This, together with our #1 Mac app Week Number, gives us a healthy and un-swedish amount of hubris, so we're now setting our sights on more markets. Likely, the next step will be Germany. Big market, and good connections through our social networks. Not that that's likely to make any difference whatsoever, but it does feel a bit more tangible than aiming for say Venezuela.

Nothing wrong with Venezuela though.

Just not sure if they even play Backgammon there.

Or have iPads.

Development was easy!

So I started a project in XCode and quickly read up on how to implement the Mac OS X features I needed. The Mac dev center docs turned out to be a pleasant experience. And people have been developing Cocoa apps for years, so it wasn't all too difficult to find online help whenever I ran into some problems. The development of the app itself was done in about 15-30 minutes (!).

The major gripe was - of course! - the submission process to the App Store. Joining the Mac developer program was surprisingly easy if you've already got an iOS developer account, but the big confusion started when I tried to get my new certificates.

Generating certificates with Chrome returns "Invalid certificate" error

I should've learned by now, but I always get some kind of headache when trying to get the proper distribution certificates for iOS (and now Mac) apps.
Even though I read the Mac App Store instructions thoroughly, I couldn't get it right when trying to generate a new certificate, using the Developer Certificate Utility. As I banged my head against the table, I remembered that there had been problems with this before... And the solution was - and this is a tricky one - to use Safari when generating the cert, instead of Chrome (!). You have to use Safari when generating the certificate. I can live with that, but the problem is that I'm getting nothing but the message "Invalid certificate" message when trying to generate it.
But it worked in Safari, and I figured I'd better choose to generate both the Application and the Installer certificate at once, using the two checkboxes available. A certificate was generated and named something "3rd Party Mac Developer Application...".

All good, it seemed:

Generate the Application and Installation certificates separately!

Another problem occurred when I tried to "Build and Archive" the app in XCode. I couldn't. But it was an easy one, as all I had to do was to download the new Application Loader 1.1 in order to get it to build.

But when all this was done, I still couldn't upload the binary properly. There was no option to code sign the installation file (.pkg) - the only option in the drop-down was "Don't sign". I Googled and tried all kinds of different methods, but couldn't get the binary approved by iTunes Connect. I tried to generate a new certificate a couple of times, but without success.

But then I returned to the certificate creation process, and figured that maybe I need to generate one certificate at a time. So I tried that. And it turns out (!), the checkboxes weren't really checkboxes (!!). They were radio buttons (!!!). I had to uncheck the Application option and only generate the Installer certificate, which gave me a certificate I could use to sign my .pkg file and upload a valid binary.

The right way:

I cannot enough express how annoyed I can get when it comes to this entire certificate-signing-submitting-apps process. How can Apple make it so difficult?
It's gotten a lot better over the last year, but I mean; where the h**l are they UX team when they're developing these things? They're clearly not prioritizing user experience in the development section of their site...

In the end; a success

I hope someone can read this and avoid some of the pitfalls I fell into. I can strongly recommend reading the Mac Store App Submission FAQ in the developer forums. A lot of tricky questions are answered there.

But I'm still happy as I've finally managed to upload the app. Just hoping that I haven't missed anything silly in the submission process and that the app will be available soon. And that people like it, of course!
It will be very interesting to get an understanding of the Mac App Store.

Oh, and big thanks to @psilfver who designed a great looking icon for the app!

/Kristofer

With iOS 4.2, Safari now supports stuff like:

• The accelerometer, allowing you to create web apps with tilt interaction
• Websockets, which allow you to keep a connection open between the client and your server. This is super great news for developers of multiplayer online games, and of update intense applications like gambling or auctions.
• More SVG and canvas support – these are really interesting and powerful tools that finally allow for a rich user experience using web technology. The support between different browsers is still so and so, but if you build specifically for say iPad, the possibilities are really interesting.
• There is also a new class, WebGLRenderingContext, which is part of WebGL, a standard for 3D on the web. Really interesting stuff, but so far it’s very unclear what support there really is for this.

This brings web technology one step closer to being a full fledged solution for creating rich apps for iOS devices. HTML5 and a tool like Phonegap for instance, can provide a much more agile workflow than XCode does.

For more in depth info check out Maximiliano Firtman’s blog entry, or if you’re reading this from an ipad, try out his accelerometer experiment, “Move the ball”.

I’m not going to get in to all the details during my Titanium experiment. Instead, I figured I’d break it down to the pros and cons I’ve come across. Note that they’re not all of the same importance; some are minor, whereas some are very important.

First, the pros

Single codebase, multiple platforms
The obvious one. Having to maintain only one code base, which can be compiled to multiple platforms is a very nice thought.

Doesn’t require Objective-C or Java expertise
If you’re not comfortable with writing Objective-C or Java code, or just not in to learning new programming languages, Titanium is going to be a very nice experience. Everything is written in Javascript and later compiled into native Obj-C and Java code.
It’s very nice and easy to get started if you’re used to writing Javascript, but that also means that you can’t use a lot of the nice things about both Objective-C and Java.

Fairly small amount of code
Compared to a similar Objective-C project, the Titanium project turned ended up with fewer lines of code. Especially parts like the Facebook integration was pretty lightweight.
Also, there were some nice simplifications in some areas, which required me to write less code.

