When looking for a better alternative to sending 100′s of emails to App review sites in an attempt to get them to review the new version of Corkbin, I drew a blank. There were PR Firms that would charge frankly-silly amounts of money to send the emails for me and do their ‘black magic’, but, not having frankly-silly-amounts-of-money to spend, that wasn’t an option.

I literally just wanted to get my description, press release and images in front of as many reviewers as possible and I didn’t have the list, or the time to send them all individually (mass-mails just go to junk).

So, I decided to make it. AppLaunch is an affordable way to give your app launch a big press push by getting your App in front of hundreds of potential reviewers!

Check it out and I’d love to hear your thoughts… AppLaunch

It’s pretty simple to use:

[self.view addSubview:[[FollowMeButton alloc] initWithTwitterAccount:
@"chrismaddern" atOrigin:CGPointMake(205, 248) isSmallButton:YES]];
									

Or you can just change the class of a UIButton in the Interface Builder and then synthesise it as a property.

I hope that this helps some people out!

Go to the GitHub
Just download the code

You can find them:

• Android Wine App here
• iPhone Wine App here

I’d love to hear any thoughts on them, especially around the search engine vs. human usefulness trade-off which is always a tough battle.

Cheers!

Google are aware of the issue, but with no support for the App; will they really fix it?!

Too bad – otherwise I’m loving my Sprint iPhone 4S; and it activated in about 3 seconds, cough AT&T!

Camera’s great though…

See – no dev account necessary.

For screenshots of iOS 5 in all it’s glory see iOS 5 First Look Screenshots!

First impressions – the new functionality is awesome, but this beta is not for everyone, I’ve come across a couple bugs already.

Setup

There is a new Setup Wizard for Post-PC setup. I lost most of the images from this during the sync, but here are the few left!!

Notifications

iMessage

This post in Safari Reader – meta!

some more screenshots:

I’ve made a few attempts at this before (that have lasted less than a day each!), but for the past week I’ve begun teaching myself Objective-C and working on an App for submission to the App Store.

Objective C isn’t the easiest language to move to, despite what Apple seems to have droves of developers willing to testify – infact, it’s probably the most difficult language to ‘penetrate’ of all the high level languages. That said, the potential benefits and uses of being able to create applications to work on what will likely become one of the most ubiquitous platforms about are enormous.

So, I’ve now gotten to the stage of having a working Application on my iPhone (having payed for the Developer account) with it’s icon etc… It can run a sockets server, and connect to a sockets server. Hurrah.

Over the next 3 weeks (my aim for this app being to a stage where work will be polish and not interesting to write about), I will be posting most days about my progress  and letting you in on how the process of getting an App in to the App Store goes.

Wish me luck!
Chris

I love my iPhone. It took a while to ween me away from wanting to actually be able to store and organise my files, control directories, copy files on and off my 16GB £400 memory card, install applications that haven’t been through your ridiculous process, copy and paste (until very recently) data etc.. etc…

None of that really matters though, because the processes that you have put in place to achieve the functionality (for the most part – still annoyed I can’t put files on my 16GB £400 memory card) is sufficiently slick that I forget that I ever had a pictures directory where I could organise my images, or a documents file where I may store items that I consider to be ‘documents’. As did I forget that I liked to be able to copy and paste data because whenever a piece of data was somewhere, and you wanted it to be somewhere else, there was a nice little button that said ‘move this data in some useful way to this other application’. Great.

The problem with this system, is that when you don’t get it right, it’s annoying. It’s very annoying. I was stuck for a year with 16GB £400 memory card / phone that I couldn’t use to ever share contact details with anyone else by any means other than email. ‘I’ll just text you their num….’, oh wait… there is absolutely no way to achieve this without a pen and paper. Really!?

The latest – navigating to an event with the location stored in the extensively marked-up ‘Location’ field in the event. There is no way to request that the iPhone show you how to get there from your current position (which it also knows). So.. in order to get to the ‘Location’ of an event, you have to edit the event, copy and paste the location. Close the event. Open Google Maps. Paste the location. Request that it kindly show you how to get there. This seems like a perfect place for another one of those context-driven buttons. ‘Directions to Event from here’. Yay!

Somebody replied to my tweet on this subject by saying ‘Location!=Address’ – and yes, congratulations, semantics have not defeated you on this occasion. I remember however, when I purchased Office 2000 (9 years ago!) and it began to underline text in emails that represent addresses. Moving closer to home, Mail in OS X does this very thing – they have the code!

Apple, I love my iPhone, but just because we have Copy and Paste now (finally) doesn’t mean that I want to start feeling like I’m using a WinMo device; I still want an intuitive experience, an Apple experience.

Can we please have directions to an event location?

Thanks,

Chris

To download it, uninstall the Facebook App and redownload from the AppStore, whatever it says, it will download the new version.

It’s going to host Windows 7 integrated theme packs; a feature in Windows 7 that I really like!

It’s very early stages now, but over the coming days and weeks it should approach completion so… bookmark it!

Thanks a lot; I’ve got a lot of iPhone dev stuff going on as well, I would be interested in hearing from anyone who has experience in developping iPhone applications.

Speak soon,

Chris