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23 February 2010
The final article about my experience creating the "NZiPhone.com and NZMac.com News" app - At this stage there's a lot of reading for a novice like me to get through. I wanted to learn how to test my application on my iPhone, so I had to login to Apple's developer site and go through the process of getting provisioning files and certificates all sorted. I would never have understood what this all meant if it wasn't for the fact that I had been sent apps and provisioning files in the past so that I could review the apps I had been sent (that's called an ad-hoc distribution), but there is also a superb amount of material on the Apple Developer portal to explain it...and a lot of iTunes U files on creating iPhone apps. I confess I ignored most of the iTunes U stuff, because as I've already mentioned, I'm not a coder and a lot of it would be too much for me to take in.
I knew I was in for a lot of reading...but I also wanted to get my app onto my phone to play with. So the first thing I did was work through the assistant for setting up the certificate and provisioning file. The assistant was great and my Mac was then able to try and put the app on my iPhone. I did this using the Development Provisioning Assistant on the Dev site, but I can't show you anything more than this image...
After that, I kept getting an error each time I tried to build my app in Xcode. The simulator had still worked with this error, but Xcode wasn't going to if I wanted to publish to the iPhone...
Luckily the solution to the problem had been addressed in the TapLynx Google Group set up to discuss TapLynx (http://groups.google.com/group/taplynx), so the fix was very easy.
I have to stop there and say...."woohoo!!!!!!". Sorry, I have to indulge myself for a moment here and it will mean little to anyone else. I just pressed "Build and Run" and Xcode pushed my app across to my iPhone. I truly am an iPhone developer now and I can't believe how easy it was. I know I have a way to go before this thing can see the light of day, but look at this screen shot of my iPhone. I'm an iPhone Dev now!!
So after that process, I had some changes to make in the app itself, adding the TapLynx license code into the variable "TapLynx_LicenseKey" and changing the variable "AppURL". Then, I need to have a very good read of the wiki page that described the config plist, to see if there was anything else I needed to change...
http://developer.newsgator.com/wiki/index.php?title=Config_File:_NGConfig.plist_Reference
...as well as spend time on the Apple iPhone Developer's site, reading PDF after PDF to try and make sure I did everything right.
Sunday Feb 7, 2010
Well the weekend has been a real mess. I had really mucked up my install of certificates and provisioning files with trying to move away from the Beta 3.2 SDK, so I was unable to get the application back on to the iPhone. I finally managed it, but only if I ran Xcode to debug at the same time. It really is completely confusing for a non-developer like me. Thank goodness for detailed writing by Apple!
Basically I think it was my fault. I installed the beta of Xcode and then the iPhone OS was updated to 3.1.3. Xcode then didn't want to publish to an OS it wasn't familiar with, but solving the issue wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. In other words, just installing the iPhone SDK that came out to support Xcode wasn't enough. It took me about 3 days to figure it out, which actually was mostly spent revoking and deleting certificates and provisions and starting all over again.
The app was ready to go! So it was time to submit it online. Straight away I ran into another issue....it seems those pesky provisioning files and certificates were for "Development", not "Distribution", so I had to go through the whole process again of setting up Xcode to create a working app.
There are a lot of things you have to have ready when submitting (via something called iTunes Connect) to the app store. I had considered charging a small fee for the app to recover some costs, but the fact I had to provide details of lawyers and all that sort of thing put me off. So the app is free....it just makes it easier.
Apple provide a lot of information on what you need to have ready to submit to the Apple Store. The folk at TapLynx have also helped with that, by making a cool PDF and Excel spreadsheet available...
So I gathered my images together, wrote out the blurb and keywords etc, and went through what was a very easy process. I received an automated response, and now it's just a matter of waiting to see how long it takes before Apple accept or reject the app. I set the date I wanted it to become available as Feb 12 (I'm assuming that is US time and not NZ time) as I wanted to make sure I had a lot of material ready to go on the websites about the app.
Monday Feb 8, 2010
No word from Apple yet...I'm joking! It's been 24 hours and it's also been the weekend in the States...Superbowl weekend no less, so I don't expect to hear from them for quite some time. In the meantime, I'm preparing some of the material to use to publicise the app when it is released.
I've also already spotted things I'm not happy with, but nothing that causes me to want to cancel the App store submission...just tweaks and changes that I will make once the app is up and available to users. One of the things I almost certainly want to do is change from having the NGConfig.plist (basically the preferences for the feeds, colours etc that get displayed) within the app to having it online on the site. That way I can make changes to that file and they get proliferated across the app each time a user launches the app to download new informstion....that's very clever!
There are also things about TapLynx that I would like to see changed (such as the ability to let users decided whether a 'Read Count' is displayed or not) and so, once the app is live, I need to work on fixing some things myself, and putting in feature requests for others. I'll be posting these details on the NZiPhone.com forum once the app goes live.
Thursday Feb 11, 2010
In review! Received an email about 6AM NZ time (no, I wasn't awake for it) saying that my application had "changed state" (that's the terminology used) and that my application was "In Review". That means that Apple's now looking at it. Be gentle with me Apple!
Friday Feb 12, 2010
Wow. Wow! What a day...I've never felt such a rush to get things organised when, at 9.30 AM local time, I got a lovely brief email from Apple that said..."Your application is Ready for Sale". Wow!
I rushed to let a lot of people know, such as site users....and after work, a small comment from someone in an email made me realise I'd made a very basic and silly mistake.
In final testing and then in the build, I set the iPhone OS to 3.1.3 in Xcode and built the app from that point. What didn't jump into my head at that time, is that doing so effectively set the minimum requirements to version 3.1.3 on the iPhone and iPod Touch....meaning anyone who hasn't updated their OS recently can't use the app. Crazy....such a silly and simple mistake and I missed it. In trying to figure out what to set Xcode to, I came across a "Read Me" file on the disk image that says....
Known Technical Issue
Because of a couple bugs in the iPhone Simulator in OS 3.0, you should build for iPhone Simulator 3.1. But, when building for the iPhone itself, build for OS 3.0.
So, quite quickly, I'm made a few tweaks, including moving the plist file to being web-based and resubmitted the app to the app store as version 1.1, so that iPhone 3.0 (and up) users can get at the app also.
Details on a web-based plist can be found at - http://developer.newsgator.com/wiki/index.php?title=FAQs
My official changelog for v1.1 is:
- Now supports iPhone OS 3.0 and above (instead of just 3.1.3)
- Minor interface colour changes
And that's it. That's the end of my articles on getting started with TapLynx and just the start of my time as an iPhone developer. It's been a great experience. Thanks to TapLynx for providing the framework and thanks to everyone who has already given feedback.
It was great to see on my phone last night that, in the iTunes NZ store, under free news apps, my app was already at number two, beating the BBC, NY Times and Time Magazine. I know that's a selective category on iTunes, but it still is pretty cool.
Time to sign off and start thinking about the next version. It's been a great learning experience so far and I now have a lot more things to go off and learn.
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