… and the cons

No interface builder
Interface builder is a very neat tool for laying out your user interface for iOS apps. In Titanium, there is no Interface Builder, meaning you’re restricted to laying out all your views in code.

Building to device takes a long time
As the Titanium Javascript code has to be converted to Objective-C code, building to the device takes quite some time. Instead of taking 10-20 seconds, every build took me at least a minute or two.

Poor error reporting
It was quite difficult to find reasons to errors during the development. A lot of the times, all I got was generic error messages which didn’t really give me any good reason to why it crashed.

Javascript isn’t Objective-C or Java
As mentioned, it’s nice and simple to develop your apps using Javascript. But you’re missing out on some nice things that exist in the other languages, i.e. the structure provided by the stricter rules of Java or Objective-C. Compared to Obj-C and Java, it is in fact more difficult to keep your Javascript code organized, clean and tidy.

Lots of generated code
When Titanium converts your Javascript code to Objective-C, it generates lots and lots of classes. When looking at the generated Xcode project, it contained around 450 classes even though my project was only around 10 files.
This isn’t necessarily a big problem, but since so many files are built in to your app, you don’t have much control of its file size.

Bugs in the UI
I know that Titanium is under development, but one very annoying thing was that the UI it generated turned out to be a bit buggy. The navigation controllers didn’t work properly, causing some navigation controller animations to freeze, hence breaking the UI.
If that would’ve happened in a real App Store product, it would have been a disaster. (I reviewed the code a number of times, and couldn’t find anything wrong with it.)

Difficult to find solutions
The business model behind Titanium seems to be to provide users with tutorials and help in exchange for some, quite expensive, training programs. This is probably one of the reasons to why it can be quite difficult to find solutions to any obstacles you might run in to during development.
There’s of course the Appcelerator Developer Center forums, but unfortunately I don’t think they’re sufficient. In any case, it’s not as easy as finding help with Objective-C issues.

Problems getting Android builds to work
I had lots of problems getting my Android builds to work; the emulator didn’t start as it should have done and I didn’t get any decent error reports.
As I couldn’t get the Android builds to work, I ended up only focusing on the iPhone. I’m sure there’s ways of solving the build issues, but I couldn’t find any help on that particular issue…

Random crashes without appearant reason
One of the most serious issues is that the app crashed occasionally without any appearant reasons. And as the error reporting was insufficient, it’s very difficult to troubleshoot. As with the UI bugs mentioned above, this would definitely have stopped me from releasing the app to the App store.

Conclusion
All in all, I have to say I’m disappointed with Appcelerator Titanium. At first, it all seemed very nice and easy, but as the issues got more and more serious, I realized that it really was too good to be true.

It’s probably worth pointing out that I didn’t sign up for any of the Appcelerator training program, which might point out some quirks and other things that would reduce the risk of bugs. But I have many years of programming experience and did try my best to find solutions to the problems in the dev forums and by googling…

Titanium could possibly be used for prototyping new apps or features, as the Javascript development was quite rapid. But as there were at least a couple very serious issues, I can’t say I recommend anyone to use it in its current state.
Releasing an app with bugs like the ones Titanium caused would’ve been a complete failure…

I’m hoping that the issues I’ve raised will be taken care of in the future, as the I still believe that Titanium is a good idea.

At the moment, I’d rather develop my apps the old school way using Java or Objective-C.

1. The quality of the results is highly varying
2. There’s a lot of results showing up on spam pages (like eFreedom)
3. The Apple dev forums are probably better most of the times

The reason I’m not always using the Apple dev forums, is a combination of 1) how simple it is to use the Google search in Chrome and 2) how the Apple forums always seem to be 4 steps away when I’m looking for answers. 
One could call it laziness, but being able to do searches really fast is important to me as I like to keep a high pace in development.

Getting easier access to the dev forums

So… I figured an easy way of solving this is to add the dev forums as a search engine in Chrome. And the good news is that it’s actually quite easy to set up:

1. Right-click your address bar in Chrome
2. Click “Edit search engines…” (or whatever it’s called in your language)
3. Enter a name of your choice, as well as the keyword you want to use as a prefix to your search. I chose “app”, since it’s short and easy to remember.
4. Enter the following URL (to make a regular search in the dev forums):
   https://devforums.apple.com/search.jspa?resultTypes=MESSAGE&peopleEnabled=true&q=%s 
5. Hit “OK”, and you’re done!

Using your new search engine

You’re now ready to use your new search engine:

1. Click your address bar (or on Mac: Command+L and Win: Ctrl+L)
2. Enter your keyword and your search phrase, e.g. “app Core Animations”
3. Hit “Enter” to search

Please note that you’ll still be required to log in to the dev center if you haven’t done so recently (i.e. you still have a valid session).

A similar set-up is possible if you’re using Firefox, just go to the Mycroft project and create your own search engine plugin using the URL above.

#9 PAID APP in Sweden!

Also, #1 DICE GAME in six countries!

*Great rejoicing*!!!

Backgammon Board HD for iPad is now available in the app store, at an introductory price of only $0.99! 

We’re releasing the game through Jadestone, who also runs a multiplayer online Backgammon game called DiceArena.com. Our iPad version is however completely offline, and as close to a really nice travel Backgammon Board one can come on an iPad. We hope you’ll like it - give it a go and tell us what you think!

Buy the game in iTunes ⇨ 

…or like it on Facebook ⇨

…or stay updated through Twitter ⇨