Some news about me and my endeavours

It's been a long time since I posted news about me, my projects and endeavours as an indie iOS developer. Here it goes. 

First, my applications sales are flat since the beginning of 2012. (Ultimate Password Manager, Ultimate Password Manager Free and Password Validator). This is not very encouraging. Because of that, I'm not investing very much time in these. I'm only working on UPM to fix bugs or make small improvements. That is it. My next release should come out in july.

Second, I still have this idea of building a Tumblr client for browsing pictures only. In the past, I wrote many blog posts about this project. The problem is finding time for this project. Here and there I do take small notes about this application: how it should work, what it should do, etc. My interests in this project comes from building my first iPad application, using latest iOS version only (I'm may develop it only for iOS 6), learning to build a graphic oriented application and because I love browsing pictures on Tumblr. So, we'll see how it goes in the future. I'll keep writing about this on this blog.

Third, my involvement in this blog is not as much as i would love. I made the move from Blogger to SquareSpace a few months ago and I love this blogging platform. I paid for this a three years plan. I costed my quite a pile of money so I have to continue and mainting this blog. I guess I'll this an incentive.

Finally, I downloaded many of the WWDC 2011 and 2012 session videos in order to keep my brain alive and well on iOS APIs matters. I did subscribre to the Stanford University course: Coding Together: Apps for iPhone and iPad. Watching this in iTunesU.app on the iPad is quite an experience in itself. I encourage you to do so too.

Oh and I'm following quite a few iOS developers on my Twitter account to stay in touch with the best of iOS devs. Pretty interesing to read during events like the WWDC 2012 Keynote.

Until next time guys!

You know that I have this blog to maintain too: http://iosappdesigns.tumblr.com/

Shameless plug - Ultimate Password Manager 3.1.2 is out!

The latest release of my password manager for iPhone out! The app was less than 24 hours in queue (it was submitted on sunday!). This is a maintenance release. 

Release 3.1.2

> iOS 5 compatibility fixes.
> Password Safe: you can now lock the safe on demand from the action menu at the top right.
> Password Safe: data entry is faster as the Done key of the keyboard now completes the entry instead of hiding the keyboard.
> Password Safe: longer delay when showing a password in password safe.
> Password Safe: Fixed application crash caused by an action on a tapped and hold password safe entry.
> Policies: Added a Save button at the bottom of the toolbar when creating policies.
> Tweaks in the About section to let the user send comments, feedback or feature requests from within the applications.
> In the Generate tab, selecting the type of password generation rules is easier.
> A security reminder will be randnomly presented to the user if the application's PIN isn't defined.
> Other tweaks and more robust code.

For those Apple fans out there - Apple After Steve Jobs

Many of us, iOS developers (full time or indie ones like me) are first and foremost Apple product lovers and Apple followers. If you are like me, when Steve Jobs passed away, you we're in a state of shock. But now, as time goes by, we start to look forward again. And we continue to love Apple's products and Apple in general. A few weeks ago, I started a new blog. A place where I can express myself on Apple After Steve Jobs. Today, I'm happy to report that this place is now open to you all, dear followers.

http://appleafterstevejobs.com

Come. Follow. Participate. 

Enjoy.

iOS 5, iTunes 10.5 and reported device capacity

This week, as soon as iOS 5 GM was made available to iOS devs, I went ahead and installed it on my iPhone 3GS. Here what I did:

1. Last device sync of my phone with iTunes 10.5
2. Download iOS 5 GM and iTunes 10.5 beta 7
3. Install iTunes 10.5 beta 7
4. Sync my phone with iTunes 10.5 beta 7
5. Upgrade my phone to iOS 5 GM with opt-click on Restore
6. Sync again with iTunes 10.5 GM

In the process, I notice something interesting. The device capacity reported by iTunes decreases after installing iOS 5 by nearly one gigabytes on my 32 gigabytes iPhone 3GS. 

