In case you where wondering … I was busy with an app I did in cooperation with Andreas Heck of der.heckser. According to my time tracker I spent 87 hours on it to get it to version 1.0 and yesterday, after twoandahalf intense weeks we sent version 1.0 to Apple for approval.
Let me give you a VIP tour of the app, first showing off the prettiness and functionality of the app itself:
After that, the second part shows you how my Xcode project looks like and I’m explaining some of the hurdles we had to overcome. This is for you beginning developers out there, but I’m hoping – if you are a seasoned pro – you still might find it interesting.
For an app like this it is essential that you spread the work amongst several people if you want to be able to finish it in about two weeks. When I get asked by new customers I am always responding “I’m a programmer, not a designer”. That’s actually bending the truth. I could probably design a decent app if I wanted to. Although my personal method of designing apps is to: build it, try it, improve it, rinse and repeat. That’s the kind of approach which is hard to get paid for, especially if the typical customer is not willing to pay more than a thousand dollars a pop.
The second thing I generally try to avoid is server-side work. I have done a bit of VB.NET programming on my server and I could do most of the things I would need, but I just hate it. Cannot tell you why, I’m in love with objective-C and anything else feels wrong to me. And any app that is social or needs the cloud to work needs a server to run off of.
Often customers are not aware of these two factors, and the different skillsets necessary.
I was glad that Andreas Heck approached me for a partnership where I could do what I do best. And he did that with sufficient funds to get the project flying. I mention currency as one of the essential ingredients because generally funding is what makes or breaks an app. Sure, you can write apps in your spare time, but then they are ripening in months, not weeks. Not a chance getting it done before this year’s soccer world cup.
Also if you’re a full time iPhone developer like me, then two weeks of non-stop work mean that you have to make have of what you need to sustain yourself financially in that time. Otherwise you have to divide your attention between a project like this and a well paying one.
It’s as simple as that: there there are some areas where you are way better than others. Money buys you the difference in time. This project has again proven to me that great apps need a team, even if it’s just two people.
UPDATE: The regular version of the app was approved by Apple on June 2nd after requesting that we remove “FIFA” from the list of keywords. We used this as an opportunity to fix a couple of minor bugs and raise the version to 1.0.1:
- FIXED: Potential crash after user creation
- FIXED: Inconsistent use of … and > on tableview cells
- FIXED: Invitations to Pools would show with a %20 instead of a space
- FIXED: Issue with animation going straight to entering an e-mail
- FIXED: Some too long German expressions
The pro version is still under review, but you get the same functionality if you purchase the normal version and then use In-App-Upgrade to Pro.
Categories: Updates
Hi Oliver,
Very nice app, best of luck with it.
A word of warning though.. ‘World Cup Fever’ was submitted and approved some time ago, more recently an update to make the app universal was rejected. This reason.. the use of World Cup in the name. Having received a phone call from the review team it seems that FIFA take exception to the use of what we would consider commonly used phrases.
I would recommend coding now for a likely forced name change. Hope this helps and keep up the good work.
Andy
That’s why we named it WC Pools. 🙂