Christopher Allen's Ephemera Blog

Tweets for Today

• 18:40 Caught up on emails and rested most of the day. #

Tweets for Today

• 18:46 Back at SFO, heading home. #

Tweets for Today

• 09:52 At BOS Boston Logan Airport, headig to CVG Cincinnati Ohio. #
• 13:01 Arrived at CVG Cincinnati. OH near Cincinnati N KY International #

iPhone OS Unstable During Apps Installs, Requires Recovery

For the third time in 3 days, I've experienced my iPhone 3G locking up hard during or after syncing applications. The first time happened while I was syncing iPhone apps, the second time when downloading an new app while using the built in iTunes App Store on the phone, the third time while syncing an app that iTunes had downloaded an update for.

In each case,the iPhone reboots, and is locked up while displaying the while bootup Apple logo. This display will remain on until your battery runs out if you are not aware of it.

The only solution is force the iPhone into recovery mode and doing a factory reset using iTunes. You do this by plugging the iPhone into the USB port and launching iTunes, turning off the iPhone by holding both home and sleep/wake keys for 10+ seconds to turn off the phone, then let go of the sleep/wake key but continue holding down the home key until the recovery mode screen appears on the iPhone:

Then in iTunes you'll see the corresponding dialogue:

At this point if you continue the iPhone will be restored as if doing a factory reset, which can take 20+ minutes. Then iTunes will ask you if you wish to restore from a backup — unfortunately, almost every time I do this from a backup, iTunes will later report that the restore failed, so I'll have to start over with a factory reset and choose to start from scratch loose all my settings.

This is quite disturbing, and combined with syncing and backups taking so long when you have apps installed, means that I've decided to no longer loading apps on my iPhone 3G for a while, and instead using my old iPhone for playing with apps.

Hopefully Apple will have a 2.01 update with a fix for this soon.

Tweets for Today

• 13:45 Blogging "red:green Submitted to iTunes App Store" tinyurl.com/5oc8wy #
• 19:23 In San Anselmo for Movies in the Park, going to see "Surf's Up". Not as warm as I hoped, but nice. Also Picnic'ing. twitpic.com/4rfw #

red:green Submitted to iTunes App Store

So after quite a bit of work and going through all the property details of my project file, I found the error. As I was suspicious might to true, it was a property that was set by some colleagues at the last iPhone Developer Meeting last week to make the Debug profile work, but the technique broke the Distribution profile. If you have a similar problem, just triple check that all the code signing in your project properties are clear or default — your Distribution profile properties must be only set in the target.

So my simple red:green iPhone app has now been submitted to the iPhone store, and hopefully will be reviewed by Apple and released soon. I'll let you know when it is available!

The Nightmare that is iPhone Code Signing

I spent most of the day prepping for iPhoneDevCamp 2 and being able to offer the ability to distribute free open source apps to the iTunes store from people who don't wish to use their iPhone Developer account for experimental or free software. I'm also hoping to be able to set up ad-hoc distribution, so that apps for the Hackathon Contest can be shared during the conference.

I decided to offer as my first iPhone application a very simple app called red:green inspired from an idea by Jerry Michalski. It is basically a native version of the red:green web app that I helped some participants with at last year's iPhoneDevCamp.

The application is very simple, it just displays a green screen for approval, and a red screen for dismay. The programming for it probably took an hour or so, and doing some simple polish of the about box and some little things added maybe two.

However, dealing with the code signing issues so that I could test it on the iPhone rather then Simulator, and today to send it to the iTunes App Store have been a nightmare. First at WWDC when I got approved for the iPhone Developer Program, I probably spent 6+ hours just trying to get code signing working for the Debug profile so that Xcode can load applications on my iPhone for testing. A number of Apple employees tried to help, but were unable to get it to work. Finally, another iPhone developer on the show floor was able to help me get it running.

However, several times since then the code signing setup has mysteriously broken, and I've need to reboot my iPhone and my Mac, or even reset up Xcode.

Some of the problem is the arcane, confusing, and poor documentation on how to code sign iPhone apps using Xcode, but most of it is the clunky setup of various keys, certificates, provisioning profiles, build properties, etc. that is required to get things to work. Of course, it is difficult to get help online or from fellow developers because the iPhone SDK is still under NDA (another sore subject.)

