Christopher Allen's Ephemera Blog

iPhoneDevCamp 2 in San Francisco, with Six Satellites

I'm spending the weekend at iPhoneDevCamp as one of the organizers and the MC and Judge for this year's Hackathon Contest. My goal is to repeat the success of last year's Hackathon where over 48 applications were presented during the Hackathon Show. Many of these apps were created by teams that had never met before the conference started.

One particular thing that I'm proud of this year is there are six cities that are having satellite events simultaneously with our event in San Francisco — Denver, Portland, Chicago, Austin, Seattle and Chandigarh, India! You can see video feeds from four of the satellites visible behind us while speaking at the podium, including India at the upper-left.

We hope to have all six satellites running tomorrow morning, take questions from them during the keynote sessions, and submit apps for the Hackathon on Sunday. They will also be offering sessions and topics back to us in San Francisco. If you are interested in seeing iPhoneDevCamp live, all three days will be broadcast through Adobe Connect.

red:green iPhone App available at iTunes App Store

I am pleased to announce my first iPhone application is now available on the iTunes App Store.

It is a very simple application, called "red:green", which is described at apps.iPhoneDevCamp.org web site. It is based on a web app from last year's iPhoneDevCamp.

One problem with this release is that even though it was released by Apple late last night, it has a July 23rd release date on the application in the App Store and thus did not shown up in the "new releases". This means that not many people have downloaded or reviewed it yet.

This is an open source app, and we'll be using it as an example for iPhoneDevCamp.org — I have written more about it there. I have many ideas for how to improve it and am hoping to get some people interested in it during our Hackathon.

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.

New iPhone 3G? Don't forget to Restore first, and set Voice Mail

If you pick up a new iPhone 3G, the first thing you need to do once connected to your Mac is to check that it has installed the latest version of the iPhone OS. Apparently most of the iPhones sold in the last few days have version 5A345, but the current version is 5A347.

The easiest way to do this is to do a full Backup (right-click on your iPhone icon in iTunes - Sync is not always good enough) and then do a Restore. If you are a developer, remember to remove the files in ~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates/ first, then do the Restore. This will make sure that your firmware is the most current. BTW, the correct size for 5A347 is 225 MB, not 218MB, which is version that circulated among developers the day before launch.

The second thing to do if you are a US iPhone 3G purchaser is to set up your AT&T Voice Mail -- apparently your outgoing messages and such are reset when you changed phones. Until you do so, your callers can't leave you voice mail. Quite a few people I have called in the last few days didn't know their iPhone voice mail was not working.

This will save you lots of time later — it took two+ hours for my 5A345 iPhone 3G to Backup, then Restore, then Sync one last time.

iPhoneDevCamp 2 Hackathon Contest & Rules Posted

I am one of the organizers of the iPhoneDevCamp 2 conference this year on August 1st - 3rd in San Francisco.

Like last year, I am in charge of the Hackathon Contest, which was inspired by my experience with MacHack in the 90s.

I have written about the rules for the Hackathon Contest here, and here are the contest rules.

I spent a lot of time last night on these rules, and invite commentary, especially from former MacHack and iPhoneDevCamp attendees.

Max 9 pages, thus Max 144 Apps on iPhone OS 2.0

I use an iPod Touch for development, so I decided to load every free iPhone App I could find, plus the few that I've paid for on it just for testing. After doing so, and trying to organize my apps, I made some interesting discoveries:

• There is a max of 9 pages that you can move your home page icons to, despite there being a lot more room for "dots" at the bottom of the screen. With 16 icons per page, this means a max of 144 apps can be installed functionally on your iPhone. With just the free apps so far, I've got over 100.
• The actually number is lower, because every time you move an icon from one screen to another an icon slips off the end to the next page. If there is no next page, it disappears, only to reappear if you do a hard reset. Thus you have to leave one icon "slot" open for each page to move around.
• It is a pain to organize lots of icons around by moving them from page to page. Also, sometimes they just disappear. Not deleted as by accidently clicking the close box, but disappear. They will only show up after the next time you do a hard reboot.
• It takes iTunes a lot longer to sync applications then it does other data, so my syncs are backups are taking a lot longer. Worse, when iTunes decides to not only sync but also backup my iPhone, it can take over an hour.
• So far I've got my pages organized as follows:
  1. Quick access essentials like SMS, Contacts, Notes, and OmniFocus
  2. My most used apps like Twitteriffic, and most of my web icon bookmarks, such as gmail's great web app and TypePad's Blog It.
  3. My camera, photo, and camera related apps like Exposure, Comic Touch, NearPics, etc.
  4. Location based apps, like Yelp, Where, Whurl, etc.
  5. My music apps, like the iTunes Store, YouTube, Pandora, Truveo, Remove, plus media related apps like Movies.app.
  6. My games, like Monkey Ball, and weird stuff like Phone Saber and Rotary Dialer
  7. Various search related apps, like pocketpedia, google app, etc.
  8. Weird stuff that just doesn't fit anywhere else, like eBay
  9. And Page Nine, where I put rejects before I delete them, and undeletable apps that I don't use like Weather (WeatherBug is better).

This problem should be an opportunity for third party apps, however, Erica Sadun's organizer app was not approved by Apple when many other of her apps were approved. Clearly Apple is going to need to address the problem of iPhone App organization and limits on number of iPhone Apps in a future update.