All hell broke loose for me in the Program Portal and Xcode today: welcome to 2009 and the expiration of development certificates over the holiday break. It’s far from obvious what is causing these problems, hence this quick essay to help others avoid them now and in the future. I’m sure that I’ll refer back to [...]
Dear Steve,
As an iPhone developer who’s been in the App Store since its launch, I’m starting to see a trend that concerns me: developers are lowering prices to the lowest possible level in order to get favorable placement in iTunes. This proliferation of 99¢ “ringtone apps” is affecting our product development.
Unlike a lot of other [...]
A friend of mine recently commented that native Twitter applications are the new flashlights. It’s true, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise: consider the number of web apps that proliferated before the advent of the native SDK.
Personally, I welcome this competition. Seeing the work of other developers whose work I respect and admire acts [...]
Unless your Internet tubes are broken, you’re probably aware that we released Frenzic for the iPhone today. It’s been a long time coming, but we’re all very proud of what we’ve accomplished—and very grateful for the great feedback we’ve been getting. As always it’s been a great pleasure working with Wolfgang Ante on this game.
But [...]
One of the great things about the NDA being lifted is that a lot of great books about iPhone development are finally being published. It’s about time: for many months the top search hit on this site has been iphone app development. A lot of new developers need guidance.
Last week, Addison-Wesley contacted me saying that [...]
During the early days of iPhone software development, there were no mechanisms for doing beta tests. Those of us on the bleeding edge were developing apps with very little peer review and beta testing.
Luckily, I have friends who are a lot smarter than me. And we banded together with one primary rule: you don’t talk [...]
If you’ve written an application for the iPhone, you’ll eventually encounter a customer problem that you can’t reproduce. Of course, you’ll want to get a copy of the customer’s data and preferences so you can replicate the environment they are working in. And then you’ll realize that it’s a total pain in the ass for [...]
Twitterrific has a splash screen and I would like to get rid of it. But I can’t.
Splash screens hurt the user experience from a purely psychological point-of-view. They don’t change the launch time of your iPhone application at all, but it looks and feels longer.
But there’s a problem: you can only specify one Default.png file [...]
People have asked which part of our Twitterrific application for the iPhone was hardest to develop. There were many challenges, but the one I found most onerous was scrolling in the UITableView.
The code we shipped in 1.0 was obviously flawed. Scrolling was jerky. We weren’t happy with it and neither were users.
There was no shortage [...]
Thank God—that’s the last time I’m going to type that word for awhile. The meme is dead, long live the SDK.
As a way to celebrate the lifting of the NDA, we bring you some very special source code. To wile away the time between our product submission and the launch of the App Store, my [...]