Nicholas Pike

First, a little bit of an Android Developer PSA: Do not lose the private key used to sign your app during your first publication! This key is needed to continuously sign your application before uploading to Google. Keep it backed up..

I am rather embarrassed that I did indeed lose my private key, and there is no way to recover from this.  You have to rename your application, resign with a new key, and reupload to google =(

Changelog:

• New slightlier less ugly widget design
• Code improvements necessary to introduce stats in the next update.
• Achievement messages! Will show a toaster dialog when you bet your average and best times.

Yesterday I received two more emails from Connor that I feel the need to share with everyone (pretty funny):

So perhaps a more accurate title for this post is:  Connor Fail – but thanks for the amusement.

I really enjoy getting emails like the following, from users who don’t understand all the work it takes to give them something free to bash.

Well Connor.  Its people like you, that explains why I don’t bother wasting my time fixing bugs anymore.  Ungrateful and non-constructive emails like this ruin it for everyone else.

For those curious, my response to him was:

Hey Connor, just to let you know; constructive feedback helps me fix its problems.  Your email wasn’t very useful. Thanks

Due to a request by Microsoft LIVE Legal Services, iXboxLive has been renamed to “Xbox LIVE Friends”, and even better news: is now completely free!

iXboxLive 1.1 has been submitted to Apple for review!  Many under-the-hood changes, and a ton of visual changes:

• Many crash bug fixes
  • Won’t immediately crash to the springboard if you have no active internet connection (iPod Touch users). This often resulted in your buddy list being wiped. This has been fixed.
  • Occasionally downloading avatar images from Microsoft would result in a crash. This should be fixed.
• Redesigned Buddy List and Details View
  • The Buddy list now resembles the style of displaying friends that Xbox.com uses! (Thanks Mike Jefferson and Erik Bye for your help here..)
  • The gamer details view has been redesigned by TOTUSHI. You can find him online here: http://www.totushi.com/. He is a visual artist that does excellent freelance work.
• Message Xbox buddy’s with www.xbox.com
• Online buddies are automatically moved to the top of your buddy list
• The application now does some under-the-hood caching of gamer tag avatars, which should result in better loading performance.

iXboxLive is also sporting a new Springboard Icon, designed by Erik Bye:

Time for some screenshots!

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.

Finally was able to deploy iXboxLive to my iPhone for testing on an actual device, way too many steps Apple.  There HAS to be a way to make this easier.

It feels really nice to see my hard work in a tangible form, as opposed to being on the simulator on my desktop, but it really shows some areas where I need to improve some items:

• Color profile on my monitor is apparently quite different from the iPhone, so the colors look different when deployed to the device.
• Asynchronous image downloading from the internet is an absolute requirement (implemented already), BUT you also should cache those images.  Multiple simultaneous downloads over 3G seem to be painful for the iPhone.

Generally though, the application performs well on the hardware.  Not surprisingly, since I wrote the original version straight on the iPod Touch (no simulator was available for the iPhone toolchain “back-in-the-day”).

I’ll do some more testing and optimizing for connections over 3G and Edge, and then start the deploy-to-AppStore process, which is any ones guess how long it will take.

Hopefully my first *legit* iPhone app will be in the AppStore soon.