iPad

It is being discussed quite a lot on the internet that it is very difficult to get started to develop applications with InApp Purchases. Most of the times developers report that the SKProductsRequest does not yield any result or reports the Product ID of the feature as invalid.

To make this post brief: most of the issues discussed do not exist if you follow the step-by-step guide 100%. However, I got hit by an issue that none of the post addressed:

• my product called EniRemote is already in the store, it has no InApp Purchases
• I want to use InApp Purchases for the update
• on my device that is also used for development, I have EniRemote installed, however, the AppStore version, not the developer version

I followed Apple’s documentation 100%. However, all my IDs were still reported as ‘invalid’. Where did I mess up? First, I waited a couple of hours as a lot of developers claim it takes about 12-24 hours for the AppStore to update. I tried again this morning, the issue prevailed.

Then I remembered that my device had the AppStore version installed. I was able to deploy my app to the device without any issues. It also ran in development mode, however, the application always ran in an environment that was created by the AppStore version. Thus, it always must have queries the live-store, not the sandbox.

How did I fix this? Very easy! I removed the app from my device and deployed it again by debugging it in Xcode. My Product IDs were immediately listed as valid and I can use In-App purchases.

Thus, when using InApp features, make sure that you do only use app environments that have been created by Xcode and not the AppStore. It will not work unless you delete any ‘live-version’ of the app that has been downloaded from the AppStore first.

I really hope this will help some folks to save some time!

A few people complained that EniRemote would not work properly. Please be aware that you have to set up the App before you can use it. In order to connect to your Dreambox, EniRemote needs the IP and credentials.

You have to use the Settings application on your iPad and select EniRemote on the left side to enter that information:

EniRemote for iPad has been released in Apple’s AppStore!

Right now it is not available in all countries yet, but it will be released in all countries. The App is free for a limited time.

If you have an iPad and a Dreambox running with the Gemini Image, be sure to check it out.

Here is the link for the US AppStore:

http://itunes.apple.com/app/eniremote/id386161917?mt=8#

Finally, I am able to announce my first iPad project written in Objective-C and Xcode, written in association with DeveloperExperts, LLC. One can hardly believe how hard-felt the “finally” is. I have been programming since 1988 and Objective-C has been the toughest programming language yet. My biggest issue was getting used to the strange way how memory allocation and deallocation is handled. It might be me, but it took quite… Continue reading

Today, I wanted to display a time-value of 9 minutes and 3 seconds like this: 09:03

Thus, I typed this snippet into my Objective-C code:

labelTimer.text = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%2d:%2d", minutes, seconds ];
[/code]

This did not yield the result I wanted. The numbers were padded with spaces, not zeros. Sadly, Apple left out the options for the different format specifiers like f, d, @ … completely. You have to rely on old C skills… Continue reading