pashernate postings

One year on…

I've just had my reminder through to renew my subscription to the iPhone developer program and it got me thinking, just where has the year gone?

I achieved my initial aim for last year by releasing an iPhone application and I've been pleasantly surprised with the feedback I've received for my first App in terms of reviews, tweets and verbal compliments but I had hoped to have at least one more application out before now and that hasn't quite happened.

Time and effort

To be an iPhone developer you have to either a) be lucky enough to have it as your full time job or b) dedicate an awful lot of hours to produce an app worthy of getting paid for.

I've spent what spare time I have on gaining knowledge of not only the iPhone SDK but Objective C too, it takes a little while and I'm only part way there but I still feel i've come a long way. If I think about it I have probably averaged two hours a week over the last 12 months. I don't think that's too bad for what I've achieved but those hours are ramping up as I write more complicated code.

What next?

So what for the next 12 months?

I'm due to have another iPhone application in the store very soon, although this will have been submitted under the company  that I work for rather than my own developer account and then within 6 weeks or so from now, my second iPhone application will be released. The latter App has been delayed mainly due to the fact I'm useless as graphical design work, so sourcing and waiting for someone with that particular skill set has slowed it down somewhat.

After that, who knows. As i've always said, it's the idea that matters rather than the ability to write the applications in the first place and at this moment I don't have that 'light bulb' moment.

I wonder what I'll be looking back on in another 12 months time?…

UIProgressHUD – A safe alternative

As posted previously, although it looks nice, putting a UIProgressHUD into your App will cause it to be rejected by Apple, however there is a much better alternative which I was introduced to recently.

This is the Activity Indicator from the WordPress iPhone Application, it's freely available (however there is a caveat to using it) and it works superbly well, simply download the code and nib that are linked in this post and insert them into your project.

LoadingView.h

LoadingView.m

WPActivityIndicator.xib

RoundedRectBlack.png

Then call it by using;

[[LoadingView sharedActivityIndicator] show];
    // your code here
[[LoadingView sharedActivityIndicator] hide]; 

This provides a fine replacement for the UIProgressHUD I admire.

Apple scanning submitted Apps for Private API’s

My previous post regarding taking a chance on submitting an iPhone Application that uses undocumented APIs seems to have turned to high risk or possibly even 'DO NOT USE'.

News has been leaking in the last few weeks that Apple now have the means (possibly via some form of automated scanning software) to check for the use of Private APIs within code during the review process and some developers are reporting that their recently updated Applications are now being rejected on these grounds.

It's now likely that my next iPhone application will no longer use the undocumented UIProgressHUD and i'll turn to the MBProgressHUD implementation instead to get what i'm after.

It's a real shame, some of the Private APIs are really nice to use and I for one would like to take advantage of them. I don't see why Apple can't just make them available through the SDK. As I touched on in one of my previous post, the UIProgressHUD is really nicely implemented and it's already used by Apple's own in built applications, so why should they be any different in looks and appearance to user submitted Applications? If Apple's policy is to have a standard look and feel for iPhone Apps then the use of some of these Private APIs is required i'd have thought?