Scratch Pad

I don’t know what has been going on (actually, I do), but we have been seeing a statistically significant increase in the sales of iHappyBirthday. It wasn’t too long ago that we noticed that our application would not appear in the search results if the search terms were “happy birthday”, though it was still search-able with the term “birthday”. It was odd because it has always been search-able by “happy birthday.”

We emailed Apple about it, and the response we got back was pure hilarity.

Search results are working as expected at this time. App Store search results are based on several factors determined by Apple-confidential algorithms.

I’m not sure what this super secret “Apple-confidential algorithms” were that made it unsearchable by “happy birthday”, but it at least it did make us laugh. It was most likely a canned response because search was actually broken.

Anyways, we didn’t realize how important it was for our application to be search-able by “happy birthday”, because as soon as search was fixed, our sales have doubled (albeit from a small number, but welcome none the less!).

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News and Updates, Opinion Apple Confidential Algorithm, iPhone

It’s been very quiet here. Life has once again conspired to get in the way of our goals and dreams. My full time job has been keeping me busy at 70 hours a week. As much as I wanted to work on my iPhone project, I do enjoy what I do for a living, and one of my long term goals in life is to foster my career. Actually, allow me to impart some wisdom in light of the current economic crisis. I actually believe that investing in your career and education is the best investment that you can make (and not in retirement accounts, though it’s a good idea). I recently had my midterm as well, so that also kept me away from working on our second application.

The schedule is starting to regain some semblance of sanity, so I will be able to devote more time to the iPhone project once again. The lack of time is only part of the reason for the delay, however. We decided to totally abandon the current design and go for something more innovative and creative. I’m not actually sure how well it will be received, but we noticed that there are too many of the same old and tired interface designs on thousands of applications. Though our application might be interesting, we felt that the interface design may hold us back. So a paradigm shift in our thinking and a total overhaul of the interface was required in order to stand out from the crowd.

Wish us luck!

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News and Updates iPhone, SaS

We’ve received a couple of negative reviews due to the application crashing (which I explained in my previous post). I guess you can’t help that. But the good news is that we haven’t really heard of any more reports of it crashing after version 1.1.1 was published.

A couple of days ago, the Lite version of iHappyBirthday was released to the App store. Imagine my surprise when I checked the sales figure this morning and saw that it was downloaded close to 600 times. Only if the same were true of the paid version! I think we need to observe it a bit more to see what kind of effect the Lite version will have, but as of yet, it has had no effect. Hey, at least it didn’t have a negative effect!

We’re trying to implement one, last key feature to SaS before we release it to the general public. But it’s turning out to be a bit of a technical challenge. Hopefully it won’t hold us up for too long!

Edit: Oops. I miscalculated. It was downloaded close to 1000 times.

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News and Updates, Opinion Bad Driver, Blind Spot, Car Accident, Free Model, iHappyBirthday Lite, Lite, Rant

Fix and a Solution

Thank you to everyone who has purchased iHappyBirthday. Reaction to iHappyBirthday has been quite positive. However, we’ve been receiving reports of random crashes. We actually know why this happens. In a previous, unreleased version of iHappyBirthday, we displayed an alert message to the user telling him or her that the system is running low on memory; and that continuing without freeing up memory may crash the application.

But we removed this message because according to our tests, the phone did not reach such a low level of memory that it would cause it to crash. However, iHappyBirthday 1.1 uses a little bit more memory than 1.0, and that seems to have pushed it over some threshold which is making it more prone to crashing. We are happy to say that we have solved this problem by drastically reducing the memory usage. We have submitted version 1.1.1 and it should be available soon for download. But in the mean time, please follow the workaround from our support page.

Technical Mumbo Jumbo: iPhone Memory Management System

I’m writing this for the benefit of other developers who may be facing similar memory problems. Or if you are not a developer and just happen to be a glutton for pain, then please read on. Our application was not using that much memory, but when other applications (like Safari) were taking up over 20 MB of RAM, it would cause our application to crash due to the phone running low on memory. The following were my observations while chasing down this problem.

When the iPhone runs low on memory, it will start freeing memory from background applications like Safari. But why then was our application still crashing? This was because the rate at which our application was using up the memory was greater than the rate at which the operating system was freeing up the memory. Ultimately, it comes down to this simple fact:

“Always minimize memory usage.”

