But I didn’t give up.  I sat down and started writing an email to Ian Marsh of NimbleBit, inquiring about employment opportunities and offering to work for free in the mornings and afternoons a couple of days a week in exchange for mentoring.  Blah, blah, blah.  All stuff I had written or said before.  It occurred to me that emails were not really getting me very far and I’m just not very good at communicating my enthusiasm and passion for iOS and games.  That’s when I got the idea to do do something big and different.  It had to be an attention grabber that conveyed my determination.  I got set on the idea of a custom app that would somehow incorporate my resume.

It sounded good, in theory, but the reality was they probably receive tons of emails from people smarter and more qualified than me asking for a wide range of things.  I also imagined if I had received an email from someone I didn’t know very well asking to install or TestFlight some random app, that I would be skeptical.  Besides, a single app wouldn’t really be able to showcase all the apps and prototypes I had done.  It was at this point I got the idea to mail them my entire iPad2 with all the apps on which I had worked.  I could put my resume on there and even write a custom app to sell myself.  It seemed like an OK idea, but there were things to consider.

Would my iPad be safe?  Didn’t think much about this one, I figured if I insured it, I’d be covered.  How do I get my iPad back?  This required a little more thought.  I didn’t really think the NimbleBit guys would keep it.  I mean, they are iOS developers, they should have plenty of devices on hand, right?  And they did donate a bunch of iPads to a school.  I didn’t want them to feel obligated to talk to me if they didn’t want to, so I had to come up with an easy way for them to opt out.  But there was one more question.

What if they think I’m insane?  I had quite a few reservations about this one.  I didn’t want to cross the line from enthusiastic fanboy over into the area of creepy stalker.  I also  started to wonder if this was considered a “leave behind”.  I spoke to a friend of mine about this, and he reminded me about the crazy guy who camped out at the Blizzard HQ.  The thing that my my buddy pointed out, besides the fact that this guy didn’t get a job with Blizzard was that the Internet made fun of him.  I took pause, but it didn’t take long to come to the conclusion that if the crazy Blizzard guy didn’t at least try then there was no way he would even have a chance to accomplish his goal.  I suppose the Internet may still make fun of me, that remains to be seen, but I had to try.  Besides, at this point I had already finished the app and was pretty proud of what I had learned and accomplished.

I went home put a hand written note to the Marsh brothers on my iPad explaining why they were getting an iPad in the mail and giving them an easy out to return it if they weren’t interested.  I boxed it all up and it was ready to go.  The next morning I stopped by the post office on my wake to work and it was off.  Whew!

I didn’t expect to get a response for at least a couple of days, if at all.  To my surprise, by that evening I saw this on Twitter.  Followed shortly, by this tweet.  I was encouraged!

What was on the iPad?

I completely reset my iPad.  I put all the default apps into a single group and moved that group to the second page of the device.  On the first page, I made several other groups that included contract apps I had done, protoypes I had created, apps I had done individually, and as part of a team.  I also had an app on the first page that was simply a PDF of my resume that used a picture of myself as the app icon.  I removed everything from the dock except the single custom app I had created for NimbleBit to showcase my skills and enthusiasm for iOS Development.  I made the background image on the iPad a custom image.  The custom image was basically a default iPad image where I pasted a game studio floor from Tiny Tower.  I named the studio NimbleBit.  I then created a Bitizen that looked like me and  put it on the floor.  I wrote a little note about how NimbleBit was my dream job and directions to start with my custom app.  It looked like this:

How did I create the custom app?

I was very fortunate as I developed this app that almost all of the resources I needed were available from the NimbleBit Bitizen Builder or the Tiny Tower Wiki.  Since I was going with a Tiny Tower theme, this was perfect.  I think every single image, sound, and music I used in the app, except maybe two, came directly from those resources or a screenshot directly from the game.

The app had two components.  The first component was a sort of intro page that answered a few questions about why I created the app, who I was, my contact info and what I had to offer.  While creating this app, I also found two bugs in the Bitizen Builder.  I reported the bugs here and explained that I was already helping them before they had even hired me.  Here’s a peek:

The second component of the app was a memory style game that consisted of randomly created Bitizens.  I had already coded the memory game using crude art, as exercise in clean code for myself, so I had a nice starting point.  It was a fully functional game with high scores and times.  The icon for the app was nearly identical to the Tiny Tower icon, except that instead of a Bitizen construction worker I used my own Bitizen.  The navigation between the two components used a vertical UIScrollBar to create the vertical look and feel that you see in several of the NimbleBit games like Tiny Tower, Scoops, and Sky Burger.  Here’s what it looked like:

What went wrong?

