TapMode iPhone Development

Well after banging my head against the wall all day and trying at least 20 different methods, I went back to part of a routine I did two days ago.  It turns out I think the rough one I had was the right way to do it after all.  So I changed a couple of parameters and now its beginning to work better.  I also figured out an additional trick, now I have it usable.  Now I am going to work on some polish and I think in a day or so I will have a smooth routine that will be good enough to integrate into news addict.

That’s the way it usually goes with me, I just keep banging my head into the wall and exhaust every method I can think of then finally it ends up being something not that difficult or crazy.

I really think that is probably the most important atttribute of a programmer…  Perseverance, it isn’t so much about being clever or smart or anything like that, it’s just that we tend to be able to spend days plugging away on some little routine until it finally works.  Then when you look back on it you wonder why it was so difficult in the first place.

Well the new feature I am working on has been going slow the last day or so.  I was making good progress yesterday and I had it working though it was rough.  I have seen one other app with this same feature and I don’t know how he made it work so nicely.  I will keep working on it.  There was one post by another developer saying it wasn’t possible at all without using private API calls.  However the developer who made it said he didn’t do that and I figured the trick I think he used to get it to work legitimately. Now I just have to make it work as nice as he did.

I submitted an update to Apple about 6 days ago now.  I am still waiting for approval… Hopefully soon.  I think they are probably getting backlogged with all of the updates for 3.0 compatibility…  The update is just to fix a couple of bugs.  One has to do with small text on a few of the news sites and another bug has to do with it being a bit too slow for edge users.  Both should be fixed once this update is approved.

Well I am working on a new feature and was using some NSLog statements to make sure things were working as they should.  They worked great in the sample app I wrote that just had part of the new feature.  However when I moved the code over to News Addict my NSLog statements weren’t showing.  After double checking everything several times, I finally noticed the problem.  I was compiling for Ad-Hoc distribution to my iPhone and not Debug.  So I switched it and sure enough NSLog are not written for Ad-Hoc builds which of course makes sense.  But you can waste a lot of time if you aren’t expecting that.  So remember when running test builds to make sure you have your build type right.

Well News Addict has been out for a couple of days now and I am quite happy with the reviews so far.  Thanks to everyone who took the time to review the app.  I notice a few people are having trouble with edge network speed.  I have one idea that I may be able to improve that some.

I believe the problem relates to the routine that checks to make sure the user has good internet connectivity.  When I had to add this to get my app approved, I looked for the best way to accomplish this.  The routine I ended up using is very good at determining whether a connection is available. It does have one part of the routine that could cause some trouble over edge because it actually double checks that an internet connection can be established.  This is the best way to know whether an internet connection actually is available, but that extra time it takes to do that seems to be noticeable over edge.  Anyway I think I am going to use a simpler routine that doesn’t actually try to establish a connection.  It will just makes sure you have at least edge available.

Hopefully that will solve the problem for you edge users.  I plan to submit that update ASAP although it usually takes 5 days or so for it to make it through the approval process at Apple.  I want to add one more special feature that I will leave secret for now as I am not sure how long it will take to make and it may not make this update.

Well Apple approved my app News Addict. I finally finished it and am happy with the way it turned out.  I have lots more features planned.  My website is mostly done.  I still need to polish a few sections.  Of course it all comes together the week I am at a family reunion.  I have had to scramble a bit and hopefully will have some time once I am back this weekend to tie up a few loose ends on the site.  I am still around to answer emails and handle any problems that may crop up.  So far troubles relate around links not fulling working on the website.  No problems reported from the app yet.  I hope its just free of bugs and not because no one is trying it out.

Dropbox saved me from a lot of work…  Well I hopelessly screwed up my framework linking while trying to install an additional framework.  The first time I added the linking I believe I linked to the wrong version of the framework..  I was getting 6 really weird error messages after installing a framework.  Initially I thought I could just remove it and reinstall it but the more I tried to correct it the more screwed up things became.  So anyway dropbox has revisions.  I keep my project in a dropbox directory and then just went into the web interface dropped into revisions and restored the three files contained in my project bundle to a known good build 15 hours earlier.

Re-added my frameworks correctly and all problems now are gone… yaaay!

Well been working on my website design and icon.  Sent the work to an artist I have been working with to polish things up and add his artistic touch to things.

Well fixed a small problem I had in the earlier code that I wasn’t sure was fixable.  However after fiddling with the extra feature I needed to add for apple to accept my app, I figured out how to get rid of the 2 compiler warning errors I was having.  Now… no warnings, great!  I hadn’t spent much time on these before because some posts from experienced developers seemed to suggest that they weren’t fixable and you just had to live with them.  But it turns out they were fixable:-)