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The development blawgh of Önders et Gonas

Tag Archives: bureaucracy

How Not to Disable In-App Purchases for Your Live App

1 Comment Posted by on March 19, 2011

Finally! The holy grail of iOS development blawghs. A legitimate reason to rail against Apple and their draconian practices.

During last week we had a problem with In-App Purchases for Warcode. Warcode is a free download on the App Store, and if you like it you can buy the full version from inside the game with the IAP API. But suddenly it had stopped working. By checking the console output from the device I could determine that it was the dreaded “Invalid product ID” error that everyone who tries to implement IAP has seen once or twice during development while trying to get everything to work (a process detailed in numerous other blog posts around the interwebs.) But I’ve never seen it in a live app on the App Store and that was a bit unsettling.

From a developer perspective, one of the main awesome things about the iTunes App Store is that it’s super easy for people who want to give you money to do that, and you don’t have to deal with handling transactions, you just get paid (potentially in dollar dollar bills, y’all*). The problem is when it’s not working it’s very hard for the people who want to give you money to do that, and that’s obviously a lose-lose-lose situation (both customer, us and Apple loses). So I have a hard time understanding why the IAP system is so easy to break.

Anyway on to the story. A bunch of things had happened that could somehow be related, like us just having renewed our Developer program membership and our Paid Apps contract having expired and we just resubmitted that and all sorts of stuff, so I made sure everything looked in order and everything had little green dots next to them in iTunes Connect. I also contacted Apple through some form, but I haven’t heard from them yet. So I waited and nothing seemed to happen, our sales figures were still a boring flat line.

Then I remembered something about the IAP system being very particular about which status your app is in in iTunes Connect. During development I had to submit unfinished apps to be able to test the IAP and then reject them so they didn’t reach the review team, a total mess obviously and also detailed in other blog posts about IAP. Obviously Warcode was in the Ready for Sale status, as it was up on the App Store… but I had created a new version on iTunes Connect.

I had written the update notes and updated the metadata, so everything was ready for our updated version (which we’re still working on), but it was in status “Ready for Upload”. I thought maybe that’s the culprit, let’s remove it temporarily to check. But no, sorry, you can’t remove new versions that you have created in iTunes Connect. But I was determined to check if this was the problem, so what I did was I uploaded a version with some bug fixes as the version 1.1 that I had created. This update does not contain all the updates we’re currently working on, it was taken from a bunch of revisions back in our version control system. But now the new version was in status “Waiting for Review.”

And voila! That was indeed the problem. Amazingly In-App Purchases now works in the version of Warcode that is on the App Store again (i.e. version 1.0, the version I uploaded as 1.1 is not reviewed yet.) So the lesson learned is: if your app uses In-App Purchases, don’t create a new version in iTunes Connect until the moment you’re ready to upload the new version as you will disable all IAP in the current version of your app.

It’s possible that this is documented in one of the guides you can download from Apple, but I hope this post can help someone in case there are other people like me (a bit too cool for school) out there.

* We’re in Europe, so actually it’s euro euro bills y’all.

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ÖeG presents: Telia NetID fix for Mac OS X

1 Comment Posted by on March 4, 2009

Tl;dr version:

On Mac OS X running on Intel there’s a bug with the Firefox plugin for Telia’s e-legitimation. Shit freezes and you’re out in the cold. Or so it seems. But things are not always what they seem. So keep hitting each key in your passphrase, and after 10-20 keypresses the plugin registers the key, and you move on to the next. Weird as hell but it works. Brought to you by ÖeG. Buy our apps.

