build an iPhone app

It took a bit over 2 weeks from submission to the iTunes Store before it actually showed up. But it’s there now!

Here’s a direct link to its page in the iTunes Store, in case you have an iPhone and want to try it out.

After polishing up the icon and a few of the default screens, I’ve decided to go ahead and submit the app as it is to the iTunes store.

It’s a fun process: creating screenshots, writing descriptions, choosing a pricing tier, and uploading the final version of the app. It sort of feels like publishing a book, except a lot faster, and more futuristic somehow.

I put together the icon and default screen from some images I found on iStockPhoto.com, which is also pretty fun to browse around. I’ve never used them before.

Of course, right as I submitted my app, I thought of a new feature. Right now, it’s a bit awkward to include yourself in the games since most of us don’t keep our own information in our Address Book. There should be an easy to add “Me” option when selecting players. Well, now I’ll have something to add as an update later.

It sounds like it takes up to 4 days for apps to show up once they’re submitted.

I’m at a point where I think I could submit my app to the App Store, if only it would build. Learned this morning that the database I’m using, EntropyDB doesn’t actually work on the iPhone yet, but that they might post a working version of it tomorrow. We’ll see.

I finished the part where you can easily add people to games that have played before, and also a way to see which places a particular person has lost, and how much they lost.

I could work a bit on creating prettier Table View Cells for the scoreboard and the player’s games view, but it’s a highly functional app even in its current state and I’m anxious to just get it working on my phone for a while so I can use it in real life.

Meanwhile, I have a couple more ideas in the batter’s box waiting to be explored a bit further. One’s a version of Morale-O-Meter, and then I have ideas for 43 Things and 43 Places apps that could be pretty interesting.

I found a cool easy way to incorporate a database with EntropyDB. It’s an easy way to store and retrieve models directly, without having to write SQL.

It seems to work well, but already I can see that the lack of other kinds of queries is going to be a pain in the future, especially if I want to display stats or store games by lat/long and find nearby places. Things like that.

I’ve spent some time trying to figure out how to deploy my app onto my phone, but so far no luck. Part of it probably has to do with how Apple thinks my name is “Erik McLeod” because they updated my last name but not my first name. Secondly, I think I revoked a certificate when I tried to start over and now don’t know how to add a new one.

Other than that, I’ve now got the app saving Player and Game information, including place name, price of the bill, etc. It then calculates whether a player is “ahead” or “behind” in their playing… if they’re making more money by playing or losing money, and how much. Sorta cool.

Next steps:

• Figure out how to run it on my actual phone instead of just the iPhone Simulator on my computer.
• Option to let people easily select players who’ve played before rather than always have to select from the Address Book.
• Figure out if I want to display a list of games, or stats on games. Not much point in keeping track of location names unless they’re re-displayed somehow.

I spent another full day (well, closer to 4 hours) in New York working on My First App, and then didn’t think about it much at all while in Delaware.

Back at the Co-op today, I spent a good part of the day making some serious progress on my app. Finally, things like outlets and delegates and the navigation controller are starting to make sense and also become part of my instinct and second nature. There’s still a lot of referencing code samples, but it’s not with the same all-encompassing cloud of confusion that followed me around the first week.

In fact, I got my Credit Card Roulette app to be actually functional. It doesn’t save games or anything, but it definitely lets you play the game, responds to motion, and even vibrates when the game reveals the “winner”.

I found two potential bugs in the iPhone Simulator, which is otherwise pretty amazing:

1. It seems to sometimes not register a turn of the iPhone with the right direction.
2. There doesn’t seem to be a way to simulate Face Down behavior (so I’m just pretending that turning to the right is Face Down for now).

What I need to do next:

• Figure out how I want to save games. Should people be tied to their address book identity, or merely to a string of their name? Advantages for both.
• Figure out if I want to store information in a database or some other way.
• Think up ways to display stats on players.
• Figure out how to sync this with the Internet. Eric Hodel just gave me his creditcardroulette.com domain to use if I can figure this out. Awesome, right?

I have to say, this whole process has been a huge enjoyment for me. If you couldn’t tell.

I can’t really show much for my work yesterday. I found a great blog that has tutorials and good explanations for building simple apps. I followed:

• Build your first iPhone application: walks you through some very basic (but difficult to understand at first) principles of iPhone app development.
• Tab Bar Controller: A quick tutorial on building a tabbed-bar application (which is what I was originally looking for when I found the blog).
• Drill Down App: a good walk-thru of hooking up a table to information and navigation.

I’ll go through the other two that get into how to hook up a sqlite database to your app when I get to the point of needing to know how to do that. For now, I’m gonna start over from scratch again and make sure I know every little detail of what I need to do to do this right.

I’ve also been asking Buzz a lot of questions and he’s been super helpful with answering my clearing confusing questions via Twitter (questions and answers limited to 140 characters seems like a good constraint in this situation).

