September 2010

An email from Apple with the above subject line was waiting for me when I got back to work on Friday after spending most of the day at the WyBiotech conference.  PasswordRN is live in the iTunes store!

The conference was way off topic for me but fascinating (especially Randy Lewis’s talk on spider silk  and goats and cotton seeds, oh my!) and a good time that I got to spend with daughter Becky who is in town for a few weeks between school terms.  I do wish the Wyoming bio-tech industry all the luck in the world.  But I’m going to stick with software and count my blessings as a microISV.  There’s really no such thing as a viable  microBiotech company — although you clearly can do quite a bit of early work as a virtual company before you get to the scaling-up, need-VC-funds stage.

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At last -- PasswordRN is submitted!

I have spent all day, literally, working on getting the first version of  PasswordRN submitted for app review in iTunes Connect (the developer’s side of the iTunes marketplace).  Sheesh.  Talk about  a process that is TOO HARD!

The morning wasn’t bad.  I wanted to re-organize the initial master password screen.  I thought it would be friendlier to have both password text boxes high enough that you could type in both with the same keyboard instance and not have to hit done after the first entry and bring up the keyboard again before you could type the confirming version.  So I did that and also added a bit more instruction text.  Nothing is easy for me on a Mac, but I knew what I was after and the design environment is just enough like Visual Studio that I could git’er done.

I used that exercise as a way to work through my version numbering scheme and be sure that updating the app didn’t destroy the old password list (kind of important).  At least as sure as anyone can be given that you can only test via ad hoc provisioning and not via the iTunes store.  I HATE that you can’t really test what you are going to release or test installing/updating what customers are going to install/update.  How totally contrary to all good software development practice.

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