I defintely noticed the speed increase on the 3GS compared to my old 3G. New camera is nicer. Haven’t tried the video out yet or the compass.

It’s a decent upgrade for sure.

• Fixed problems with MMAJunkie news feed
• Show title/description for news articles
• Replace WAMMA with Strikeforce in Champions view
• Remove deprecated APIs

Note that MMATracker now requires OS 3.x so if you are still using 2.x now would be a good time to upgrade.

Screenshot of news view in portrait:

In landscape:

The code that I was using:

NSURL *xmlURL = [NSURL URLWithString:URL];
NSError *err = nil;
NSString *xmlFeed = [[NSString alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:xmlURL encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:&err];
if (err) {
	// handle error
}

After some trial/error, I determined the problem was the encoding. It was ASCII instead of UTF8. The feed is coming from Feedburner which is owned by Google. Seems odd they would stop using UTF8.

To fix this, I used the following code:

NSURL *xmlURL = [NSURL URLWithString:URL];

NSError *err = nil;
NSString *agentString = @"MMATracker";

NSMutableURLRequest *req = [[NSMutableURLRequest alloc] initWithURL:xmlURL];
[req setValue:agentString forHTTPHeaderField:@"User-Agent"];

NSData *data = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:req returningResponse:nil error:&err];
NSString *xmlFeed = [[NSString alloc] initWithBytes:[data bytes] length:[data length] encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
if (xmlFeed == nil) {
	xmlFeed = [[NSString alloc] initWithBytes:[data bytes] length:[data length] encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding];
}

if (err) {
	// handle error
}

I’ve talked to other developers and they have noticed the same thing. Perhaps Apple is having trouble keeping up with demand.

When clicking on “More” information about a figther, the app now slides over and shows that content in a web view. It no longer closes the program and launches Safari.

We were planning to update the titles view and drop WAMMA and insert Strikeforce but it slipped my mind. We’ll do that in 2.3.1 or whatever the next release ends up being.

MMATracker v2.3

The first one was from the Globe and Mail, called Game publishers muscle in on iPhone upstarts. It talks about EA and other big publishers getting into the App Store and making it harder for Indie developers to get ahead.

The second one was from Venture Beat, Pocket God offers case study of how to build a hit iPhone game. It’s about two guys who wrote a game and had a lot success with it.

When the device is connected to a WiFi network and the user taps on any of the upcoming events, the contents on the next screen are blank. This review was conducted on iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2nd generation running iPhone OS 3.0.

Interestingly I can’t reproduce this at all. It works in the iPhone simulator using OS 2.x and 3.0. The build I submitted, I have installed on my iPhone 3G and it works. It works over WIFI. Works over 3G/EDGE.

The only thing I can think of is it happened due to us moving the server where the web service/DB for MMATracker lives.

If they reject it again, not sure what next steps are.

As time goes on, I find that Apple’s process gets more and more frustrating. I don’t like the delay between submission and approval/rejection. I hate the faceless bureaucracy as Apple employees hide behind generic email addresses.

Do musicians on iTunes need to have their album covers adhere to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines? Do studios have to tailor their movies/TV shows for Apple? Why do only application developers have to put up with this crap?