If Apple would allow developers to respond to reviews, or more easily challenge the validity of a review, this would be no big deal. But I don’t have any hopes of Apple wising up and fixing anything, so I’m left trying to get more positive reviews of my apps to drown out the negatives ones.

Appirater
The goal of Appirater is to encourage your satisfied user’s to rate your app. To use it, place the Appirater code into your project, and add the following code in your app’s delegate class.

Finally, open up Appirater.h and change the APPIRATER_APP_ID to your apps software id. You can also change the other #defines, for a more customized reminder message and buttons, but the default should suffice for most apps.

Now every time the user launches your app, Appirater will see if they’ve used the app for 30 days and launched it at least 15 times. If they have, they’ll be asked to rate the app, and then be taken to your app’s review page in the App Store. If you release a new version of your app, Appirater will again wait until the new version has been used 15 times for 30 days and then prompt the user again for another review. Optionally, you can adjust the days to wait and the launch number by changing DAYS_UNTIL_PROMPT and LAUNCHES_UNTIL_PROMPT in Appirater.h.

Code: http://github.com/arashpayan/appirater/

BTW, if you like Appirater, please consider checking out my game, Jabeh or the lite version of it.

Here it is:

1. Log into your account at tmobile.com. Change your device to be a silver (the pink one won’t work!) Motorola RAZR.
2. As of this writing, there’s a bug in the site that prevents you from seeing the correct data plans for your newly selected device, so log out of the site, then log back in again. Now fFind your way to the page that lists the possible services you can add on to your plan, and you should now be able to select a $9.99/month web plan ($20 gets you unlimited texting as well). Select it.
3. In your iPhone go to Settings->General->Network->Cellular Data Network and for the APN use internet2.voicestream.com. Leave the username and password blank.

You might need to wait up to 24 hours for the service to be activated. Just keep restarting your phone periodically and check to see if it starts working.

1. Jailbreak your iPhone/iPod Touch There are various tutorials around that take you through the jailbreaking process. Just make sure to use the latest version of the jailbreaking tools and install Cydia if you’re prompted.
2. Launch Cydia and install Veency If this is your first time opening up Cydia, you’ll be prompted about what mode you want the program to run in; select ‘User’. Next click on the Sections tab at the bottom, select the Networking section and scroll down until you see Veency. Select it and press Install.
3. Download and install a VNC client If you’re on OS X, you can download Chicken of the VNC. On Windows, you can use Tight VNC.
4. Find your iPhone’s IP address On your phone go to Settings->Wi-Fi then click the blue disclosure button for the network you’re logged into. Take note of your iPhone’s IP address, because we’ll need it later. Mine is 192.168.1.50.
5. Launch VNC and connect to your iPhone Make sure your iPhone is unlocked and logged into your Wi-Fi network. Launch Chicken of the VNC (or Tight VNC) from your desktop, type in your iPhone’s IP address for the Host, and leave the Display at 0, then hit Connect. You should see a prompt on your iPhone asking you to accept or reject the connection.
   Go ahead and accept.
6. Control the iPhone You can control the iPhone with left-mouse clicks and the keyboard. You can simulate a press of the ‘Home’ button with a right-mouse click, and you can simulate the ‘Sleep/Power’ button with a middle-mouse click.
7. Capture the iPhone screen I like to use Screenflow on my Mac to capture screencasts. I’m not up to date on the best screen capturing software for Windows, but I’m sure there are plenty of options out there.

A couple caveats: The frame rate’s not that great, which produces some artifacts during animations, and any app that uses OpenGL doesn’t work at all.

1. Go to Settings->General->Network->Cellular Data Network
2. Type wap.voicestream.com for the APN (leave the username and password) blank
3. There’s no step 3!

That’s all there is to it. YouTube even works over t-zones now.

BTW, if you’re a long time T-Mobile customer, you can call in right now and ask about the loyal customer plan. If you’ve been with them long enough, you can have a plan which gives you unlimited minutes for only $50 a month.

Jabeh is a puzzle game where you search for 12 hidden stones on a board. Arrows on the board point in the direction of one or more stones, and the column and row numbers show how many stones are in the respective column and row. Using deduction you can figure out where the stones can’t be in order to ultimately find out where all 12 stones are. While you’re playing the game, some light music plays in the background (which you can download for free from the Jabeh website), and when you solve the puzzle you’re rewarded with one of the beautiful pieces of art created exclusively for Jabeh.

You can get Jabeh now for $4.99 or download Jabeh Lite for free if you wanna try before you buy.

For some background about the app, you may want to check out my earlier post. After submitting Prayer Book to Apple on September 24th, they approved it for sale on October 2nd. It was immediately placed on the App Store, but it was never at the top of the recently released apps list, because I had set the release date to be September 24th. It wasn’t until 3 months later that I learned that your order in the App Store has nothing to do with the date Apple approves your app.