Not much really went wrong, but the one thing that did go wrong was kind of big and I’m still beating myself up over it.  At some point, after I had loaded all my apps to the iPad, my provisioning profile had expired.  I renewed the profile, but there was some weirdness going on, so unfortunately some of my apps didn’t even launch.  The custom app did work and that was the most important one.

What went right?

I learned!

I completely reversed engineered the creation of Bitizens.  Not just an image of a bitizen.  Bitizens with random hair colors, skin colors, clothing colors, hair, facial hair, hats, ties, earrings, costumes…the whole deal.

I learned how to do color overlays on a single image, preserving transparency and allowing for the randomization of skin color, hair color, and clothing color.

arcrandom() % 0 doesn’t just return zero. Many head explosions over this one. ☺

I figured out a better way to programmatically animate a UIScrollBar.

I learned about adding and implementing a custom ttf font.

I was able to apply a real-world implementation of recursion.

I created an observer and actually understood how and why I did it.

I used Instruments for the first time to track down a memory management crashing bug.

I proved to myself that I can make a game of my own if I put my mind to it.  I’m pretty sure I already knew this, but it was a nice confidence booster.

I didn’t get a job.  This may seem odd for a what went right, but by the time I was done, I was just so proud that I had done it and I learned so much that I knew it wouldn’t bother me too much if I didn’t get much of a response from NimbleBit.

The NimbleBit guys bought me lunch and gave me a tour of their sweet studio.  David, Ian, and Tim took time out of their busy schedule to meet with me and shoot the breeze about iOS, games, and just every day stuff.  Very cool, though I’m still not not sure that they don’t think I’m insane.  At least they haven’t made fun of me on the Internet…yet.  ☺

This post is part of iDevBlogADay, a group of blogs by indie iPhone developers featuring new posts every day. You can subscribe to iDevBlogADay through RSS or follow the #iDevBlogADay hash tag or @idevblogaday on Twitter.

I was working on a project that required that code.  After I implemented it, I noticed that the the scrolling was kind of jerky and not nearly as smooth as it should be.  It was very subtle, but it bothered me enough to do some Googling.

That’s when I found this post on stackoverflow.  I was skeptical this would solve my problem, but I gave it a try anyway.  It worked perfectly, and it made my other solution seem ham-fisted.

So I ended up going from this:

- (void) animateScroll:(NSTimer *)timerParam
{
    const NSTimeInterval duration = 10.2;
 
    NSTimeInterval timeRunning = -[startTime timeIntervalSinceNow];
 
    if (timeRunning >= duration)
    {
        [scrollView setContentOffset:destinationOffset animated:YES];
        [timer invalidate];
        timer = nil;
        return;
    }
	CGPoint offset = [scrollView contentOffset];
	offset.y = startOffset.y + (destinationOffset.y - startOffset.y) * timeRunning / duration;
	[scrollView setContentOffset:offset animated:YES];
}
 
- (void) doAnimatedScrollTo:(CGPoint)offset
{
    self.startTime = [NSDate date];
    startOffset = scrollView.contentOffset;
    destinationOffset = offset;
 
    if (!timer)
    {
        self.timer =
		[NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:0.01
				target:self
				selector:@selector(animateScroll:)
				userInfo:nil
				repeats:YES];
    }
}

To this:

- (void) doAnimatedScrollTo:(CGPoint)offset
{
    [UIScrollView beginAnimations:@"scrollAnimation" context:nil];
    [UIScrollView setAnimationDuration:1.5];
    [scrollView setContentOffset:offset];
    [UIScrollView commitAnimations];
}

So much slicker and much more elegant.  I lol’ed at myself.

This post is part of iDevBlogADay, a group of blogs by indie iPhone developers featuring new posts every day. You can subscribe to iDevBlogADay through RSS or follow the #iDevBlogADay hash tag or @idevblogaday on Twitter.

