Projects · @jnjosh’s internet weblog

Bad Movie Podcast: The App

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 12:23:32 -0500

A few months ago I spent a weekend and built a small app for the show my friend and I do every week, The Bad Movie Podcast. Then I sat on it for several months, only tweaking it occasionally. Deep down I thought there was no way Apple would approve it due to the nature of the show. Thankfully, a few people informed me that I was silly and should “Roll the Dice”.

So I rolled the dice and I’m glad I did. The app is now approved and will be live on the store tomorrow morning. It is a really simple app which allows you to listen to the show easily.

I’m really excited, because this will be the first time since 2008 that I’ve released an app for myself.

I also made a small video showing the app work with AirPlay.

I'm still working without a clock

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 22:23:32 -0500

Last year I wrote a post about how I was going to work without a clock. This was completely inspired by Cocoa developer Zach Waugh who wrote about the same topic. As part of this post, he also talked about his small Mac app called Clock.app which is an open source project. Since you sometimes need to know the time, the app provides a quick way to get the time using Alfred or Quicksilver to launch this simple app. For example, you can type cmd+space cl [enter] and I the time.

I actually stopped doing this for awhile. I’m not sure why. I love working this way and recently went back to the clock-free environment. It works so well for me that when I’m working on an app on my phone and see the time, I get a little upset.

One small problem I had was I often used the clock to identify the date. Since it was open source, I forked it and updated Clock.app to have the date.

If you’d like to try it out, you can download the built version from Github or checkout the source.

My iPhone App's Icon in the Apple Storefront Display

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:23:32 -0500

With over 100,000 apps available on the iTunes App Store, developers are striving to be seen. If your iPhone App is on the front page of the App Store, sales tend to rise. What if your App is in the actual Apple Store? Will it help sales? I guess it could, but most users won’t make the leap from an image in the store to the app in iTunes. That said, at least you can say “My app was featured in the Apple Store”.

My app was featured in the Apple Store.

This morning I received an email from another iPhone developer in the Raleigh-Durham area (Tantrum Apps, if you have small kids these apps are a great find). He shared an image he had taken from one of two local Apple Stores showing the icon for my app, iAdvent (no longer available). Checking out the other local store, I found the icon hanging up as well.

So how does this happen? I can only speculate. I wasn’t contacted by Apple or anything. I assume a store planner designed an in-store “App-Christmas” tree, and searched the store for matching themes. The design was approved, printed and sent to the stores. I have learned that this design is likely in most of the US stores, so my App is hanging up with other Christmas apps all over the US. (If you see this as true or not, let me know, it would be interesting to know if these displays are standard)

Still quite exciting to walk into your local Apple Store and see the icon you created hanging up for all to see.