Posts Tagged Apple

WelliBUS updates and other news

Posted by Nick in Uncategorized on February 11, 2010

This past week has been a very active week in terms of deployments.

iPhone WelliBUS reached version 2.5.1. The latest update adds a new feature that allows users to save favourite services not just stops, improves the load times significantly, brings tooltips to a few screens and addresses a couple of small issues.

But the real reason for this post is that this week we launched two Android applications.

Firstly WelliBUS for Android was launched! This first release of the application is very feature rich thanks to the work of @cur3n4 Users can search by stop numbers, station names, street names and even wharfs. There is even a Map view that allows users to find nearby stops. Once the departure stop has been identified the application allows filtering by service number or date/time and goes on to display the departure times and itinerary for the selected routes. Download this free application from the Android Market today.

The other application is the Android version Twister Referee. This is a port of the iPhone application with the same name. Its purpose is simple: enable referee-free Twister play. Rather than having one player operate the spinner the application will do it automatically, over and over again.

Cheers…

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Urban Airship – Push Notifications

Posted by Nick in Objective C, REST, iPhone on October 4, 2009

Today I have finally added Push Notifications to Parcel Trackr.

I decided not to waste time and I went for Urban Airship. I registered, uploaded my push certificate, downloaded the sample and integrated the two systems.

Not everything went smoothly though because when I first ran the application I got a

Failed to register with error: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=3000 UserInfo=0×120610 “no valid ‘aps-environment’ entitlement string found for application”

I thought my provisioning profile did not include the right entitlement… so I re-downloaded it and tried again. Turns out I was using the wrong provisioning profile.

So if you want to avoid my mistake just make sure that after you’ve configured push services in the iPhone Dev Center you download the updated provisioning profile and then you install it via XCode.

Other things worth checking include: the product name in your build configuration matches the app id and of course, the ultimate solution, clean all targets before building!

Cheers…

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Special App Stores

Posted by Nick in Apple, iPhone on May 8, 2009

Today I was having a conversation about the Apple App Store App Review process and I realized that I don't really mind a little bit of censorship but with a twist…

Let me explain:
1. The Junk Store
Not all apps should make it to the store. I honestly think that if an app does not really do anything then it probably should not be allowed in the store. Say an app says: "I'm rich!". Is it really an app? Owning a Porsche would achieve the same result (telling people I'm rich) and it would also help the German economy… 
Now the question is what does one do with this app though? Somebody wrote it, and they want it to be available to all the people who find it useful. I vote for the creating of another App Store called "The Junk Store". Really, so many apps could go in there. Just imagine: you write an app and you immediately get access to the Junk Store: you can upload apps, updates, etc. In the Junk Store all apps are equal, they need no review process, they come with no warranty and they make no promises that they won't break your phone or eat your battery alive. Users only need to point to the Junk Store and then a jungle awaits them in there. Knock yourselves out people, download and try stuff at your own risk!
2. The Awesome People Store
Now there are some people (see these ones) who have hundreds of applications in the app store. They just clutter the gorram store! Now I vote for creating "The Awesome People Store". In this store developers "move" the apps that they consider to be the least likely to generate revenue for them. Think of it as the Archive Store… apps go to the App Store and after a while, when they fall in disgrace and people seldom download them they get moved to the Awesome People Store. Accessing this store can be done either via the main store or directly… Apps here are not guaranteed to work on the latest iPhone OS version either which a bonus.  
3. The Enterprise Store
Now this is maybe a bit too serious for this post. I believe there is a need for an Enterprise Store because there are just too many enterprise-ish applications that don't really belong in the public App Store. Say your company has 200 employees. You cannot really get an Enterprise license and you have to put your app(s) in the bloody store. There they will be public and people might end up downloading them for no reason: waste of bandwidth and time plus a bonus of frustration for some of us… Another reason for this Enterprise Store is that currently it is very hard to build a product (iPhone app) that can be sold and resold to enterprises with a little bit of specific branding on it. You either have to make some sort of activation screen or you need to issue a new app for each of your customers (this means going through approvals and such that are time wasting and annoying).
An Enterprise Store will solve this issue: you create a Product, you sell it to your first customer (enterprise) and the app goes through the usual process. After that you "notify" Apple that you've released a new app (with just a different branding, service endpoint, function configuration etc) and you just move along…
What would all these new rules achieve is a less cluttered, more value adding App Store. I am keen to hear what you people think so feel free to post your comments below…
Cheers…
p.s. what "stores" would you like to see?

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