Nicholas Pike

So this week at work I am writing a Windows  (XP/Vista/2k) installer for one of our upcoming products… I was asked to evaulate the options currently on the market, mainly the free options.

I settled with the Nullsoft Scriptable Installer from the fine folks of Winamp.  There’s a lot of documentation, some handy tools, and even a neat Eclipse Plugin (eclipse-nsis).

So after a day of developing in the crazy NSIS scripting language I am ready to shoot myself.

Why?  Well here’s some example code and screenshot so that you can see the hell you have to live through to make something simple.

On the bright side: I am awesome, and the final result will be awesome as well.

Wow!  I’ve gotten a huge response from the Internet about iXboxLive 1.0.  Over all mostly positive, but there are some big issues that I need to fix for the first update.

• I’ve fixed the crash that occurs when theres no active internet connection, which often resulted in your iXboxLive buddy list to be whiped out.
• I’ve hopefully fixed the source of random startup crashes.
• I’ve increased loading performance significantly.  iXboxLive will load its main interface and add buddys to the buddy list as their information is retrieved.  (As opposed to what it does now, and waits for all the information retrieval to be finished before displaying the main interface)

More info to come.

Xbox Live is great – there’s no questioning that, but sometimes you just really want to check your Buddy List without having to turn on the Xbox, or fire up Xbox.com in a browser.

iXboxLive is your Xbox Buddy List(*) on your iPhone or iPod Touch!

• See your select buddy list
• See what they are currently playing
• See their gamer pic
• See their gamer score, gamer reputation, and location
• See their list of recent games, including scores and last played dates
• More features to come!

* This application uses the Microsoft Xbox Community Developer SDK, which is private and only available to a limited number of developers.  Due to limitations of this SDK, you will have to specify which gamertags to view on your local buddy list, and you will not be able to use all of the features you would expect from Xbox.com (like messaging friends)
** It is highly discouraged to add more then a dozen or so gamertags to your local buddy list.  The initial loading time of the application will increase significantly for each gamertag you add – so be cautious!

Received an automated email from Apple yesterday evening informing me that iXboxLive has moved from a status of “In Review” to “Approved for Sale“.

Approved for Sale?  It’s a free application.

Regardless, I was excited that my Application should now be in the AppStore – only to find that its now stuck in yet another queue in the review process.

Prior to submitting an application to Apple, you have to complete a contract – disclosing the legal obligations and limitations of you providing your software to Apple for distribution on iTunes.  There are two types of contracts:

1. Free Applications – Developers are automatically entered into this contract, and requires no extra information from the developer to complete
2. Paid Applications – Developers are not automatically entered into this contract, as it requires banking and tax information.

iXboxLive is under the Free Applications contract – which for some reason is still Pending Completion by Apple. (It would seem that they have to hand approve all contracts, including the free contracts).

My contract information has been in their database for a week or two already – I just hope that it won’t take much longer for them to approve my contract so that my applications can be released into the wild.

Now that project #1 is out the door, and pending Apple review… it is time to start planning and working on the more important project:  Porting MobileTwitter to the AppStore.

Laid some foundation work this afternoon, will definitely need to revisit the icons used in MobileTwitter 1.5 (as they look like crap, and I need someone to make me new ones)

Changed around the Gamer Details screen a little bit again:

• Using the Xbox Orange
• Using the Gamer score icon where appropriate
• Bold header for Recent Games list