Jim Chapple's iPhone adventures

Mac OS X projects use a default name of the organisation that is __MyCompanyName__

For the project as a whole.

1) Select the project at the top of the left hand pane.

2) Make sure the Utilities view is showing.  For the project as a whole select the first icon at the top of the view.

3) Basic information should show.  One should be Project Document.  Under that is Organisation.  Set this to what you want.

This has changed most uses of this information.  But there is at least one other that needs to be changed.

If you do 'About <your App>' menu selection a copyright notice shows at the bottom and this still has __MyCompanyName__.

To change this select the info.plist for the project and look for 'Copyright (human readable)'.  Change the use of __MyCompanyName__ to what you want.

http://www.essence-computing.co.uk
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/artist/essence-computing/id333177404
http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/essence-computing/id333177404?mt=12

I had to change some of my oldest Apps to use my new In App purchasing shared code.  The new code does away with a great deal of duplication of code and XIBs.  It also allows me to show the user screenshots of what they are purchasing so that they have a better idea of what they will be buying.

So, I changed an App to use the code and all works well with the iPhone and the iPod Touch.  But not the iPad.  It just would not recognise that the debug session was active and so the purchasing should use the Sandbox. 

I tried deleting the App from the iPad and then installing a completely new version using debug.  Nope.  Still did not work.

Tried logging out of the store. Nope.

Tried restarting my Mac.  Nope.

Then deleted the App from the iPad again, cleaned the Project and Rebuilt and then debug.  Now it works.

1) Logout of the Store on the device.
2) Sync your device and then Delete App from device.
3) Clean the Project.
4) Rebuild the Project.
5) Debug on the device.

Hopefully, it now works. 

Step 2 could be a problem since you may lose all your data.  Sync'ing should mean you won't.  You may need to use iTunes to delete the App if it is one you bought.  You used to be able to do this from XCode but it seems you cannot now.

http://www.essence-computing.co.uk
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/artist/essence-computing/id333177404
http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/essence-computing/id333177404?mt=12

Trying to fix my sister's PC.  It has Windows Vista on it and is being very temperamental so I decided get a Windows 7 upgrade disk and just upgrade and avoid Vista completely.

So I put it in the machine and rebooted from the DVD.  It starts the installation only to stop with a statement that you have to start from a working version of Vista, something I do not have.  It will not upgrade until I can get to the Vista Desktop.

Why? I have a completely valid version of Vista it is just being awkward.  When did the whole will not upgrade from the DVD start?

I paid £80/$125 for this piece of crap.  Lion was £21/$30 and worked a treat.  Lion was a full install.  A full version of Windows Home Edition is £110.

At this rate I'll have to put another Hard Disk put XP on it (the only Windows installation I can find that works) and then completely overwrite that with Windows 7.  What a pile of steaming......

P.S.  I tried to persuade my sister to get a Mac.  I tried I really did.  She seemed keen but my luddite brother-in-law wasn't and couldn't be persuaded.

http://www.essence-computing.co.uk
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/artist/essence-computing/id333177404
http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/essence-computing/id333177404?mt=12

Latest reason to reject an App.

App has been marked as "has add-on"!

They say my App has In App Purchases and that I have not implemented them.  It initially had In App Purchases but I decided in the end not to charge for the extra functionality so I removed them. 

Now when I look at the In Apps for this App there are none.  So how is my App still marked 'has add-on'?  Where is this mark?  I just do not know.

Luckily, in the Resolution Center you can send messages to query the rejection.  I did this, basically saying what I have put above.

What I have also found is when your App is 'In Review' then they respond very quickly to queries and even new App binaries that you upload.  There's no week's wait for a new answer, usually it is within 8 hours or so.

I have just had confirmation that the App is now ready for sale.  I didn't do anything so they must have had a problem at their end and it is now resolved.  That took about 5 hours.

http://www.essence-computing.co.uk
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/artist/essence-computing/id333177404
http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/essence-computing/id333177404?mt=12

unable to extract package metadata - with loads of useless crap after it.

