Updated TWIS Music data for the 2010 Music Compilation

I've updated the TWIS app's data to have the TWIS 2010 Science Music Compilation now that the album is available. Everything was going great, many of the contributing artists had iTunes pages and versions of the songs already in iTunes. Unfortunately when I went to test the app with the new data I discovered that the <store> tag in the TWISMusic.xml file was not being parsed at all so I can't link to the album link on twis.org so that app users can purchase the app. How embarrassing!

iPad vs TWIS

Version 1.4 of TWIS has been submitted to Apple for release on the App Store. This version has a functional iPad UI, unlike version 1.3.

The app will hopefully be reviewed and released in 4-7 days.

Quality Control and Testing, I hear they're important.

My success at releasing bug free versions of the TWIS app has been completely non-existant. My first released update exposed a bug where the absolute paths (full path names) to art assets such as the book cover art and album cover art would break when the app gets updated to a newer version. My bugfix update to correct that created a new bug that would crash the app when would execute log statements that had been left in the release version of the app. This has been a bad trend of not finding these bugs until after I update the released version onto my own iPad from the App Store. The bugfix release to remove the log statements was no exception. This time when I updated my local copy of the app from the App Store I discovered that it was using the unfinished iPad UI instead of the iPhone UI it should have been using. Oops. Unfortunately this mistake will render the TWIS app unusable on the iPad until the next update get's pushed out. Instead of simply repackaging the TWIS app with the intended UI on the iPad I'm going to use this blunder to light a fire under my development efforts to get a semi-functional iPad optimized UI.

Hopefully after the release of Xcode 4.2 and iOS 5 my release cycle will have a more stringent testing procedure! For those that don't know the released Xcode 4.1 can't run debug versions of an app on iOS 5 and Xcode 4.2 can't bundle iOS 4.3 release versions.

iOS TWIS app update

The appeal of the rejection of the TWIS app was upheld. I don't think the app reviewers understand the concept of the content discovery app. When I was talking with Steve (not Steve Jobs, but a Developer Relations Rep) about it he never referred to links to iTunes and the iBookstore as being a problem, only the Amazon links. He didn't understand why anybody would ant a link from a book list to the iBookstore when they could open iBooks and search for the book they wanted. I was stunned by that part of the discussion.

So I have modified the TWIS app and resubmitted it.

I had heard that the review process for app updates was prioritized over that of new apps but this was a little ridiculous:
July 15th: app submitted to Apple for review.
July 21st: app enters "in review" state
July 22nd: app rejected
July 22nd: app rejection being appealed
July 26th: appeal being reviewed
August 2nd: appeal rejected - spoke with the non-Jobs Steve
August 3rd 8:22am: app update submitted to Apple
August 3rd 8:23am: app enters "in review" state.

-- Updated August 3rd 2:30pm

August 3rd 2:03pm: app enters "processing for app store" state
August 3rd 2:17pm: app is Ready for Sale

You can find the TWIS app in the App Store

TWIS iOS Application, Update

On Friday Apple informed me that they had rejected the TWIS iOS app on the following grounds:

11.13 Apps that link to external mechanisms for purchases or subscriptions to be used in the app, such as a “buy" button that goes to a web site to purchase a digital book, will be rejected.

I have appealed this decision as this provision is intended for in app purchases but the TWIS app does not do any in app purchases it has links to Amazon, iTunes and iBookstore so that the user can easily find the books that are read in the TWIS Book Club.