Computers?!
May 11, 2009 Code, Technology
My wife is always telling me that she doesn’t understand how with computers something can be working fine one day and then the next day it’s broken. Being a developer, I see this kind of thing all the time. “It was working a minute ago!”, or the times when you ask someone to look at something that isn’t working and when you go to show it to them it suddenly starts working perfectly.
Something like this happened to me recently. I was thinking about making some modifications to the iPhone app that I wrote, so I opened up the project and ran it but the audio wasn’t working and it locked up. I thought that was strange since I hadn’t changed anything since I ran it last, and the last time I ran it was when I was getting it ready to submit it to the App Store. I knew that this exact same code was currently for sale, which was a little disconcerting.
After a bit of digging I finally discovered an error that was complaining about a DivX file that couldn’t be found. I remembered installing a DivX codec to try and resolve a video playback issue I was having on my laptop but it doesn’t make any sense to me why that would have any effect on audio playback in the iPhone simulator. The DivX codec had not resolved my video issue, however, so I proceeded to uninstall it and sure enough my code started working again!
So those times when something is working one day and not the next, I’m 100% positive that there is a reason for it, because that’s just how computers work. Whether or not you can find the reason for it, the world may never know.
iFakeUout
Mar 10, 2009 Code, Technology
iFakeUout is my first iPhone application, and it went on sale in the App Store today!
My idea for this app started out as something else, but because of some limitations I ran into it evolved into what I think is just a fun, simple app that can be used to get a laugh out of your friends. The idea is to wait for just the right moment, then pick a sound to play that will get the best reaction. Thinking back, this would have been great to have on some sleepovers, like playing the school bell or the bugle when the whole tent is quiet and everyone is just about to fall asleep. Maybe that’s only funny to me though, but only because we actually did that kind of thing.
If you’ve got iTunes installed, click on the link below to check it out:
Ah, the dreaded shameless self promotion, nothing wrong with that though, right? On a side note, it was very encouraging for me as a developer to have my app accepted on the first try. I learned a ton doing it and I already have more ideas to improve the app, so I think I smell an update coming soon.
iPhone Icons
Mar 5, 2009 Code
Since I’ve been dabbling in iPhone development for the last little while, I wanted to just write down a few items regarding the icon to hopefully help anyone else out there to avoid some of the incorrect information I ran across on the web.
The icons are 57×57 pixels, not 60×60.
The rounded corners and the reflective “button effect” are added automatically by the system, all you need to do is create a square flat image (57×57).
In development mode (and probably for ad-hoc distribution) you can get away with using a .jpg for your icon, but when you upload your app to Apple they will reject it if it isn’t a .png.
I had read about some of the complications of adding the icon to your app, but it is quite simple. First, add your icon to your project just like any other resource, then open Info.plist right in Xcode and type in the filename for your icon. I believe there are some other customized settings that you can configure in the .plist regarding the icon and maybe that is where the complications came in, but it wasn’t clear in what I’d read that adding the icon itself was simple.
Lastly, when submitting your app you are also required to submit a large icon (512×512). I have heard rumors that your app will be rejected if your large icon and small icon don’t match. If that is the case you’ll want to be sure to create an icon that looks good in both sizes. I believe this rumor because it makes sense, but I don’t know how exact the images have to be to be considered a match. I guess I’ll find out soon enough because in the app I submitted I created my small icon first and the large icon later. The larger one resembles the smaller, but they aren’t “exactly” the same. In the future I’ll just create the large one first and resize it to make the smaller one. I’ll update this post if I get any more information on that.
**UPDATE**
Turns out that the icons don’t have to be “exact”. My app was accepted even though the smaller icon was not created directly from the larger one. Visually they looked the same, so I assume that the person who got rejected because of the icons probably had visually different large and small icons.
Tags: iPhone