To all our customers who have purchased Optiscan:

Version 1.4 of Optiscan, currently on the App Store, does not support automatic scanning on iPhone OS 3.0. We sent version 1.5, which fixes this problem and adds some new features, to Apple about three weeks ago, but it has not yet been approved for distribution. Apple have been extremely busy, but with the OS update expected out on Friday and no word on our update, we felt it was important to post a warning!

The application still functions correctly in all other respects. But, if the automatic scanning function is important to you, please delay updating to iPhone OS 3.0 until Apple publishes our more recent release.

Airsource are delighted to announce that Optishare is now available on the App Store.

What is Optishare? It’s a simple app that allows the creation of QR codes on any iPhone or iPod Touch, which can be scanned by any QR-enabled device, such as an iPhone using Optiscan, the fastest QR code scanner on the App Store.

• Share contacts, web addresses and text with other devices.
• Save specific QR codes for quick sharing — perfect for sharing your business card.
• Keeps a history of QR codes created and shared for easy recall.
• Optishare supports encoding to UTF-8, ISO-8859, and Shift-JIS.
• Select the contact details you want to send, to ensure the right people get the right information.

Optishare runs without a network connection, and keeps your data private. Why put up with anything less?

Optishare is available right now from the App Store.

Airsource are delighted to announce their latest application, Viral Fou. Viral Fou leverages the power of crowd-sourcing, to identify potential mischief makers in their community. The initial release of Viral Fou is only available in France. It is free, but time-limited, and will expire at midnight tonight.

Airsource was very pleased to see the contents (login required) of yesterday’s announcements about the new version of the iPhone SDK. Naturally we will be updating our existing applications to take advantage of the new features.

The update to Optiscan has been approved by Apple – get it on the App Store now! The update is free for all existing customers, and includes several bug fixes, including three which could causes the application to crash.

Wow. Obviously great espresso is at least partially responsible for Apple’s success with the iPhone – their staff have graciously awarded Barista “Pick of the Week”!

Read more here, and if you want to brush up on your espresso skills – go get Barista!

Your app is on the App Store, and you’ve just sorted out the translations for all the metadata. So you go upload them on iTunes Connect, and then obviously you check that they look right in iTunes, changing country to make sure each language looks right. English is unchanged and obviously looks okay. France – tick. Deutschland- tick. Nederland – Whoah! That’s not right. My Dutch isn’t that hot but I know it isn’t identical to English. Check the rest, and it turns out Japanese has the same problem.

Let’s back up a step. Firstly, we’re changing our region using the My Store setting at the bottom of the homepage of iTunes Store.

That’s what we do for all the regions – and French works. Why doesn’t Dutch? Why doesn’t Japanese? I’ve been struggling to figure out what these two languages – or at least regional App Stores – have in common. And I have no ideas. Answers on a postcard to…

However, it is possible to check the localizations for Dutch and Japanese. The answer can be found in an Apple Support article, which I’ve summarised here.

On a Mac

• In iTunes, select any regional store other than Nederlands
• Quit iTunes
• Go to System Preferences->International->Language and drag Nederlands up above English
• Quit System Preferences
• Run iTunes and select the Nederlands regional store.
• Find your app. If you correctly uploaded Dutch metadata to iTunes connect, then your app’s App Store page will now display in Dutch

On a PC

• Forget the Windows language settings. They aren’t used.
• In iTunes, select any regional store other than Nederlands
• Go to Edit->Preferences->General and select Dutch (Netherlands)
• Quit iTunes
• Run iTunes and select the Nederlands regional store.
• Find your app. If you correctly uploaded Dutch metadata to iTunes connect, then your app’s App Store page will now display in Dutch

The same principle works for Japanese.

The update to Optiscan has been approved by Apple – get it on the App Store now! The update is free for all existing customers, and includes several improvements such as better image processing, internationalisation, and bug fixes. Try it out!

A common belief among programmers is that you should write code that says what you mean, because the compiler will probably do a better job at optimising than you can do off the top of your head.

On the other hand, Writing Efficient Android Code says “It is unwise to rely on a compiler to “save” you and make your code fast enough” and recommends that programmers do things like caching member variables (like array lengths) in local variables. This isn’t just premature optimisation; it’s trivial stuff we expect the most basic compilers to handle!

To understand why, it helps to know how your code ends up running on device:

Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of developers have complained about the App Store feedback process. For one thing, nothing prevents a rival developer leaving a bad review. For another, Apple only solicit reviews from dissatisfied users. What can be done to get better reviews to counter-balance the bad ones? Maybe we could invite happy users to leave a review…

I’m a little sceptical that this will work. As a developer it’s easy to imagine that a user will be happy to sing the praises of your application. As a user, however, my time is precious, and it’s just too easy to hit the cancel button. Having a “Review this app” button on the Info page might work better — I’d be interested to see what people think though!