Original Post:

This entry was supposed to be posted months ago, back when it was the hottest thing around, but common life and professional laziness laid its ugly body between it and cyberspace. But today I decided to revive it, so I opened a beer and just went crazy. So here it comes ladies and gentlemen:

Since the day we started our business some people have been asking us questions such as “When is project Mustang coming out”, “What is this wardrobe thingy” and “Which Kent song describes ÖeG the best”. But instead of answering theses questions I will provide you with a quick and neat fix for using Telia NetID with Mac Os X. First a little bit of history,

First I was afraid I was petrified…

Yeah, true story boys ‘n girls. Me and my gutwrenchingly attractive wingman decided, a while back, to start up our own firm. Some people do things like that with the intent to conquer the world, get really really rich or attract a lot of good looking specimens of the opposite sex. I really would like to lie a little and say that our goal is bigger than that. It is to give the men and women (And, as our social skills evolve, also other animals. Both big and small ones) of our beautiful planet a better user experience when using their mobile appliances. Since me and Önders live in Sweden, you can’t just go out in the street, pull out one of those Dirty Harry-esque guns and declare “I’m Jonas, and from this day on I have my own firm!”. No no, as our society evolved from hunter-gatherers to become what it is today, it adopted bureaucracy. That means forms. Lots of forms. And a line where you have to sign your name. When starting a business in sweden you have to fill in some forms and send these by regular mail to two agencies, Bolagsverket and Skatteverket. Sounds quite simple, right? Well, ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to the World Wide Web. As mankind got more and more used to paying bills, booking flights and ordering late-night entertainment with just a couple of clicks on the Web, someone thought “Hey guys, maybe we should construct a way to identify ourselves online. We can call it Telia e-legitimation and come on boys, why don’t we make it run terrible on Mac OS while we are at it”. Thanks to this smart, but not so awesome guy, it is possible to sign contracts with your computer. Sounds absolutely fantastic, right? Wrong! Enter the fucked up world of fucked upness.

The Problem

First you have to download the program, and its plugins to all the various browsers that are out there….oh no, that’s right. It only works on IE and Firefox…. noo that’s right! It only works on IE and Firefox running in Windows! Isn’t that great? Hey, why would anyone else want to use it? Of course you are able to install it if you are running MacOS. It even let you install its Firefox plugin. But when you’re sitting by the computer with a big smile, and that crazy Glasvegas song (Stabbed) on highest volume, and decide that it’s time to sign a document you’ve been working on forever the god of awesomness turns into a fucktard. You’re not able to enter anything and firefox freezes like that guy from The day after tomorrow. Yep, Screwed is the name of you and your future. Or…? No, fuck no! Bang the drums and unzip that flight suit, ÖeG has the solution!

The Solution

A person with more time, talent and less beer would take som nifty screenshots to illustrate the solution, but that’s not the way I live my life. One of the best writers of modern poetry, mr Fred Durst, said it best back in the day when music still was cool “It’s a fucked up world, what a fucked up place, Everybody’s judged by their fucked up face” and this has nothing to do with our fix for the problem. Just general rambling and space whoring. So to give it to you the quick way: just type man! Hit those keys as if you are Muhammed Ali and they want to draft you to kill vietnamese babies. Oh, and you better be the Muhammed Ali of today, cause you have to press every key multiple times, until a small black dot appears in the field where your security code is required. There you have it. The badass ÖeG sewn fix is to hit each key until something happens, and then move on to the next one. This procedure may remind some sickos of group masturbation, but it works, oh fuckin a it does. I have no idea what I just wrote, and it doesn’t make any sense to me either, but I guess Önders will clean up this mess tonight. Until then you can ask questions in the comments, or not.Maybe it’s best not to do that. A picture would be nice now..

Oh, btw; we are still fawkin awesome.

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Finally!

Leave a comment Posted by on March 3, 2009

A milestone has been reached! Finally after over a month of e-mailing, sending faxes and general confusion we’re now accepted into the iPhone Developer Program. That means we can now debug our programs on the actual device instead of the simulator, and we can submit applications to the App Store.

Tomorrow I’m going to take Project Mustang through some battletesting in the field. Of course you’ll be the first to know when it’s available for download if you keep reading this blog!

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