A few months ago, my wife and I were working on our kids bunk bed.  It is one of those configurable types you can change with a few tools and some heavy lifting.  We had been working on it for a couple of hours and my wife declared, “We’re about to have a difference of opinion”.  She then went on to explain to me that she was going to do major cleaning and vacuuming of the entire area underneath the bunk bed since the bed was already apart and access was easy.  I tried to convince here that we should just pick up the few toys there and save the vacuuming for once the bed was done.  I did this knowing that there would be no way to vacuum under the bed once it was re-assembled and just because I wanted to get on with completing the task at hand.

My wife moved on with getting the vacuum and the monumental task of cleaning under a child’s bed.  I decided to go do some yard work until I was needed to help with the bed again.  I was grumbling in my head about the vacuuming under the bed and how the bed could be done by now if she hadn’t vacuumed.  Eventually, I sort of reasoned with myself that it was probably a good idea to do the vacuuming.  I made a further realization, that the vacuuming under the bed wasn’t unlike refactoring or cleaning up code as you were working on it.  I even had the thought, “damn that’s why my code sucks, I never clean as I go, because I’m so excited to just get it working.”  I don’t think this was something I didn’t already know, but seeing the analogy first hand made me make take notice.  Shortly after that I decided I need some kind of project to get me excited about just writing readable code, independent of the app or any functionality.

Sometimes, I find it amazing when simple, mundane, day to day tasks run parallel with the task of coding, marketing an app, or trying to make a living do something you love.

This post is part of iDevBlogADay, a group of blogs by indie iPhone developers featuring new posts every day. You can subscribe to iDevBlogADay through RSS or follow the #iDevBlogADay hash tag or @idevblogaday on Twitter.

Matt Drance did the keynote.  One of the the things he said was that your app is a self portrait, it tells people about you.  Not sure I like what I see, but the good news is that I’m allowed to update my self portrait.  Mike Lee also spoke.  He gives great talks and I always look forward to hearing him speak and reading what he has to say.  He said all my ideas are terrible.  I already knew that.  Harsh words meant to motivate and stimulate introspection.

Last year, when I went, there was one moment when all the expenses of the trip were justified.   It was in Nathan Eror’s session on UIGestures.  It was great, because it was something that was new for me and I could apply immediately to the Color Dog project I was working on at the time.  I haven’t had that moment yet, but there are still two days to go and I am optimistic that it will happen.

If it’s not clear by my post, I think 360iDev is a great conference and would recommend it for both new and veteran iOS enthusiasts, whether you are a developer, designer, artist or something in between.

This post is part of iDevBlogADay, a group of blogs by indie iPhone developers featuring new posts every day. You can subscribe to iDevBlogADay through RSS or follow the #iDevBlogADay hash tag or @idevblogaday on Twitter.

There are a couple of reasons why I haven’t been very good or diligent about refactoring.  The biggest reason is because I’m impatient.  Once I get something working, I usually don’t care how it looks or how it works.  I just want to move on to the next task.  And on a bigger scale, I just want have a finished product and get it on the app store so that I can start counting my millions of dollars.

The second reason is excitement.  I’m just so excited my code is working that I don’t want to mess with it any more.  Working on something new is always more exciting for me that cleaning up old code that I know already works.

The final reason for not refactoring is fear.  Sometimes, I’m just afraid that if I change my code it will stop working.  Some people call that fragile code, but I think the code is probably not too bad, and I’m the one who is fragile.

So for my current project I decided to do something with the primary goal of ending up with a nice working app, that was readable, clean, and easy to maintain.  Code that I could show other developers or during interviews without being embarrassed.  It really sucks not wanting to provide a code sample because your code is such a mess that you are embarrassed by it.  I ended up going with an idea I had for awhile, for a simple memory type matching game.  Nothing exciting, flashy, or innovative.  Kind of boring actually.

I picked boring for a reason.  I wanted to be more excited about learning about refactoring and clean code that I was about the actual application.  My thinking goes that if I was overly excited about the app and not the learning process, it would be too easy to relapse into bad habits.   A matching game would be just challenging enough to keep me interested but boring enough to keep me focused on writing some nice, well organized code.

