0

Apple Developer Forums

Posted by lorenb on Oct 28, 2008 in business, iphone

Got a message from Apple today about their new Apple Developer Forums. It’s in “beta” and sadly I can’t login right now because “a serious error has occurred in the system”. I’ll have to try again later.

Also noticed that my carrier almost doubled it’s profit on iPhone sales. Maybe they could spend some of that on training their staff to not be so useless.

 
0

Steve

Posted by lorenb on Oct 25, 2008 in business, iphone

Yesterday while I was doing some errands I dropped my iPhone. I had it in an acrylic case but the impact on the sidewalk still cracked the glass screen pretty bad. The phone worked but I didn’t need any glass in my ears. I had to get a new one.

I set out to buy a replacement. I went to see my carrier at one of their local stores. I asked to buy a replacement. They told me that wasn’t possible. They offered to cancel my contract for $400, sign me up again and change my phone number (that I’ve had for 10 years). Said there was no way they could sell me an iPhone any other way. They claimed it was Apple forcing them to do business like this. Then they offered me other brands of phones.

I talked to 3 people at the store, 2 or 3 more on the phone and all of them had this same crap story. They called the Apple Store in Toronto and they said they don’t do repairs. You’d think I was the first person in Canada to have a broken iPhone.

All this non-sense pissed me off. I end up firing off an email to Steve Jobs with an email address I found from Google. I told him what had happened and that in my opinion his company/partners sucked. I called them out on screwing me over and told him it would never happen again.

A few minutes later he replied saying that I indeed I could buy a new iPhone and that I was given the wrong information. He CC’d the COO, Tim Cook too.

Inspired by Steve, I tried my carrier again. I called up one of their call centers and kept escalting. After an hour I finally found a manager who would let me purchase a replacement iPhone without all the extra fees and weirdness. They did push my contract date up though, so it started over again yesterday. They are mailing the new phone to me and said I would have it by the latest Nov 13th.

Later on that night I heard from the director of iPhone support at Apple. He offered to help me deal with my carrier if they were still giving me problems.

Seems the stories on the Internet are true. Steve does read/respond to emails from random customers.

 
0

Android Market

Posted by lorenb on Oct 22, 2008 in business

I see Google has finally released more details on the Android Market. Looks mostly the same as Apple/iTunes to me at this point, minus the approval process. Here is a quick summary:

  Apple Google
Signup fee $100 USD $25 USD
Profit sharing 30% to Apple; 70% to developer 30% to carriers; 70% to developer
Application approval Yes No
Development Tools XCode / Objective-C Eclipse / Java

Still undecided on what, if anything I’ll do with Android. It would kind of pain to have to carry multiple code bases in different languages.

 
0

Many Mistakes?

Posted by lorenb on Oct 14, 2008 in business, iphone

Read one of the reviews for MMA Tracker. A person named MMAJunkie was saying there were many mistakes. I wonder if that is the fighter stats? or if he means a bug in the software?

I’d like to fix the problem but I don’t know what it is. D’oh.

 
1

MMA Tracker v1.1 approved

Posted by lorenb on Oct 13, 2008 in business, iphone

Just got an email from Apple letting me know that MMA Tracker v1.1 has been approved.

It took about 6 days from the time I submitted to now when it was approved. Better be more careful with internal testing as you don’t want broken software out there for a week.

 
0

LAT future

Posted by lorenb on Oct 10, 2008 in gnome, mono, projects

I haven’t done any development of LAT in a while. The tool does all the stuff I need it for and I’m happy with it as is. These days I’m mostly writing applications for the iPhone.

It was looking like the project would just die and fade away but, Jeroen Asselman has stepped up and taken over development. He’s moved the source code over to SourceForge.

I’m sure Jeroen will do a good job of taking LAT forward.

 
1

MMA Tracker 1.1

Posted by lorenb on Oct 7, 2008 in business, iphone

I updated MMA Tracker at iTunes Connect today. The new version (1.1) adds a new icon and adds more polish to the interface. Also fixes a stupid refresh bug I somehow missed. It will be a free update to anyone who bought 1.0.

So once again I’m “in review”, we’ll see how long updates take to get approved. Should be quicker than the initial application submission. I hope anyway.

Copyright © 2009 Loren Bandiera’s weblog All rights reserved. Theme by Laptop Geek.