However it seems although apple has released my app with the wrong revision, which has a bug in it, how has this come about?

Well from my last post, I added Reachability to my app, to check for an active network connection before trying to get the RSS feeds, In this revision I seemed to have missed a small bug, which made the app crash upon selecting a second RSS feed for the iPhone 3G (so far no word on crashes on 3GS). This was caused by the way I removed and released the RSS articles. This bug was picked up by apple, and the following day I re-submitted a quick fix, which I ensure I tested this version more thorough, a week and a half later, the app is now released, with the bug back in it…?

I found this strange, so the first chance I got, I re-compiled NZRSS on my phone, as the app store replaced my current dev version, the result? no crash, hmm suspicious? Anyway I have re-submitted the fix, and hope this comes out faster than the initial release

In my case, this is really quite simple to implement, as I only need to check for the connection on the app launch, I included both Reachability.h & Reachability.m into my project, and import Reachability.h into my AppDelegate, and check it via the method below:

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- (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(UIApplication *)application {
	NetworkStatus internetConnectionStatus = [[Reachability sharedReachability] internetConnectionStatus];
	if (internetConnectionStatus == NotReachable) {
		// no connection
		UIImageView *noConnection = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"noNetwork.png"]];
		[window addSubview:noConnection];
		[noConnection release];
	} else {
		// connection, continue normally
		[window addSubview:[navBarController view]];
	}
	[window makeKeyAndVisible];
}

The second thing wrong with the NZRSS was something so small I wet myself laughing, on my Article view I had created a menu (as mentioned in the previous post), in that menu if the article has a “full article” link, I showed a Safari button, thats right a “Safari” icon, the apple do not approve the use of this (is it just me or is the UIWebView not safari? LOL), anyways, I found a new icon for this, and fixed that issue (also renamed it to WWW).

Sooo what does this mean? yep another week or two to get it approved, back to the waiting game (Or should I say, back to working on my game while waiting for the approval).

Flash Viral Link: Tauranga Websites

Ok so this week i have been busy working on this internal viral, this is a piece of advertising we are trialing to help increase the website development Totali does, this was rushed, and not too well thought out, but in the end I am still happy with the outcome in the amount of time available.

This is a simple flash game, which is interactive on a couple of levels, firstly it requires the user to input a name and phone number, from here you will receive a call from our automated phone service with instructions on how to play the game.

After this is complete the game starts, you simply have to shoot the twitter birds, get as many twitter birds as you can in 60 seconds to claim your discount voucher for our “Spring into Action” website promotion.

Note(s): The more birds you get, the bigger the discount. This is set up to only call NZ phone numbers

This only meant that the NZRSS App had to be better!, So I had to add the option to select the feeds you personally would like to read, instead of being stuck with all the feeds, this is where the settings came in, I tried to keep this as simple as possible, so I created checkboxes inside the UITableView’s Cells, this took some time to get working, as I had to keep an Array of which feeds had been checked, and which ones hadn’t. I also wanted a way of being able to check for new feeds, so I added a button to the bottom of the settings table which checks for newly added feeds (more on this shortly). The one thing I have yet to start working on is a system or way of re-ordering the feeds, I will be looking at doing this in a future release.

Once you have selected some feeds, they will show on the main screen, once you select/click a feed, the app then goes and pulls the live RSS feed from the desired source, and parses this ready for the next UITableView to display, this second view only shows the headlines of the selected feed, from selecting/clicking a headline will take you through to that particular article (Note: the amount of content in each article depends on how much content they have on their RSS feed).

I have included a menu bar under the article, which holds different things per article (e.g if there is a full page article link, it will show safari. or if the article has a audio file, this will show a play audio button), I have also added twitter in this menu, and will also be looking at adding more social networking websites to this menu.

That pretty much sums the application up, but lastly, where do the feeds come from? who has control over them? Well The NZRSS reader has a fairly wide list of RSS feeds around New Zealand, this list is currently controlled by Totali, in later versions I hope to add the functionality for users to submit feeds, for now if anyone would like to see any feeds in-particular, please leave me a comment.

A little about the iPhone interface, I decided to be a little creative with my screen shots, and other tools on the website, so I have created an interface to showcase some of my iPhone work, I plan to expand on this with other little functions like the tag cloud, and the later possibility of “test” apps, or interactive apps for more of a showcase.

The first of these is the Calendar, I have almost finished replicating the iPhone’s calendar, which has my websites “posts” as events, this was a bit of fun to create .

This website is going to be home to my iPhone App Development, but first, a little bit about who I am and what I do.

My name is Jarrad Edwards, and I am a 22 year old developer living in Tauranga, New Zealand. Over the past 5-6 years I have taught myself many different programming and scripting languages, over a few different platforms.

How did all this come about? When I was younger I had a huge curiosity about how things worked, and being the natural born wrecker I am, I also loved to pull things apart. It began with a simple website, yep plain HTML with tables it was, either way, I took some source code, hacked it up, moved things round, until I was happy with it.

From there the curiosity expanded, and likewise the technology did too, slowly progressing and learning CSS and JS (note: I was still at school while learning this), also around this time, I started playing with VB6, this was great fun, writing an actual program that could be executed.

I got a bit bored with VB6, and moved back to the websites, where I began playing round with MYSQL & PHP, this was awesome fun, learning how databases worked in general, and how the relationships of data work together.

After a while of learning PHP, I took a bit of a break (being a teenager at the time, what more can I say), I then got back into websites when I left school to study at Polytech, this was up until my first job locally here in Tauranga, with a company called ReserveGroup. While working at ReserveGroup, I coded Website and Newsletter Templates for a CMS system, but this became really repetitive very quickly, and I felt that it couldn’t take me any further than I was already. So what did I do?

I left Tauranga, to go and live in Auckland, with hopes of progressing further, which I did at AIM Proximity. Here I learnt Flash AS2 & AS3 and also picked up XSLT, got my hands dirty with some Java back-end. AIM was a really creative agency, but sadly after a year and a half with them, I decided to leave when the team was downsized by half, and the workload remained the same.

Now I am back down here in Tauranga, where I have spent the last 3-4 months learning the iPhone SDK (and also learning some C/C++). I have just re-released my first application (NZRSS, based on the NZ Herald application that I wrote and then pulled, due to issues with NZ Herald). I hope to release my second application over the next few weeks, so check back here shortly on progress.