My iPhone application is online! (finally)

Apple finally deigned my application worthy to be sold on the iTunes App Store! I wish it had been up for the launch, but better late than never.

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=285279179&mt=8

Any bets on whether I will sell the 130 or so copies required to recoup the $99 development fee?

 

Thanks for the $0.99! The iPhone SDK is very nice. It's just like writing an application for Mac OS X, except the user interface is usually simpler and you have less decisions to make about how to arrange things (which is a good thing). It probably took me 8 hours from start to finish. The hardest part would likely have been the actual calculations for sunrise, sunset and twilight, but those are well-known. Just a lot of trig and some esoteric corrections for variations in the orbit or something.

What do you mean by update? I have uploaded the 1.0.1 update to Apple and am waiting for them approve it for release - it fixes the too-small touch zone for the info button, as well as a potential crash if you delete a city immediately after launching the application. Is that what you're asking? Future updates will include the ability to set the clock to a future date, as well as support for the iPhone GPS.

I have to say I am amused that half the reviews on the Store say "Wow, how cool, what a deal for only 99 cents!", and the other half are whiny freeloaders complaining that I'm charging for it at all.

 

"Sol" - it should show up if you search for "daylight clock", sunrise, sunset, that sort of stuff.

 

It is in the list...you have to type "Raleigh" in the city field and then select "North Carolina" from the list. "Raleigh, NC" in the city field alone will not work.

 

Yes, that's in there. ZIP codes would be useful, I agree, but aesthetically it looks better to display a place name than a number.

This is Apple, after all. Form over function.

 

Ever since Apple announced it, I have thought that the iPhone App Store is a great distribution system for small applications like this. You couldn't charge $0.99 for something like this on the internet - it costs people at least $10 of their time to fill out the credit card forms, deal with PayPal, download the application, deal with the registration code emails, install it themselves, and all that crap. Never mind the effort required on the developer's part to set all that stuff up, deal with CC companies, etc. And you can't charge $9.99 either, because that's just too pricey.

But with the App Store, people just have to click a button - their credit card information is already on file, and it takes literally ten seconds to buy something and have it on their phone. Just like buying a song. And from my perspective, Apple will just send a check every month, after taking their cut. Everything is dead simple on both ends.

The other nice thing about it is that, with the $99 listing fee, there is less chance that some open-source dweeb will rip off your application and put up one for free. Especially with simple applications like these, that's a real risk on some platforms. But on the iPhone, most people will want to try to get back their $99 at least.

So this was a proof-of-concept to get myself acquainted with the iPhone SDK, distribution mechanism, etc., and see how everything works, before I decide whether to sink time into building more complicated applications.

However, that description is a bit clinical - I wouldn't have done it if I didn't enjoy the process of writing it, creating the graphics, seeing it actually run on the phone for the first time, seeing my name in iTunes when it went live, and so forth.