The cafe was way too crowded today, so I’m working from Rick Webb’s bedroom. I’ve got my own air conditioner, air purifier, ice coffee, and tuna sandwich. Totally ready.

Here’s where I ended after another 8 hours of frustration and excitement and confusion and basically mashing my brain in ways that don’t come naturally.

Last night I decided to draw out a screen flow diagram for my eventual Credit Card Roulette app. I then proceeded to have dreams about it last night… dreams that for once helped me figure out a way to make it really easy to play a game fast.

Basically, you select the number of players playing, and start a game. This will take you to a screen that gives you a field for each person in the game, so you can enter their name.

Then, the game starts, and you flip the phone over so it’s upside down, and turn it over to reveal the first person who doesn’t have to pay. Turn it upside down and back for each person to be revealed.

The winner is eventually announced, and you have an option to save the game. If you save it, you enter the location name, and the bill’s amount. Each player has a record in the database that keeps track of how many times they’ve lost and won. And how much money they’ve paid and not paid.

11am

I spent the rest of my morning starting the project, and trashing it, about 30 times. Seriously. I am still wrapping my head around how to connect views to controllers, and where it makes the most sense to store instance variables.

4pm

Finally, I decided to take it really slow and work on just trying to get a slot machine wheel to hook up to its data source. Not an easy task! My brain hurt by the time I figured out delegate methods.

Then, I spent a good couple hours trying to figure out how to make a line of text update with the slot machine wheel’s selection. The build kept failing due to a string that I was prematurely “releasing”. The debugger is really difficult for me to read when it doesn’t have obvious errors or warnings.

6pm

I finally got it to all work together. The button even calls a method. Since I’m meeting Kellianne at 8 to go on some city adventures, I’m gonna stop here before trying to figure out how to get the app to go to the next screen. You’d think it would be easy, but this isn’t as simple as a link I’m finding out. I think I need to create a view somewhere, and push it onto the window stack. This will be tomorrow’s big task.

I actually made my own useful app mostly from scratch. It’s really simple. It uses the Address Book to allow you to email a phone number, email address, or other piece of contact information to someone.

1. Click a button, and up pops your address book. Drill down to the email address or phone number that you’d like to send, click on it and the menu takes you back to the front page.
2. Click the “Email to whoever you like” button, which opens Mail with “Contact info for So-and-so” and whatever you selected in the body. You have to fill in the To: line manually.

Super simple, but it’s something that I wish the iPhone could do. I’m not going to submit it or anything, since I’m positive that someone else will do it a thousand times better than I have, but it was a very rewarding exercise.

I have one technical question about this. I made the button in Interface Builder, but would like to enable and disable the email button unless after you’ve selected a contact. I couldn’t figure out how to get the button’s reference when it was created in Interface Builder. Anyone know how? Or should I delete it and make the button manually in Xcode?

Yesterday, I followed the tutorial on the iPhone developer website and was able to get my first working app. Of course, I had to pretty much copy verbatim the entire thing, and made a few typos that sent me on a wild goose chase, but it’s a start.

And last night, I had a cyclic dream where I kept trying to do the same thing over and over for a particular app. My brain is officially latched on.

Also, every 3.8 seconds, I get a new idea for an app:

• A way to send a phone number from your address book to another person’s (I’m upset that this isn’t default functionality yet, and surprised nobody else has done it).
• Friend flip book. Use the iTunes cover flow to flip through your contacts who have pictures associated with them. Use the back of the card to show more detail.
• Coin flipper. Advice slot machine.

To name a few.

Today I’m looking into how to work with the Address Book Framework, starting with the Address Book Programming Guide for iPhone.

Since it took me a while to figure out how to learn about this stuff, I figured other people might be in the same boat.

Here’s how I got started learning about iPhone app development as a complete beginner.

1. I sent out a Twitter asking if anyone was on the same path as me. Turns out buzz was, and his suggestion was that I buy Cocoa Programming and also take a look at the code samples from the iPhone developers site.
2. I bought the book and started reading. Unfortunately, it assumes I know C, and that I’m using an older version of Xcode. Reading it anyway, as I think there will still be tons of information in there that’s relevant.
3. Watched all the videos on the iPhone developers site. The last video is especially helpful, even though it’s about desktop apps rather than iPhone apps.
4. Tried out one of the challenges in the Cocoa Programming book. The fact that my version of Xcode is newer is throwing me completely off… can’t figure out how to implement new classes.
5. Beginning to read through the Getting Started docs on the developer site. I’m gonna read them all, which seems time consuming, but is part of my total-immersion learning strategy. If I read it all, even the repetitive parts, it’ll all start to get set in my brain.
6. Downloading all the documentation through Xcode’s Developer Documentation application. It’s cool that you can subscribe to documentation and new docs will automatically get updated.
7. Downloading all of the code samples and am going to start loading them into Xcode and seeing if I can figure them out.

That’s the plan for now. I’m learning it all with an app in mind that’s simple and should focus all of the learning in a particular direction.

I’m really excited about this, if you can’t tell.