It took its time, but Film Quiz Version 2.0 is now available on the App Store. Previous versions of the App took only about five days to get looked at and then an hour to be actually reviewed. Version 2.0 took about 7 days and then 6 hours to be reviewed.
New features include:
Have fun!
I had originally intended to submit version 2.0 last week. But having been really busy I didn’t find any time to create a load more questions. I had also decided to have two versions of my App. A free one with adverts and a paid for one without adverts.
So on Monday and Tuesday night I decided to crack on and make the final push to get it to the Apple App Store. I forgot how time consuming creating new questions and coming up with alternative answers can be! After a lot of brain work I managed to create a load more.
I then had a thought about the Free vs. Paid for App idea. Every few days I check how many times my App has been downloaded and how much revenue iAds has produced for me. In the last few weeks iAds has generated quite a bit. So, it’s a trade off. Can a free App with iAds generate more money than a paid for App? I think in my case I’m going to stick with iAds and the free version, even though I had made the effort to add code to my Film Quiz Project to generate the two versions.
The two previous releases have taken about 5 days to get approved. Hopefully Version 2.0 will be just as quick.
After my mate Steve saw the success of my Film Quiz App he got his thinking cap on and came up with an idea for a new App. We can a quick chat about it yesterday and it looks promising. It would probably fall under the category of a ‘Life Style’ App. It’s going to take a few months to get something together. I’ll be doing the coding, Steve will be doing the ‘other’ side of it.
Until then it’s all hush hush.
Watch this space…
The last few days I’ve been working on Version 2.0 of my Film Quiz App. The main features being Game Center integration, an iPad version and of course, more Questions.
I started first with Game Center which I thought was going to be the hardest to do. Liking a challenge I first found Apple’s documentation for a good read. I was shocked at how simple it was. It true Apple style they’ve really thought about it and created an easy to use API. Firstly you need to set up you Leaderboards/Achievements on the iTunesConnect web site. Each leader board has an ID associated with it. Using this ID you add a few lines of code to your project calling the leader board methods with the leader board ID and the score. That’s it. There’s also the bit of code to sign the user in too. Again, very simple.
I was confident making the App ‘universal’ to run on the iPad too. Using the MVC model, all I needed to do was create the new iPad views, and connecting each of the view elements to the outlets/actions in the controller.
It also occurred to me to check for memory leaks using the ‘Instruments’ app. After running a few tests I could see there were quite a few objects I had allocated but not deallocated and as a result memory was being leaked. With a few code changes I managed to tidy up my code.
All I have left to do is creating a load more questions. It’s funny because when I tell people I have an App on the App Store they ask was it hard to create and write all the code. My answer is always – it’s harder to come up with the questions and think of alternative answers. That’s what takes the most time.
With over 2000 downloads in a week, and iAds generating a bit of money for me I’ve decided to change the way the App pays for itself. I’m therefore going to create a full version with all the current features and the ones I’ve described above along with all the questions I’ve created. I’m also going to create a ‘Lite’ or free version, keep the iAds but only provide a limited number of questions. I’ve read how to create a full and lite version of your App in the same Project but have yet to try it out yet.
Meanwhile, if you have any suggestions for questions please let me know. Thank you to my brother Jonny for provide a few earlier today.
At work today I got several people to download my new Film Quiz app. While it worked for some, it didn’t work for others. I was a little confused by this. The only thing I could work out was that if the iOS version was below 4.2 it crashed when you pressed the start quiz button.
After I got home I decided to look into this problem in XCode. I compiled and ran for iOS 4.0 and ran into the error.
What I found was that the iAd banner had changed slightly in iOS 4.2. Version 1.0 of Film Quiz was only tested on iOS 4.3. So there we have it. After a quick Google I found the solution.
Version 1.1 has now been uploaded to Apple for approval and will shortly be available for download.
I was greeted this morning with an e-mail from those guys at Apple telling me that my App’s status has changed to ‘Ready for Sale‘. So I immediately went on the App Store and did a search for ‘film quiz’ – and there it was, top of the list.
Total time from submitting the App to it being approved: 4.5 days.
So after a busy night coming up with lots and lots of questions, I finally managed to get over 100. After 30 minutes of testing on all my devices it was time to upload to the App Store. I’d already set up everything for upload on the iTunes Connect web site including my App description, artwork etc. What I couldn’t find though was some instructions of the actual process to upload my App.
I Googled around but most of what I found was for XCode 3.x. Eventually I found a link to a site telling what to do for XCode 4.0. I was surprised how easy it was actually. XCode 4 seems have now have it all integrated without the need to launch any other applications. Once I generated my Distribution Provisioning Profile for my App, loaded it into XCode all I had to do was Archive my App and submit to the App Store. Easy!
As you can see from my previous post I ran into an error when submitting to the App Store. I got some Java exception. Thought it was strange Apple of using Java for XCode to upload to the App Store. Disappointed about this I tried again. No luck. Tried on my other Mac… No luck. So I Googled the error and found it to be a common problem. The advice that kept coming up was to do a full uninstall of the XCode Developer tools, download the latest XCode, install and try again.
So after downloading the 4.6GB XCode installer over night, uninstalling, reinstalling and testing my App again, I tried to submit to the App Store again. Success! Woop woop!
Just have to wait for those guys at Apple to approve it now.
So spent all night working hard and finally the App is finished, questions done… Tried to submit to the App Store but getting:
com.apple.transporter.util.StreamUtil.readBytes(Ljava/io/InputStream;)[B
Grrr!! So annoyed. Just done a quick Google and it seems to be a popular problem. Will have to look into it tomorrow now.
