Month: October 2010

Categories
iPhone app

collegeFund free for now at iTunes App store plus more

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Last Updated on October 27, 2010 by omaha

(Update Dec 16, 2010) Free again for limited time (until Dec 25).

What is it?
collegeFund is a college savings calculator iOS app (iOS 3.1.2 or later) I released a while ago (Oct. 5 to be precise). Link to iTunes App store here. For a limited time (this annual benefits enrollment and holiday season), I am making the v 1.0 app for free. I will end the promotion as soon as the v 1.1 approves.

collegeFund_iTunes_store_2010-10-27

Why free?
I am out of mind 🙂 Actually I thought about this before the release. Over the years I came to believe college education is a prerequisite for many things in life: the college experience, the knowledge learned and friendship formed in college, last but not least, the skill of “how to learn on one’s own” and a path to entry level job. For me and my wife this is not possible without the sacrifice of our parents. This March our baby daughter was born, and we enrolled in a college saving plan for her shortly. We are just trying to repeat what our parents did for us.

In the same spirit, we would like share this little app with all the hard working parents.

Is it really free? Am I ask anything in return?
Yes. If you are happy with the app, you can help me out by

1) send me feedback, including write reviews on iTunes store, good reviews only 🙂 ; send me unpleasant reviews by email (uudaddy no spam AT gmail DOT com).

2) I do have a paid app, myNestEgg ~ the retirement calculator at App store. So if you have an extra dollar(s), you can buy or gift this little app during holidays 🙂

What if you already paid for the app?
First I want to say “thank you”. I can either refund you the 99 cents, or give you the myNestEgg app.

What if you already bought myNestEgg too? We are not entering an infinite loop here, let me know and I will send you something, for your patronage.

Continue reading “collegeFund free for now at iTunes App store plus more”
Categories
401k and Personal Finance iPhone app

Earn $25 filing a bug report, enhancement request, or user story

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Last Updated on January 7, 2011 by stlplace

for #iPhone #app #myNestEgg ~ the retirement calculator (link at iTunes store) and receive an Amazon gift card (one winner per category).

I am starting this mostly for fun, three categories ($25 per category):

bug report; enhancement request; user story

Send email to uudaddy(No Spam) AT gmail DOT com. This runs until Dec 31, 2010. One entry for one person.

How the prize being determined
My 7 months and a half daugher gets to decide 🙂

Seriously, I will decide according the merits.

AmazonThankYou2010-04-27 myNestEgg_12_2010-10-25_2

Version 1.2 is coming
Just in time for annual benefits enrollment. The following is a glimpse. Note I purchased Glyphish Pro icons this time. So hopefully you can show this app to your friends without being embarrassed for lack of icons in version 1.0/1.1

F.A.Qs

Continue reading “Earn filing a bug report, enhancement request, or user story”
Categories
iPhone app

myNestEgg 1.1 released yesterday

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Last Updated on October 22, 2010 by omaha

I know, I know, I am a little late making the announcement. But I was fighting a small battle.

Anyway, the latest and greatest is here. It has all the goodies of version 1.0 plus the following new things:
========
Fix the problem in “email results” when income_ratio is larger than 100%, the email results shows 100%. Now it shows the correct number.

Set default inflation rate to 2% (was 1% before the change); set default investment return rate to 7% (was 6% before the change). We believe the new numbers are more realistic numbers.

Change the calculation of inflation adjustment to fix the “divide by zero” problem in some cases.
========

Categories
iPhone app Stocks

The iPhone development provision problem

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Last Updated on October 22, 2010 by stlplace

I got this problem 2 days ago, exactly same as it being described at Stackoverflow. My environment: Xcode 3.1.4, iPhone OS 3.1.2, Mac OS 10.5.8 (yeah, I am a little old school).

Struggled a bit, tried creating new certificates, using old certificates, blah blah blah. Nothing, still see the same message after I added the provision (downloaded from iOS dev center) to Xcode: “A valid signing identity matching this profile could not be found in your keychain”

I read that Stackoverflow carefully, also looked at the Apple Offical Q&A 1688. Finally I figured it out: I need to download the dev certificate approved (automatically) at iOS dev/provision center, double click it (to install on Keychain). It initially complained about “two certificates using same name” or something like that. I deleted the old dev certificate in Keychain. After that I fixed the provision for my apps, and download the relevant provisions, then drop those to Xcode => Organizer. I no longer see the error. Subsequent build and install worked beautifully.

A small battle was won.