No idea what this means and it seems neither do a lot of other people.

It my be a spurious error from Apple's validation servers since I got it to go away by only doing one thing to my Archive.

I cleaned the project and then did archive again.  This time the upload worked.

I have no idea if cleaning the project made the difference or whether Apple's servers were having problems.

I suppose the best that can be said is: 

If an archive won't upload for a silly reason then try cleaning the project, Archive again and try the upload again. Worked for me.

http://www.essence-computing.co.uk
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/artist/essence-computing/id333177404
http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/essence-computing/id333177404?mt=12

Note I put 'year round'.  Many of my competitors seem obsessed with Christmas and so their App cannot handle the concept that their may be other days you want to save gift ideas for.

The App lets you create as many people your want. 
Each person can have from zero to lots of gifts allocated to them. 
Each gift has a date, price, what store it is to be bought in, whether it is bought, whether it is wrapped and whether it has been sent.

You can view this information by sorted on Person, sorting on Store, sorting on Date, sorting on To Be Bought, sorting on to be Wrapped and sorting on to be Sent.

Amazingly, the whole idea for the App came from listening to three people talking about Christmas and how they all had scraps of paper to keep track of what, where, how much, when and so on. 

Some of the sortings came from looking at other Apps and seeing that they had all the information to do re-sorts of the information but didn't even though users were asking for it.

Anyway, link to the App: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gifts-list/id482885011?mt=8

http://www.essence-computing.co.uk
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/artist/essence-computing/id333177404
http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/essence-computing/id333177404?mt=12

I have a dB with every daily sales report in it.

So I ran the following SQL

SELECT Country_Code, SUM(Units) FROM DailySalesLine  where Royalty_Price > 0 GROUP BY Country_Code

Although these are my names for the columns and table I suspect they are obvious to anyone who has looked at the Daily Sales Report file.  Anyway,  I have changed it to percentages not actual numbers:

USA    51.6669%, UK    19.6929%, Australia    7.7476%, Canada    4.9303%, Germany    1.3100%, Netherlands    1.0894%, France    0.8710%, Sweden    0.7489%, Mexico    0.7301%, New Zealand    0.7043%,  Italy    0.6996%, Norway    0.6668%, Spain    0.6597%, Ireland    0.6527%, Denmark    0.5869%, South Africa    0.5729%, Switzeland    0.5118%, Belgium    0.4860%, Singapore    0.4578%, Brazil 0.4343%, Japan    0.4320%, Russia    0.3569%, Austria    0.2676%, Thialand    0.2418%, Finland    0.2395%, Malaysia    0.2183%, Hong Kong    0.2160%, United Arab Emirates    0.2089%, India    0.2043%, Indonesia    0.1667%, Philippines    0.1643%, Portugal    0.1620%, Greece    0.1432%, Turkey    0.1385%, Poland    0.1244%, Argentina    0.1010%

All the rest are under 0.1% so I have not included them.

So, it is clear that the US is still half my market.  I still have no intention of spelling things using American English since it feels completely weird to me. 

It is also clear that the English Speaking world (sorry, Quebec) are most of my sales - 85%-ish.

I then think well maybe I should start translating my best selling Apps to other languages so that I can see if that makes a difference to sales.

I know people who know Italian, French, German, Spainish, Dutch so should I bother.  I don't know.  I certainly think that it is not worth it to actually pay a company to provide me with the translations.

My first non-English speaking market is Germany and that's 1.31% of my sales.  Even adding up all the European countries the total cannot be more than 15%.

The issue is how many people are put off buying an App when it is not in their native language, once again, I do not know.

Many Europeans speak, read and write English better than many English people and so the question then becomes 'Are these people the ones who have iPhones, etc?'.  I think the answer is 'Yes, they do'.

There's just not enough information available to me to make a worthwhile decision. 

I tried to look up iPhone/iPod touch/iPad sales per country but couldn't find anything.  If, say, I knew that 10% of all sales were in Germany then maybe I could conclude that I should at least try to translate my top sellers to German just to see if the sales go up.