It has has worked out great so far.  I’ve been reading some books on the subject and working with mentors to apply what I’ve learned.  I cannot describe the sense of joy and relief I had when I noticed my viewDidLoad method had just a handful of method calls instead of being like a sardine can packed full of a ridiculous amount of logic and chunks of unrelated functionality.  I’ve even been able to gain a better understanding and use of objects, which had always kind of scared me.

The cool part about the objects, was that in the past because my code was such a mess I never knew where to even begin with creating my objects, so I would just rationalize it by knowing that the app worked and moved on to the next thing.

I still have quite a bit to learn, but I already feel better about refactoring.  I’ve gained a great understanding of why it is so important to spend the extra time cleaning as you go to save so much time later on when you are troubleshooting an issue, adding new functionality, or doing maintenance.  The best part is that it is actually fun and makes coding that much more fun.  Stoked!

This post is part of iDevBlogADay, a group of blogs by indie iPhone developers featuring new posts every day. You can subscribe to iDevBlogADay through RSS or follow the #iDevBlogADay hash tag or @idevblogaday on Twitter.

I have found Tiny Tower very addictive.  I’m not a big fan of microtransactions, so when I first started playing I only gave it about five minutes to figure out what was going on.  After that, I tuned it off and planned to forget about it.  But, I couldn’t.  I picked it back-up a couple of hours later and found it was still holding my interest.

I think the reason it has held my interest is because the microtransactions don’t slap in you the face and tell you that you suck.  The game is very playable without using any of  the IAP.  For a casual player like me the pace feels just right without spending a thing.  I’ll probably end up doing a single IAP purchase just because I feel like I’m ripping off the NimbleBit guys since the game is free.

Yes, this is a short post.  You can blame Tiny Tower.

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I have a couple of apps on the app store.  Some I did solo, some as part of a team, some as contract work.  Even when working on a team, I did my portion of the work by myself.  Occasionally another guy from the team would review the code, but if it worked there wasn’t really much concern.  I have a few books that I refer to and browse the topics where I am weak.  I read lots of tutorials in blogs and watch videos.  I attend developer meet-ups from time to time.  I went to 360iDev last year and plan to attend this year.

All that stuff is great and very helpful and I have learned quite a bit, but I know my code is still shit.  Other people know it too.  I was looking at doing a contract last week and I didn’t think the first interview went well from a technical perspective.  As far as a culture fit, I felt pretty good and we had some good conversations about what makes the app store difficult, marketing, and just general iOS banter.  I didn’t expect a call back, based on the technical portion of the interview, and was surprised when I received one.  They were interested in having me do some work but wanted to see a code sample.  I sent a code sample and never heard from them again.  Before seeing my code:  interested.  After seeing my code:  not interested.  Ugh, pretty telling.

At this point, I’m trying to figure out what to do next.  I know that with practice and experience comes expertise.  Doing development in my spare time outside of my day job makes that difficult and presents something of a Catch-22 situation.

I’m curious what others do for self-improvement?

This post is part of iDevBlogADay, a group of blogs by indie iPhone developers featuring two posts per day. You can subscribe to iDevBlogADay through RSS or follow the #iDevBlogADay hash tag or @idevblogaday on Twitter.

I am one of three developers who created Baby Activity Logger.  We released it back in 2008.  About or year or so after that we received a letter from Apple that they had been contacted by the holder of patent #5691932 for a “Care giver data collection and reminder system” and that we were infringing on their patent.  If we did not contact the patent holder our app would be removed.  Every other baby tracking application also received the same letter from Apple.  Some of those apps actually ended up getting removed by Apple.

We contacted the patent holder who initially wanted a $5000 per quarter licensing fee in addition to 15% of sales.  After we explained to them we were three hobby guys doing this in our spare time and the app didn’t even make enough to cover the licensing fee they agreed on a flat 6% of revenue.  We thought we could win a challenge to the patent, but we didn’t have the money to hire a patent attorney, it just wasn’t worth it.

That went on for a few months and then we received a letter from the original patent holder who informed us the patent had been transferred and the new patent holder would contact us shortly with contact information and details.  This was back in 2010.

Today we received another letter from the new patent holder that we owe royalties back through 2010.

So here are my questions:

1.  Does this patent for a hardware device really even apply to software?

2.  Are there any options for a little guy to fight this without going broke in the process?

3.  Why would Apple remove an app instead of standing up for their developers, especially in cases were it is not clear that there is in fact patent infringement?