Categories
iPhone app

Back from Voices that matter: iPhone developer conference

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Last Updated on October 21, 2010 by stlplace

#VTM_iPhone

The conference was hold in Philadelphia, PA. Note there was a VTM_iPhone conference this past spring in Seattle. This is my first time attending an Apple themed conference, my first time to hear names like Omni Group, Mike Lee, which are almost like household names in Mac/iOS community.

Ok, let me get to the topic, the people and topics of conference. First I want to thank Chuck and Barbara (and all other Pearson Publishing organizers, venue helpers) for their hard work on logistics (food, drink, website etc.), if there is anything could be improved, I think it’s the Wifi access point. Probably due to the overwhelming of iPhone/iPad, and laptop, sometimes we had difficulty connecting to Wifi. But that’s a minor thing, compared the quality of speakers, and the openness atmosphere of participants (Mac community is much friendly than some of the other dev community as I know of).

Technical sessions are excellent, sometimes I had hard time to make a choice but I like to attend all 3 sessions running at the same time. Eventually I decided to take more UI (user interface) and Graphics Design classes as that is my weakness, coming from coder/programmer background and not graphics Q. Here is the schedule of classes. Some of the highlights: Aaron Hillegass talked about the product cycle and going form “independence to interdependence” as business grow. Not entirely new topic, but good reminder to me. Mike Lee reminds me a Chinese guy names Lu Xun (after I gave it more thought): he fired at a lot of places and I think many of his points are valid criticism of “lack of effort/thoughts” in design. I think yesterday Steve Jobs’ fire at Android fragmentation is along the same line. When “Open” is just for business and marketing purpose, how meaningful really is open of Android?

Continue reading “Back from Voices that matter: iPhone developer conference”
Categories
iPhone app

At philadelphia voice that matters iOS conference

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Last Updated on October 16, 2010 by omaha

I am at Philadelphia now. I came here for the VTM iOS conference. Took southwest Air from STL this evening, arrived phl slightly after 10. Planned taking the shuttle, but could not reach the guy per his instruction. Took train to market east/Philly conference center , then called a taxi to hotel. Saw quite some people on street on the way to society hill Sheraton. It seems free AT&T wifi only works on my iPhone, not MacBook. So I settle on iPhone for tomorrow conference info and how to get there.

I also wrote this post via wordpress iPhone app. It requires wp 2.9 but my Stlplace blog was still at 2.0.2 🙁

Oh, by the way, it seems apple fixed myNestEgg app update (1.1) stuck in “upload received” status. It’s in “wait fore review” mode now. This update will fix some of the bugs.

Categories
iPhone app Software development

iPhone iOS dev blogs

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Last Updated on October 13, 2010 by stlplace

The following are iPhone development blogs I often read. Note I used Google reader to get them. I also listed some of the blogs under “dev” category in the side bar (small).

Technical
iPhone development by Jeff Lamarche. Jeff is the author of the best beginners book for iPhone dev “Beginning iPhone development”. Recently I found his profile at LinkedIn, and found he was a law school graduate, which is total surprise to me. He is definitely not a lawyer type in terms of writing (blog) and talking style (from his tweets).

Cocoanetics (aka Dr. Touch): Oliver Drobnik, the former Windows Admin turned full time iPhone iOS developer lives in Austria (Europe). Note he recently changed the name from Dr. Touch to Cocoanetics. Regardless the name change, I found he has a very good sense of both technology and business: I think his article on Notifications and “Part Store” (he sold his components software like parts) are very interesting.

iPhone developer:tips written primarily by John Muchow, who is the author of Core J2ME (which is the primary mobile development language pre iPhone, it is still used on Blackberry platform, and note Android used a different Java virtual machine developed by Google). I think some article such as “rename Xcode project”, “Prevent application being placed in background” etc. to be interesting.

iPhone development blog: written by Nick Dalton who got into iPhone dev early. A lot of goodies include this iPhone iOS app store reject reasons. I believe he is a co-founder and CTO of a mobile development firm in SF (can not recall the company name on top of my head, you may google).

Ray Wenderlich: the blog bears the author’s name. It has a lot of meaningful tutorials (not those “Hello world” stuff). Besides that, I found this How to host beta test for iOS app” to be interesting.

Other Resources, news, gossips etc
iPhone developer news (Apple): get it from Apple iOS developer center. The official place for all the announcement etc.

Mobile Orchard: used to be good technical stuff, stopped update this April, just resumed blogging.

43 iPhone app development resources: the list is a bit dated, but still useful.

I will add more as time goes.