Miscellanea
April 24th, 2009
I haven’t been posting much lately (bad Owen, no cookie!) because of a variety of things that are keeping me busy. However, there are a few things I wanted to talk about today, so I thought I’d actually write a short post.
The first is about App Updates. I forgot to post this after the Dapple 1.1 update went out. I learned a very important lesson: when you push an update out, you must manually update the release date in iTunes Connect, or your release date will still show the 1.0 release date!
This bit me in the ass, because at no point in the update process does it ever ask you for a new release date. When you submit an update to iTunes Connect, until it is approved, it sits in your “Manage Your Applications” section as a second app. If you click on it, no where does it give you the option to set a new release date. So I had assumed that it would update automatically. Incorrect!
After 4 or 5 days of waiting for Dapple to show up in the “By Release Date” list and wondering why it wasn’t there, I went back into iTunes Connect. When your update is approved, they roll both versions back into one item in the “Manage Your Applications” list. At that point, you can update the release date under the Pricing tab. You should do this as soon as you get the approval email from Apple. What ended up happening with Dapple was that I didn’t catch this until about a week after the release. So when I finally updated the release date in iTunes Connect, the update showed up on page 5 of the “By Release Date” list. Dammit.
So I really missed an opportunity for a small bump in downloads because of the “new” list. Oh well, I won’t make that mistake again!
This week I took some time away from working on Dapple, which felt amazing. I spent the early part of the week working on a mini project so that I could teach myself about CocoaTouch and Quartz for iPhone. It was really fun and I was able to build a neat little app in about 2.5 days. This app won’t be released as it stands now, but I’m considering making a few improvements to it and releasing it. Anyway, it was really fun to do something that wasn’t related at all to Dapple. I’m looking forward to working on my next game even more now!
I also spent a bit of time this week working on some stuff I’m not prepared to talk about yet. Ooooh…secretive…
Yesterday I started working on some stuff for the next Dapple update. I do want to push out at least one more update sometime soon, and then we’ll see how long it goes before I get to another update.
Oh, and finally, I did an interview with Mobile Orchard earlier this week for their podcast. The podcast should go live on Sunday, I’m told, and it will be posted to their website on Monday. I spoke with them about my up-coming Numbers Post Part 2, which will go live on Monday along with the interview. So check back on Monday, if you’re curious about the sales side of Dapple since the last Numbers Post.
Ok, so this didn’t end up being as short as I’d planned. Oh well. Have a great weekend, everyone!
Owen