This post is part of iDevBlogADay, a group of blogs by indie iPhone developers featuring two posts per day. You can subscribe to iDevBlogADay through RSS or follow the #iDevBlogADay hash tag or @idevblogaday on Twitter.

When I was first contemplating putting ads in one of my kids apps, I was really torn on the subject from an ethical perspective.  Is it fair to show ads to kids?  Younger kids really have no idea what they are looking at, they just see something cool pop-up on their screen and want to touch it.  When the ad is presented, they may not even be able to read it nor understand what it is they are seeing.  Every time a child does that, I make a little bit of money from someone who probably didn’t really have that in mind when they started their adverting campaign with Apple.

At 360iDev last year in Austin, I attended a few sessions where the topic of children’s games or advertising was discussed.  I posed my question a couple of times about the ethical considerations of presenting ads to children and what as a developer I should consider as viable options.  Nobody really had a good answer and some hadn’t even really considered the topic.

At the airport on the way home, I raised the same question to Markus Nigrin.  He didn’t have the best answer, but he had an argument that made me feel better about putting iAds in an app for kids.  He stated it something like this, as best I can recall from memory:  If I have a decent application that provides entertainment for kids for only 99 cents and that same app that is free with ads, it is up to the parents to decide if their child is worth paying 99 cents for an ad free experience.

While, I am not completely convinced by that argument, I can live with it.

Now that Apple has started removing iAds from some kids apps, I think it is the right thing to do.  Of course, the sting from lost revenue isn’t that bad for me, since I was only making 2-7 dollars per day in iAds.  It also doesn’t appear that any of my kids apps have been impacted by this change yet.  I’m not sure if Apple is looking at this on a case by case basis and going after the big fish first or if they have plans to implement something across the board.

I would be interested to hear other opinions on what the right thing to do is with respect to presenting ads in a children’s app.

This post is part of iDevBlogADay, a group of blogs by indie iPhone developers featuring two posts per day. You can subscribe to iDevBlogADay through RSS or follow the #iDevBlogADay hash tag or @idevblogaday on Twitter.

This app really belonged in an entertainment or lifestyle category.  Most of the other offending apps at least had some shred of relevant content related to the medical category.  This breathalyzer app did not and was a blatant attempt to leverage a softer category.  So after looking at the screenshots, I also realized the app sucked, and I could make a better one.

Big deal right?  There are plenty of developers that look at stuff and think they can do it better and it ends there.  So I started thinking, what would be the advantage of doing a better breathalyzer app?  Well, if it was better it would push this crappy one off the rankings allowing our baby application which is a true medical application to be better represented.  But what was the point to run the other guy off the top 100 only to be replaced by my better breathalyzer app?  No reason really,  at this point, it was just a personal challenge for myself to see if I could do it.

So I had a plan, I made the app, got it approved and on the App Store.  Even though my app was better, the other breathalyzer app had been around for almost a year and had a decent number of  reviews that it was tough for my app to get any traction.  I was seeing low to zero download numbers, with tiny bumps on the weekend, as you would expect for a drinking related app.

So I decided to get my hands dirty.  I adjusted the pricing of the app.  Monday through Thursday I had the app at 99 cents.  On Thursday morning, I would make it free through the weekend.  I figured this would serve two purposes.  It would hit the other guy where it hurts most; weekend sales.  If people were downloading my free version on the weekends it was keeping his off the top 100.  This would also get me more downloads which would translate into more reviews.

I did this for about two months until I was within five to ten reviews of the competition.  I put the app back at 99 cents and left it there.  From that point on I was consistently beating the competition.

Of course, within a few months it didn’t even matter  because the App Store was starting to fill up with so many apps that all of the breathalyzer apps were consistently falling below the top 100, even on the weekends.

I have tried lots of different tactics with pricing, categories, and keywords on the App Store and feel like it is mostly a black art.  This was the one time where I really felt like I had figured something out about the App Store and made it work to my advantage.

This post is part of iDevBlogADay, a group of blogs by indie iPhone developers featuring two posts per day. You can subscribe to iDevBlogADay through RSS or follow the #iDevBlogADay hash tag or @idevblogaday on Twitter.