It’s not very enlightening, but that’s the fact of the matter. Looking at the Activity Monitor in Instruments, I noticed that the memory used by Safari continued to decrease bit by bit over time as iHappyBirthday was running. And then eventually, Safari was entirely removed and all resources freed. However, if iHappyBirthday was too aggressive in its memory usage, even though the OS was freeing up memory, it could not outpace the rate at which iHappyBirthday was requesting memory. The result? Crash.

UIImage!

For version 1.1.1, the memory use was halved. It was achieved by not using the UIImage’s imageNamed message and by intelligently loading resources. It turns out that if you use imageNamed, the resources are cached into the memory and the iPhone does not do a very good job of releasing the cached memory. For version 1.1.1, imageWithContentsOfFile was used in conjunction with imageNamed. And for the most part, the caching was handled by the application rather than the iPhone SDK.

It was interesting to see how the memory management system behaves on the iPhone. And even more enlightening to learn about the pitfalls of using UIImage’s imageNamed routine. In fact, the documentation for this routine states,

“This method looks in the system caches for an image object with the specified name and returns that object if it exists. If a matching image object is not already in the cache, this method loads the image data from the specified file, caches it, and then returns the resulting object.”

But of course, I never looked at the documentation before using this. Had I looked at it, I could probably have avoided all this mess.

So always remember to RTFM!

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Development, News and Updates, iPhone Development background process, Fix Crash, iHappyBirthday Crash, imageNamed, imageWithConentsOfFile, memory management, safari, UIImage

We just go approved for the iHappyBirthday update.  A small drama right before the release, but nothing we couldn’t laugh off.

I just want to let people know that the 24:2 blog post ratio that Min has over me is due to the fact that we’re hard at work with our next upcoming App: codename SaS.  Stay tuned.

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The update to version 1.1 of iHappyBirthday was rejected by Apple because the application did not meet the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines. The detailed reason for the rejection is because we do not display a checkmark next to a selection in our choose cake screen. Apple says that you must provide feedback to the user so that the user knows something is selected.

It’s kind of funny, because it’s obvious what the user has selected because the item that the user has selected is highlighted. It’s also funny because our version 1.0 behaves exactly the same way and it was approved. This just seems to be a case of having gotten a reviewer who is a bit more thorough (or anal — take your pick). In any case, we resubmitted the application immediately after fixing the issue. But that does delay the release by another week or so because now it’s pushed to the back of the review queue. Boo.

And a final word of warning to anyone releasing an update. Do not set the release date to a date in the future, because that will also affect the release date of your original version. We set the release date of our update to a future date, and that also affected the release date of version 1.0. The net effect being that version 1.0 was taken off of the App store because the availability date was set to future date! We were really perplexed by this one. We thought Apple retroactively took applications off of the App store if the update to the original application is rejected. Who would have figured that the release date of the update was tied to the original version. Apple should really make this clear.

On a more personal note, I am strangely enjoying school. Is it because I’m getting older? My brain still seems to be fairly functional because I am able to soak up new information. Let’s hope this continues.

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Why is it that it always takes longer than what you expected? I stayed up way past my bed time last night trying to get iHappyBirthday 1.1 out the door.

We will also be doing a photoshoot of someone actually using the application as well as uploading a video to Youtube in the near future.

Version 1.1 delivers more features:

• More full cakes (chocolate and a vanilla cake).
• Randomized candle blow-outs.
• New finale animation. You can choose from different finale animations.
• Some bug fixes.

We’ll post a link to screen shots and the video once we have them.

For any users who experience random crashes with iHappyBirthday, please be rest assured that it is not a problem with the application. It is because the iPhone is running low on memory. For some reason, the iPhone does not seem to be too good at releasing memory when misbehaving applications are terminated. Also, you may have applications running in the background (mail, Safari, etc) that are taking up memory. We’ve added a warning message when the memory is running low so that you can take appropriate course of action. It usually suffices to turn the phone off and on to free up the memory. Or you can even download applications from the App store that will let you free memory as well.

Also, my partner will be posting our sales figure. We thought about keeping it private, but it is our belief that knowledge should be shared!

So keep your eyes peeled!

