My fingers have started hurting from keeping them crossed for the past week. We submitted the Linguan 1.1 update for review just in time before the Sandboxing deadline hit on June 1st. Linguan has two problems with sandboxing:
- Currently the user picks an xcodeproj and Linguan processes the files linked from that. With sandboxing this is no longer possible, we have to modify it such that the user would pick a project folder instead through powerbox to gain access to all contained files.
- The new version is remote-controlling the ibtool command line utility contained in Xcode. I’ve not done any research but it is highly likely that sandboxing will not allow this either.
So you can understand our situation? Either release it now, or never. Well may be not really never, but it will take a lot of time to reverse-engineer ibtool so that we can include the functionality directly in the app binary.
So looking at the status history for Linguan you can see the exceptionally long duration of approval.
I imagine my app sitting in a chair under a bright light and being interrogated by an Apple agent for 6 hours straight. But it didn’t budge and spill the secrets of our workaround. It went into “Pending Developer Release”.
Oh, the “Developer Rejected” was me, I had forgotten to localize some strings. So I fixed that, rejected the app and resubmitted. No big deal.
This is the first time ever I held back a release as opposed to using the automatic release after approval. This I did to have a chance to raise the price tier before unleashing the new version. The simple truth is that selling it at $5 does not give us sufficient cash flow to be able to continually invest in the improvement of Linguan.
It was like a year long marketing campaign trying to get a foothold on this market of developer tools. But now the grace period is over and we need to charge more. Twice as much more. It feels a bit ridiculous to me that we’re even talking about raising the price from $5 to $10 as I know the time savings that people are seeing from using Linguan.
Developer Rico Becker shared this snapshot showing Linguan in use with at least 8 languages showing and the wizard mode hovering on top. He tweeted: “was this even possible before Linguan from @Cocoanetics ? :D”
Well, the answer is: No. The idea for Linguan came out of my own need to consolidate multiple languages and making sure that I had all tokens properly translated. And that when I added a new feature I would know which new tokens to add to all the other languages. And to have a structured way to make sure I translated all of them.
When you choose the option to release an app yourself you will see it like this, once it has been approved by Apple:
And on the version details screen you get a big green button looking like this. (I’m so proud, I just have to show this to you)
If you have your sound turned up this button literally screams “Release me. Release me. Please! I will make you rich. Just push me!”, sometimes it also sings this familiar tune:
“Please release me let me go
for I am not reviewed anymore
To keep this update would be a sin
Release me and let me love again”
But first I had to defer the gratification and headed over to the “Rights&Pricing” to adjust the price tier, effective right away.
There are people who are way more trained in delaying gratification then I am. I’ve seen approved releases being held for multiple days. It’s those Marketing Types. As an engineer I want to let out my puppy and have all my users reap the benefit of all the work that went into it.
I finally pushed the green button. You can help us by recommending Linguan to your developer buddies and translators alike.
Categories: Updates
