If you’re like me and you rely on your iOS iApp revenue to pay the bills, it’s helpful to have an idea of how well you’re doing, how much revenue is coming in, and be able to calculate it before Apple releases the actual reports.

For the longest time I would sort of guess what my revenue would be each month.  I’d look at sales reports, guess a date range and hope that it was close. Somewhere in the middle of the month I’d start getting emails stating that financial reports are available per region.  Eventually all regions would be in and I’d finally have a good idea of what my next check would be.

But this month Apple is just now starting to release revenue reports for February, and I had a good idea of what my next check would be about a month ago.  Of course it’s not that complicated and I just needed to open my eyes and look for the answer. Continue reading →

One of my facebook friends posted this on my wall:

4S, that’s it? So, when can we expect iOS5 for iPad?

I responded on facebook and decided to also post a response here… Continue reading →

Back in the days of coding Atari ST I was fairly familiar with what was really going on in the processor after I compiled and ran my code.  I knew that it was running sequentially. And if I jumped or branched off to a subroutine, I knew that it was run that and then return.  It was an event based system with a menu bar… one of the first.. but still it was a main program loop that waited for events and then acted on them, running the code to act on them, and then return to the main loop and wait for the next event.

But today with multi-code processors and multi-threaded code, I have to admit that half the time I don’t really know much about what’s really happening in the compiled code from a program flow standpoint.  Does it sometimes run down two threads of code at the same time?  I sort of assume that it does at times.  But I don’t really know. Continue reading →

When I started this blog I never though I’d post more than every now and then.  But here I posted two days ago and today I’m posting two things.  Whatever!

So this one is easy to find on Stack Overflow but I’m posting it anyway cause it bothered me for a while before I sought it out.  Here’s the stack overflow link. Continue reading →

TableViews in iOS is like coding 101 – it should be one of the first things that you learn. Lots of apps use table views, including many of the built in apps in the iPhone. Nonetheless I’ve been struggling with them for a week and spent a good few weeks before that avoiding this task all together.  And in my debugging and trying to figure out how to do the exact thing I want to do with a table view, I’ve found that the necessary information is spread out all over the docs and some of it is just not there.

I think one reason for the lack of detailed documentation is that tableviews are one of the basic views of iOS and as such there’s almost an endless list of things that can be done with them.  But I don’t want to do any of those things.  I want to make a basic table that pops up in my app as an options or settings view.  It needs to have a DONE button and it needs to drill down to allow option selection in the same way that the Settings app does in the iPhone.

So I might as well provide some of the answers here, if for no other reason, so I can reference back to it later the next time I want to do this.  This is another long post so buckle up… Continue reading →

The time has come to upgrade to iOS 4.3 and Xcode 4.  Grrr.  The main problem I was having I could not find anywhere on google or in the dev forums, so I thought I should post my problem and fix here (after the jump) to hopefully help the next guy.

In general I suppose I resist change.  But for iOS app development I also sortof fear change because it means having to learn something new, and historically this is a time-suck of anywhere from a few nights to a week or so.  Of course Apple has to keep releasing new features, improving old features, adding capabilities, etc.  This is required to maintain their number one spot in the marketplace.  So, I get why it has to happen. But being a one man development shop, any time some new os is released it means I’m the only one to update everything to support the latest software.  What I fear the most is any new product release from apple.  Well, actually I’m torn on this because as an apple consumer /slash/ fanboy, I want new stuff.  But as a developer who has to support the new stuff, I fear it.  For example, if Apple were to add a retina display to the iPad and double the pixel resolution… it would throw me into a tailspin.  Supporting such a high resolution iPad would mean redoing a lot of my graphics.  I could skip it, but the key to success in the app store is being among the first to support the new features that Apple is pushing. So I’d have no choice but to dig in and do it as fast as possible.

Anyway, here I am a couple of days into trying to use Xcode 4 and iOS 4.3.  I’m not sure which of those two updates is causing the problems, but I’ve been battling it…

Continue reading →

My first post here and the title is really long.  Whatever!

I needed to create some smooth mostly preset animation paths for an iPhone game.  I didn’t want them to be completely random, I wanted to control the general feel of the motion.  But I also wanted it to have a random feel and not be exactly the same each time you see it.  So here’s how I did it, using After Effects and Microsoft Excel.

Continue reading →