Today, after getting everything working with the latest SDK, testing on the simulator and on both the iPhone and iPod Touch, I spent maybe 3-4 hours setting up the Application and Support web pages for the red:green app, as well as all the graphics, text, and icons required for the iTunes App Store.

Then I had to through the whole code signing process again to get the Distribution profile working for the App Store with a whole new set of certificates and provisioning profiles.

Everything was working, and Xcode was reporting that it signed my red:green app without an error. I uploaded all my text and graphics to iTunes. I thought I was home free. However, when I got to the very last step for submission and used the iTunes Application Uploader, it reports "Application red-green.app failed codesign verification". I have no idea what is wrong, as everything seems to be set up right.

I've gone through all the docs again to make sure I didn't miss any trivial thing, but nothing obvious so far. But so many things have been done to my project file to get signing to work, especially since it was originally iPhone SDK Beta 7 that I first got it working for my Debug profile. So tonight before I go to bed I'm going to re-download the final iPhone SDK, delete my old SDK and do a install fresh. Then in the morning I'm going to rebuild my application from scratch using the latest iPhone SDK template, and copy my code by hand over to the new project. Then hopefully the default project settings for a brand new project from the final SDK will all work correctly for me to be able to sign and submit the app to the App Store by the weekend.

If I can't get that to work, I'll have to resort to using one my my precious ADC Support Incidents, which I hate to use on something that should be trivial.

So far, 1 hour coding, 2 hours polish, 1 hour testing, 4 hours for required text graphics & websites — all relatively fun and interesting. Add to that maybe another 10 frustrating hours dealing with code signing which still does not work.

Wish me luck.

Tweets for Today

• 09:24 Another foggy and dreary morning in the land of Mark Twain summers. #
• 20:45 Spent most of the day working on a new iPhoneDevCamp web site for open source applications: http://apps.iPhoneDevCamp.org #

Tweets for Today

• 10:18 In downtown Berkeley working out at the YMCA. But even here there is no 3G! And the Edge connection is very slow. (sigh) #
• 12:26 We are about two-thirds the way for the sponsors we need for iPhoneDevCamp - let me know if you are interested in sponsoring us! #
• 13:43 I'm going to be in Boston on the evening of Monday July 21st. Anyone want to get together? #
• 13:51 I'd never seen the Feist 1234 video before, old news for most, but wow, looks like shot in one take! youtube.com/watch?v=9D0aTSkslWY #
• 14:03 Congrats to Jonathan Zamick and folks at BerkeleyCoworking.org for having sold all the 'anchor' spaces. Downstairs is still open for dropins #
• 17:12 Blogging "Managing iPhone Applications is a Pain" http://tinyurl.com/62rmg9 #
• 22:20 Small number of iPhone Developers at the meeting at BerkeleyCoworking, but some good discussion. Also got my iPhone app dist profile working #
• 23:41 ChristopherA Blogging "iPhone Apps Removed Today" http://tinyurl.com/6ep3cm #

iPhone Apps Removed Today

I've run out of iPhone home page slots for all of my App Store free apps and purchases, so it is is time to prune them down.

The following iPhone apps I removed from my iPhone today:

• Alarm Free:Supposedly a personal alarm device. If you move the iphone, or click on screen, an alarm goes off. Can't believe that people would think this would actually work -- it is better to call 911.
• Blip Solitaire:Sort of a one-player pong where you play both sides using a circular paddle. Didn't find it fun.
• Bluepulse: Tried registering for this one on an ugly too small font screen that looked like a web page (but Safari on the Bluepulse web site looked better then the iPhone app). It sent me an SMS, but I could never get the confirmation to work. Don't need yet another social network app anyhow..
• Bubbles: Not really that fun or interesting. Some good physics could have made a big difference.
• Evernote: I wanted to like this one, but adding text notes was a pain with the scrolling of the first line being lost over the top of the window, and no way to edit notes once written. But I'll keep an eye on this one as someday it might be a good cloud replacement for Notes, which get lost every factory reset.
• HaHaHa: I presume this app modifies photos you've taken to make them more Batman like, but it just didn't function for me. I took a photo, but then I was unable to modify the photo.
• Twittervision: I like the Twittervision web app, though it is actually more silly then useful. But the iPhone app just didn't work.

More will probably have to go tomorrow, but this is a start.