If anyone knows of sales per country then can they please email me.

http://www.essence-computing.co.uk
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/artist/essence-computing/id333177404
http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/essence-computing/id333177404?mt=12

where
#0  0x30183f1c in objc_msgSend ()
#1  0x33d39e2e in -[_PFArray dealloc] ()
#2  0x33d325f4 in -[_PFArray release] ()
#3  0x35e6f3f8 in CFRelease ()
#4  0x35e6e8e6 in _CFAutoreleasePoolPop ()
#5  0x33fb75e0 in -[NSAutoreleasePool release] ()
#6  0x3381f7e4 in _UIApplicationHandleEvent ()
#7  0x35262c88 in PurpleEventCallback ()
#8  0x35e9a5ca in __CFRUNLOOP_IS_CALLING_OUT_TO_A_SOURCE1_PERFORM_FUNCTION__ ()
#9  0x35e9a588 in __CFRunLoopDoSource1 ()
#10 0x35e8c834 in __CFRunLoopRun ()
#11 0x35e8c50a in CFRunLoopRunSpecific ()
#12 0x35e8c418 in CFRunLoopRunInMode ()
#13 0x33865554 in -[UIApplication _run] ()
#14 0x33862558 in UIApplicationMain ()
#15 0x00002722 in main (argc=1, argv=0x2fdff790) at /Users/jim/Documents/GiftList/GiftList/main.m:16

Now the error is not exactly helpful and does not even appear to be in my code but it was.

The error was an autorelease that caused an object to not be there the next time I tried to access it.

The autorelease was of an object that had been created as the result of a fetch of Core Data information.

I found it by running the code using the Zombies profiling tool. 

You access this in XCode from the Product Menu, select Profile and when the dialog comes up select Zombies.
The App then runs and you get this sort of screen appearing when the EXC_BAD_ACCESS occurs.

You press the little arrow next to the address and this History of what happened is shown.

I've highlighted the line that tells me where the error is.  I looked in that method and found a line that autoreleased something I wanted.  So I removed autorelease and all now works.

I can't explain why it worked on iOS5 and not 4

http://www.essence-computing.co.uk
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/artist/essence-computing/id333177404
http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/essence-computing/id333177404?mt=12

Can't install an App on an older iPhone (3G) or even older iPod Touch (2nd gen)?

Yes, so have I. 

Check to make sure you info.plist does not have the following set.

Required device capabilities

See item 0 it says you need armv7 doesn't it.  That means it will not run on an armv6 machine.  Remove the line and suddenly all is OK.

http://www.essence-computing.co.uk
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/artist/essence-computing/id333177404
http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/essence-computing/id333177404?mt=12

Log in to iTunes Connect.

Go to Contact Us

Select 'App Store Questions' for 1)

Select 'Customer Reviews' for 2)

Select 'Specific Removal Request' for 3)

The select the blue 'contact us' at the end of the information shown.

Then fill in the fields as required.

The URL can be either from iTunes or the App Store.  The text implied iTunes only but it works for the Mac App Store.

I doubt Apple will remove a review just because you don't like it.

I think they removed mine because:

1) It had a thinly disguised swear word in the title.
2) It was talking rubbish - the App does work and Apple knows this.

I doubt it was anything to do with defaming me.  Maybe it was, maybe not.  I used the word 'defame' when I wrote to Apple because this has a legal definition which boils down to 'to attack the good name or reputation of'.  I do have a good name and a reputation that can be ruined.   Maybe I was being over the top but it can get very annoying when rubbish reviews get posted where I could have sorted the problem if they had just contacted me first.

Since Apple are the publisher of the review comments, and I can see no obvious disclaimer about Apple not being responsible for reviewer comments, I wonder if Apple did remove it because I could have sued.  I wasn't going to but I could have.

I also wonder if Apple found out that the reviewer was somehow connected with one of my competitors.

http://www.essence-computing.co.uk
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/artist/essence-computing/id333177404
http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/essence-computing/id333177404?mt=12