Up until the writing this post, there have been 9,448 downloads of Prayer Book, with an average of 91 downloads a day. Not bad I think. December was a particularly interesting month, so I’ll share some more detailed numbers there.

December was shaping up to be a pretty regular month, and then on the 22nd, there was a spike to 118 downloads, then a drop, and then another spike that lasted from the 25th-29th.

I only have data up to the 13th of January included in the monthly table above, but that’s already further ahead in downloads than the same time in December (941 downloads from December 1-13). Granted, December will probably still be better than January because of the Christmas activity.

Have any links to download numbers for other apps? Please share them in the comments. :-)

In my first app, my XML needs weren’t that great, so putting up with the lack of NSXMLDocument in the iPhone SDK was not a big deal. However, in Jabeh I was changing the XML format so often and using so much of it for my network communication creating delegates for NSXMLParser quickly became a huge time sink. After a little hacking, I came up with APXML to solve my DOM problem. It’s not a perfect implementation of the W3C XML 1.0 standard, but it’s close enough for a lot of usage. One particular shortcoming is its lack of support for namespaces but maybe somebody else can add that support. If you just want to jump in and start using it (LGPL license), you can get the code from github:

http://github.com/arashpayan/apxml/

Most of my XML manipulation experience has been with various Java libraries (org.w3c.dom interface, JDOM and XOM), and the only one that I enjoyed using was XOM, because of its simplicity and licensing. Almost all of my design decisions were based on how XOM does things.

Let’s say we want to represent the following XML document in memory using APXML:

In code, we do the following:

And if we want to convert the document to an NSString*, we use one of the two methods in APDocument:

or

Often times when I’m working with XML, I like to see what the current element contains, so for added convenience, you can obtain an XML string containing the element you’re working with, its attributes and all its children directly from the APElement by calling one of two methods:

Now for the best part of the library, which is the ability to read in XML and represent it in APXML. All you have to execute is one simple line:

Hopefully this will be helpful to other developers out there. I may post another article soon if anybody has some questions.

UPDATE Sep 5, 2009: Here’s an example that demonstrates traversing the XML document.

In the console you’ll see (I’ve removed the NSLog markup):

Root Element Name: books
Child Name: book
Author: Michael Pollan
Title: The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Child Name: book
Author: Foley, van Dam, Feiner, Hughes
Title: Computer Graphics: Principles and Practices

It’s available for free on the iTunes store, so go ahead and take it for a spin.

1. Update to iTunes 8 and restart
2. After the reboot, plug in your phone, then open up iTunes. It will ask if you want to update your phone. Click ‘Download only’. If you accidentally clicked cancel, just click on your phone in the iTunes sidebar, then click ‘Update’ to get the latest firmware. Then once the download starts, unplug your iPhone from the USB port.
3. Once the download finishes, close iTunes
4. Open up the ‘Activity Monitor’ app from /Applications/Utilities. Find the ‘iTunes Helper’ in the list of running programs and kill it (the red button at the top left).
5. Set your phone’s auto-lock to never (Settings->General->Auto Lock->Never)
6. After downloading PwnageTool and copying it to your /Applications folder, launch the program.
7. Select your device (I’m using the original iPhone) and click the next arrow.
8. PwnageTool will search for the ipsw firmware file you just downloaded (and it should find it). Select it and click the next arrow.
9. Now PwnageTool will look for the bootloader v4.6 and 3.9 files. If you don’t have them, you can download them here. After downloading the files, click ‘No’ to searching the web for the bootloader file. At the next dialog, click ‘Yes’ to browse for the location where you downloaded the file.
10. Now PwnageTool will ask you if you have an iPhone contract that would normally activate through iTunes. If you are using the Apple approved carrier in your country, you can click ‘Yes’, and this will skip the unlocking process on your phone. Just say ‘No’ if you want your phone unlocked.
11. Now PwnageTool will build an ipsw file for your phone.
12. After the file is created, close PwnageTool, disconnect and turn off your phone, and open up iTunes.
13. Now we need to put the phone into recovery mode. While the phone is off, hold down the ‘Home’ button, and at the same time plug your phone into your Mac. Keep holding down the ‘Home’ button until iTunes tells you that your phone is in recovery mode and needs to be restored.
14. In iTunes, hold down the option key and click ‘Restore.’ Select the new firmware file that PwnageTool just created, and you should be good to go in about 10 minutes.
15. Enjoy your updated phone!

All you need to do is set the UIWebView‘s delegate, to an object that implements the optional method webView:shouldStartLoadWithRequest:navigationType: (part of the UIWebViewDelegate protocol). Then whenever the initial page is loaded or a link is followed in that view, the delegate’s method will be called. You’ll want to return YES for the page you initially load, and then return NO for all others, and open the URL in MobileSafari. Here’s what the method implementation should look like:

By returning NO from the delegate method, we’re telling the web view not to load the link the user tapped, but instead we redirect the opening of the link to [UIApplication openURL:] (MobileSafari).