Finally, what we’ve all been waiting for. Apple just announced that they’re allowing In-App purchases for free apps, and not just paid apps. This means, as an app developer, I can develop a single app for the app store for free, but can allow my users to upgrade to the full paid version without having to split it up into a “Lite” and “Full” version. I can’t wait to apply this to my apps!

As any iPhone application developer who’s released at least a single app to the App Store will tell you, releasing your app is a terrible pain in the…well, it’s not a fun experience.  After your second or third app you start to get the hang of things, but there’s still pain and suffering involved.  Managing certificates, getting settings configured properly, and iterating between development, AdHoc beta builds, and the final App Store release builds, all make the process seem tediously manual and prone to human error.

Its been a while since I’ve made an update to my blog, and I figured it’s far overdue for a new post. My life over the past little while has been divided up into 4 chunks: my family, my work, my weekend consulting, and my own personal application development. Somewhere around the second half of that list is sprinkled a bit of PhoneGap development. PhoneGap vs Apple, resolved First, I’d like to announce that I’ve made headway with my interactions with Apple.

Things have been busy over the past few days, which is the reason why I haven’t had a chance to post about this until now. But for the PhoneGap community, I have some good news and some bad news.  First, the good news: I got a phone call from the Apple app reviewer that was reviewing my test app.  And before I go any further, I want to say a few things.

I’ve been using git for all my new software development and have been converting my old Subversion (and gasp CVS) repositories over. Throughout this process I keep learning more and more about git, and my love story with it continues every day. Thanks to my friend Chris, he sent along this blog posting that really describes how you can do hardcore agile software development in teams with git. This really is helping me solidify in my head what it is I want to do, but have just never had the tools or know-how to put into practice.

At the suggestion of my friend Scott McWhirter, I decided to go to Ideas On Tap and keep an eye on the pulse of the Vancouver technology community. And after spending an evening drinking beer and talking with various people from companies around Vancouver, I began to feel like the only married guy in the middle of a speed dating session. I have a stable and intellectually stimulating day job that I have no plans of leaving anytime soon, but it was still a nice ego boost to be flirted with by so many companies looking for bright talent.

I recently wanted to try my hand at writing a little iPhone app for helping students find University grant funding. It turns out to be a bit more difficult than I’d expected, but part of the app was to be a listing of all the available universities near the student. This, of course, would involve actually having a list of Universities. To make a long story short, once I got the list (Wikipedia rocks), I needed to get their locations so I could do a proximity search from the user’s coordinates.

You know that feeling when you listen to a song that you love so much, you re-play it 3 times in a row? You also know that feeling when people tell you “ZOMG you’ve gotta listen to, you’ll love it” and you say “yeah yeah, sure, sometime…” and you never bother ’till “sometime” eventually comes along, and you think “Why the hell didn’t I listen to this earlier?!” Well, I’m doing that right now with “Miss Murder” by AFI.

I’ve made some quick updates on the train this morning, and ended up creating a Bourne shell script in the iPhone directory of PhoneGap for renaming a brand-new PhoneGap fork to whatever your project is called. This also works with the previous changes I made to my buildprocess branch, meaning that when you’re done, you shouldn’t have any references to PhoneGap in your code at all. It also makes developing quite a lot easier, since renaming my XCode project file by hand is cumbersome, and needs to be done every time I start a new project.

The PhoneGap demo is really starting to grow beyond the capacity of a single screen since tons of new features are being added all the time. It’s even showing a few examples of the tab and navigation bar features, but they didn’t really do anything beyond just throwing out alerts and log statements. I decided to change that to show just what’s possible with a PhoneGap app. (Forgive me for the ugliness of the video…this is my first upload to YouTube, so I had assumed I could resize the embedded viewer to fit the aspect ratio of the original).