst us as well, besides of 99% having a physical iPhone and 66% using twitter to build their network. We all have Internet, as benign as this may sound. We all have websites that have some information on the apps we have in the app store. We are advertising ourselves to the world. Hoping to get noticed. Looking for help. Or simply looking to make as much money as possible with the jewels they have polished in endless hours.

Static, non-machine-readable HTML. Sometimes even worse: Flash! Looking great, but achieving nothing except a good feeling for the person who created it. But that’s just Web 1.0.

A few of us took the next evolutionary step and started to write in forums (the official one as well as the largest non-official one) and get business-centric profiles on facebook or Xing. That’s Web 2.0.

But still those are information silos, you don’t own your posts, you don’t own your content on “social networks”. I say “That’s passé!” Here I am proposing Web 3.0 and all participating iPhone developers will benefit.

1 Comment

Shuffling an NSArray

Apr 23, 2009

For a project I am working on I needed to shuffle the contents of an NSArray without harming the items themselves. NSArray is a convenient container because it does not care about what you put inside. This is because you don’t (put objects into arrays), you only pretend.

You cannot add an object itself into an array but instead you always insert pointers to class instances. NSArray and its bigger cousin NSMutableArray will keep track of the pointers and memory management of the items so you don’t have to. This is a custom category for NSArray that is useful for shuffling the contents, regardless of their class type.

17 Comments

Learn to Say No

Apr 22, 2009

This request of MKureth is so totally crazy that I just had to share it with you:

Hi, I am currently working 60+ hours a week on highly advanced interactive development which mainly consists of Flash (AS3), XML, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL. I was asked to learn and develop a working iPhone application using the frameworks of Cocoa, Objective-C, and OpenGL within two weeks. Given my current work schedule and skill sets, how should I proceed with this request and deadline (of two weeks) keeping in mind that I have no prior experience with Mac development?

As impressive as your resumé sounds you lack a couple of essential skills.

0 Comments

The Best Way to Save Data

Apr 21, 2009

BebopSong asks:

Can anyone tell me the best way to create and store data on the iPhone so that the app can read the data but also write to it?

Having tried out all the possibilities that the iPhone platform holds in stock, here’s my opinion.

3 Comments

LuckyWheel 1.0.4

Apr 20, 2009

I finally got my Frenchy to translate the UI strings for LuckyWheel. Also we put in some Dutch “modernizations” because a Dutch review site had complained about the style.

Added French UI and cleaned up French proverbs
Dutch language improvements

Since there where no code changes Apple should be fairly quick to approve this update.

0 Comments

Apple Owes Me Millions, or Lucky Women on Top

Apr 19, 2009

When you are trying to be successful with something you think a lot. You are researching methods that worked for other people. You are pondering, designing, sweating. You are emulating what caused success in others. And it does not get you anywhere where you would already call yourself successful.

But then comes a long a new aquaintence, a little tool called AppRanking for FREE, that turns your world upside down and with this external help you suddenly realize that you are already many times more successful that you thought you are. You just looked in the wrong direction.

0 Comments

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