Thursday, November 26, 2009

My First iPhone App Submission

I just completed my first iPhone App for the App Store.

It's a Hockey Twitter app for tweeting about Hockey, specifically the NHL teams and games.

I'll post more info on the app later but for now I am going to cover tonight's submission process. The submission took about 3 hours. This was time spent reading Apple docs, filling out App submission paper work, reworking my icon (I had it in jpg not png), reworking my App Store icon (it was a little blurry so I sharpened it up), and redoing multiple builds.

To build I needed a Distribution certificate which I could have done before and saved some time tonight (lesson learned). The artwork is now solid (I hope) so I won't need to do that for this app again.

Overall the submission went fairly smoothly; I did get annoyed by a quirk in the submission pages which kept sending me back a page and losing data I had typed. This was very frustrating but once I figured out the issue I made it through without losing data.

I'm taking a couple days break before I jump back in and get back to work. I'll be recording a preview video, redoing the website, and posting a followup when I get through the review process.

I also have an article on the decisions I made during the app and how I choose various features and approached the design. That one is still cooking and will come later.

Next week is a big week as well, I am off to Toronto for the iPhone Tech Talk.

Did I mention? I just submitted my first iPhone App? (Me -> nervous, excited, tired...)

2 comments:

Philippe said...

Great job Mark!

One thing I found useful in my submission was to keep a copy of all the info I put in the web forms (app description, etc...) in a text file that is (of course) under version control. Helps a lot when your internet goes down, or when the web site decides to eat your form submission...

Unknown said...

Congratulations Mark! Best wishes on a successful launch.