Jay Versluis

On Tuesday, my “Dancing Alien” App has been rejected by Apple on the grounds that “it wasn’t very useful”. They pointed me to Section 2.12 of their submission guidelines which explains this.

Today, only a couple of days later, my good mate Steve Jobs resigns from Apple, probably as a direct response to this appalling decision. This is the second time in his career that he had a falling out with management over decisions he’s just not 100% behind.

I’d like to say from the bottom of my heart: thank you so much for your support, Steve – but this wasn’t necessary. I appreciate the gesture though, and I’ll put you on my list of Beta Testers so you can run t he app anyway.

I’m already planning my next app which will include the alien, so I’ll let you know how that’s going. So please, nobody else needs to quite their job over this!

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It’s been an exciting day here at The Render Farm: we’ve decided we wanted to release our first app by tomorrow evening, and the next thing we knew was that Julia’s soundtrack was ready for it. Not even half an hour later we previewed stunning animations with several characters… we couldn’t believe it ourselves – since we’re neither musicians, animators or coders!

I had conducted several tests based on the ImageHop exercise from SAMS Teach Yourself iPad Apps by John Ray, all OK but implementing several views really was hard. I’ve decided instead to keep it ultra simple and literally only have one view for Dancing Alien and one lone “i” button at the bottom right as an About / Credit page with link to our website. Works much better, is much simpler – and more to the point it’s possible to implement by tomorrow evening.

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It’s been a tough couple of days with my head spinning and – as my wife says – me being not very happy. This is because every book i read about iOS developing appears to be hopelessly out of date. My fault for wanting to get my hands dirty with bleeding edge shenanigans.

Book No. 1 “iPhone Apps for Absolute Beginners” is written really well, however 9 out of 10 examples don’t work. Outdated code, code not reprinted properly, instructions are for Xcode 3, you name it. There’s only so much frustration you can take until you put this to one side and look elsewhere.

Book No. 2 “Teach Yourself iPad Apps” started out a bit tough, but now that I’ve got my head buried deep in this matter sounds more promising by the minute. At least: the examples work, even if they’re based on Xcode 3 too. The author was nice enough to include an updated Xcode 4 chapter on his homepage.

Frustration and agony to one side, let me share with you the exciting things I have managed to build these past few days.

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It’s exciting times here at the hacking front: I’ve deployed several test apps today and had a closer look at Xcode 4.1 – the latest coding environment for iOS and Mac.

After having spent most of the day downloading and installing Mac OS X “Lion” I found out the hard way that Xcode 4.02 was no longer working… so I had to download that as well. Once it was all working I found no major changes had been made in the software other than a spurious error message because I didn’t sign up for the Mac Developer programme and some library couldn’t be downloaded. Let’s ignore this message, shall we?

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It’s only been 4 weeks since I’ve bought my first ever Apple product. We now have SIX in our household and my ISP has just informed me that I’m now downloading over 40GB per month (and should really pay more). I have to admit: iPad, iPod Touch and Apple TV have forever changed our lives for the better.

So much so that last week I went out and bought myself a Mac Book Pro for one simple reason: I want to write iOS Apps. For those of you who don’t know it’s the stuff you can download and run on your iPhone and iPads. Should have jumped on this project a year ago when I had a hunch that this could potentially be super cool.

Getting my teeth into this will be a challenge beyond belief, and I thought it would be a nice idea to jot down my progress here. I’ve done this with the WP Guru site where I write down notes so I can remember a few weeks later (I have a short attention span you know…). I shall call this category iOS Dev Diary.

Let me start by telling you all about what I want to do and why I’m doing it.

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