Reported capacity before

Reported capacity after

Why is that?

Thank you Steve.

Today is a sad day. Steve Jobs is resigning from Apple as CEO. The rest is history. Thank you Steve. Really.

.ipa file size difference between Xcode 4.0 and 4.1.1

Today I decided to start work on the next release of Password Validator. Upon my first Adhoc build ready to be installed on my test device, I found out a very surprising thing: the size of the .ipa is now 3.8 megs instead of 7.9 megs. What a difference! the larger size one was generated from Xcode's Organizer Archive and Export command release 4.0. The only explanations for this could be:

• Xcode 4.1.1 is much more efficient at generating ARM6 code while using the LLVM debugger instead of the GCC 4.2 one.
• Xcode 4.1.1 uses a different compressor for jpeg resources

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2011

Today, I would like to wish everybody who come over to follow this blog a merry christmas and happy new year 2011.

2010 was a very busy year for me and I'm quite happy with the current state of my blog. I'm looking forward to 2011 to keep this blog well and alive. But, I have a very deep wish for 2011: I hope that everybody who comes here and find this blog useful spread the word and refer this blog to others.

Again, thanks for visiting and reading.

A day in the life of an indie iOS dev

So, what is like to be an indie iOS developer on a saturday morning? 

10:00 AM. Read my emails, look at my www.appfigures.com today's report. Nothing very exciting. My thanksgiving sale promotion did not really push sales. That was expected. I give a quick look to the Reviews section to see if I've got any more App Store reviews. Nope. Nothing. While being there, I take a few minutes to update my account settings in order to send the sales reports to a new email address.

10:15 AM. Next, I'm thinking of the next blog post. This could be interesting to others if I wrote a post about what is like to be an iOS indie devs on saturday morning. 

10:20 AM. Looking at my iPhone, I have 1 day left to my developer provisioning profile. So I start Safari on my Mac and go to developer.apple.com to renew my profile. Found out that my old iPod touch is still linked but I lost it (!). So I remove it and renew my provisioning profile that I download on my computer. I'll install it later.

10:35 AM. Now I head to www.cocoapedia.org to complete my registration on the wiki. Takes five minutes. 

10:40 AM. Now in Xcode to install the new provisioning profile and build a new test version of Ultimate Password Manager 3.0. Test that the application starts correctly. Yep.

11:15 AM. Next, work a bit on application X user interface in Keynote. A few teaks are needed on the application default user interface. This thing is starting to look good. 

11:30 AM. Now, I'm trying to complete my www.apptank.com registration. Found out the verification email was in my spam folder on gmail. Spent a few moments to complete my portfolio there. The web site has a few quirks. Some potential but I think I prefer www.theymakeapps.com. 15 minutes on that.

11:32 AM. Now visit www.rememberthemilk.com to updates my to-dos. 

11:40 AM. I realize that I need to test my new indexed table on the password safe in Ultimate Password Manager. Setup the test.  Seems to work fine. That was fast. 

11:45 AM. Went on www.dropbox.com/developers to see any new announcements on their web site. Nothing.

It is now 11:47 AM. Time for a break.

2:28 PM. Back to work. After careful examination, I will remove some NSOperation from application's delegate methods to be sure certain data structures are loaded at the right time, in sequence. Compile a new adhoc release. Installed on my dev device. Testing.

3:15 PM. Time for another brake. Some other things to do.
5:00 PM. Some other touches to user interface prototype for application X. I had to fin d the textured iPad background to use in this application.

5:19 PM. I'm pretty much done for today. 

Google: Building iPhone Apps

Here is what happens when you search the terms "building iphone apps" in Google.

You get this blog as the first hit! Spread the word to other iOS devs who doesn't know about my blog yet. They might thank you and give you big rewards! You never know.

Searching "Building iPhone Apps" on Google

You need to find information on "Building iPhone Apps" on the Internet? Doing a search on Google will return www.buildingiphoneapps.com. Cool.