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News and Updates Happy Birthday, iHappyBirthday 1.1, Low Memory, Sales Figure, Update

Our first iPhone application iHappyBirthday has been in the App store for a week now. The following are a few of my thoughts regarding this entire experience.

On the day that our application appeared on the App store, we saw a competing product released on the exact same day! But we didn’t worry too much about it because our application looked better and more polished. But this just illustrates the importance of timing. If you have an idea, it’s almost a sure bet than someone else does too.

Being that this is a two man team, we are really struggling with resources. There are so many things we would have liked to do more with iHappyBirthday but couldn’t due to lack of time and resources. One thing that sorely needed more of our attention was marketing. We didn’t do enough advertising for our first application. Immediately after releasing it, we were hard at work developing our second application. But we’ve decided to spend a bit more time on iHappyBirthday and release an update (version 1.1) before this week is over. And this time, we’ll attempt to do some advertising through review sites and such.  And perhaps even think about releasing an ad supported, free or lite version.

The question that begs to be answered is, “Has iHappyBirthday been a success?”

We’re definitely not getting rich. I was hoping it would do better because it is a cute little application that appeals to a wide audience. But once again, perhaps it’s our lack of marketing experience holding us back. But we think that the application has been a wild, run-away success in terms of what we learned from the process. After accounting for all the expenses in creating the application, we’ve made a profit of about $20 (as of today).  So at least we didn’t lose money in the process. And hopefully, it will continue selling a steady number of units for the near foreseeable future.

The entire process has been a thrilling experience, but not an easy one. The number of times I refused to go out for a night out of drinking and partying because I had to be home working on this too numerous to count. I’ve neglected a lot of things, such as my sexy figure. I think I’ve put on a few pounds since I started this journey. And with a full time job and graduate school, it’s proven to be quite a challenge. But I sure do feel more productive than dousing my liver in poison. Though I must admit, I did really enjoy the wine I had last night while doing absolutely no work. But I think it’s important to realize that you do need to cool down and take some time off to recharge every now and then.

Our second application is around 70% complete. We’ll be constantly working on new applications, so please check back frequently to see updates.

And also, feedback is always welcome!

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Our first iPhone application has been approved! Please check it out in the App store!

When we started, we had never owned a Mac. We had never used Objective-C. We had never programmed for the Mac, and the term Cocoa was only familiar to us as a beverage to be had on a cold winter day. But I think we did a bang-up job learning the platform we had never seen before and simultaneously developing a polished application all in just a month. I plan on writing a “lessons learned” article in the near future, but today, I’d like to introduce our first iPhone application to the world.

Introducing iHappy Birthday! Yes, I know. We really tried to stay away from having the ‘i’ in the front of the application title, but all the other names that we wanted to use were already taken. But it has a catchy ring to it the more and more you hear it. Don’t you agree? So you may be wondering just what in the world this application is all about. And no, it’s not another one of the myriad of birthday reminder applications in the App store. iHappy Birthday is different, and after extensively testing it out on our friends and family, we think you’ll definitely use it and like it.

Imagine that it’s your friend’s birthday, but no one has remembered to bring a cake. But do not fear! Fortunately for you, you are a proud owner of an iPhone with the world’s first digital birthday cake. And it’s it’s not just a still image of a birthday cake on the screen. You can light the candles just as you would on a real birthday cake. Blow on the cake to blow out the candles! With iHappy Birthday, you will never have to waste money on a real birthday cake. With iHappy Birthday, you will never arrive at a birthday party empty handed.

iHappy Birthday is high configurable.

Features include:

Light the candles with the touch of your finger tips.
Choose among many delicious cakes.
Set how hard or easy it is to blow out the candles.
Set the number of candles blown out per each blow.
Music playback during birthday celebration.
Configurable finale animation when candles are blown out.
iPod Touch compatibility mode.
… and more!

Celebrate birthdays with iHappy Birthday and see your friends and family amazed and laugh in joy at your thoughtfulness. Never be without a cake at a birthday again! The cakes are so delicious, it’ll be a shame that you can’t eat them. And at the end of the celebration, you’ll be greeted with a finale animation to dazzle your friends!

Available NOW in the App store! Click the iTunes link to go directly to the App store.

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