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ITGulfCoast Approved

It’s been quite awhile since it happened, but the ITGulfCoast App we created for our favorite local business networking group was approved!  It is awaiting you on the App Store for free, so check it out!

We hope you enjoy it!  All advertising proceeds are donated to ITGulfCoast and help fund several scholarships for area technology students.

ITGulfCoast Submitted

Just a quick note that we’ve finally submitted the ITGulfCoast application to iTunes and are anxiously awaiting approval.  Until then, here are some screenshots:

Please let us know what you think!  We’re already thinking that the listing view needs to show dates and use smaller text so it doesn’t ellip…

Release Dates

When submitting to the App Store for approval, you’ll commonly hear of people setting a release date well in the future, then rolling it back once approved.  We made the over-optimistic mistake of setting our release date to shortly after the day I submitted, relying on my favorite submission stats site that said we’d be good to go in something like 2.5 days.  Lo and behold, it took nearly 20 days get approved.  Doh!

Once approved, our application appeared on the 23rd page of the Arcade Games sub-category due to a release date of July 14th, which I felt was a little unfair.  I checked the iTunes Connect site on Tuesday and it had our release day grayed out (which meant no updates).  However, yesterday during the workshop I noticed that it was no longer grayed out, so this morning I updated both versions to tomorrow.  I was expecting everything to update overnight as it has so far and get us to the top of the listings.

Matt and I were slightly concerned about whether Apple would have a problem with this later-date change, and while I felt there would be no issues Matt was concerned of running afoul of Apple.  Lo and behold, iLostMyMarbles totally disappeared from the App Store this evening for a few hours!  This obviously put us into crisis mode, but we decided to see if everything would fix itself in the morning.

Luckily it re-appeared this evening as well, and with a new release date of the 3rd (which was our actual approval date).  Apple was apparently nice enough to set ours to the 3rd without even scolding us, but I can see how changing release dates like we did could be abused to keep Apps at the top of the “New & Noteworthy” listings.  I’m not sure they’ll be so understanding in the future!

The moral of the story is that you should set release dates well in the future, then reset them to your actual approval date once approved.  Live and learn!

Workshop Results

Thanks to all who attended the iPhone Workshop!  I had a lot of fun and I hope it was informative and useful!  To recap, we covered the following:

• iPhone Dev Center
  • Roles and Teams
  • Tools and Support
  • Certificates (and their uses)
• iTunes Connect
  • App Submission
  • Sales Trends, Reports
  • Quick Contracts Overview
• AdMob Website
  • General overview
  • Analytics
• Objective C Intro
  • Brain melting syntax
  • New(er) dot property syntax
  • Message passing vs. method calls
• XCode Overview
  • Basic features
  • Work flow with XCode
  • Starting new projects
• Simulator Overview
  • Features and Differences
  • i386 vs. armv6/7 and libraries
  • Garbage collection and lack thereof
  • How to crash Simulator!
• Interface Builder
  • Integrated work flow, purpose
  • Connecting to code with IBOutlet, IBAction
  • How poorly it works on a small screen…
• ITGulfCoast App
  • Reviewed code and application startup process, chain of events
  • Added “already viewed” feature using sqlite database engine (thanks iLostMyMarbles code!)
  • Debugged new feature in Simulator and on device
• Instruments
  • Profiled iLostMyMarbles
    • Memory leaks
    • Rendering performance
    • File access

Obviously a jam-packed session, but we did manage to eat some pizza somwhere in there! (sorry it was so late in the session for those that had to leave early)

I’ve cleaned up the source code for the ITGulfCoast App (download), and will be making a few modifications today before submitting it to the App Store for approval.  Thanks again for your great suggestions and help!

I look forward to more workshops through ITGulfCoast, if you’re interested in giving one please get ahold of Maria Weisnicht.  She was instrumental in putting this all together, and we really appreciated her help!  Also thanks again to TechSoft, Inc. for providing our venue (which was awesome!).

First Day – Wow!

So Apple sent out 300 copies of iLostMyMarbles yesterday, we’re apparently already in 29 countries around the world!  Our App appeared two weeks after we submitted it, so we got bubbled down on the lists (as in page 23 of the arcade sub-category).  We’ve done no advertising so far, and a reach like this is unheard of for such a small company.  Thanks Apple!  *wink*

We’re really excited, and have been keenly watching our ratings.  It seems the iTunes Store keeps multiple versions of our ratings, depending on how you reach the listing.  So far, depending on where you look, we’re “Unrated”, “3 1/2 stars” and “3 stars”.  Not too shabby for a first stab, especially when many of the well established Apps are rated much worse and iLostMyMarbles is so simple.  Time will tell, I hope everyone likes our stuff though!

Tonight is our iPhone Workshop, and I’m really excited to show people how it all works with real data.  Very glad we got into the store soon enough to have some stats!

iLostMyMarbles Approved!

So all your finger crossing paid off!  We’re approved, and I’m way too excited to be long winded here!

We’ll be showing up on the App Store within the week, there’s typically a 1-4 day delay before they post and index new apps.  I’m guessing we’ll be live before the workshop, see you there!

Still Waiting

Today marks the 16th day we’ve been waiting for our iLostMyMarbles App Store approval!  We’re hoping the delay is just due to it being our first App submission, especially when compared to the recent statistics 148Apps.biz maintains.  Keep your fingers crossed and iTunes open, we’ll be there soon!

I contacted the approval team last week to check up, and was not really expecting a response but they quickly let us know that we haven’t fallen through the cracks.  Unfortunately they can’t give us any sort of estimates or specifics, but it was nice to hear from them!  I’d like to meet some of those guys at some point, I’m sure they come up with great App ideas all the time.

iPhone Presentation Video

Finally got the videos of the presentation I recently did for ITGulfCoast on the iPhone Ecosystem.  Enjoy!

This is two segments, and unfortunately is missing a couple of minutes between them where I reviewed some advertising providers.

The slides I used in the presentation are available here.