Uploaded (October 1)

Ooops! This should have been posted on October 1...


It's been a few whirlwind weeks as I put on the final touches - a new "hint" sound effect, a non-proprietary explosion sound for the end, the statistics page, pop-up instructions, fixed graphics on the menu, an updated instructions screen. But last Saturday, I deemed version 1.0 complete.

And that's when frustration really started to kick in. Every step in Apple's App Store submission process is (presumably) reasonable, but it takes a lot of time and internet searching to work through it all.

My first problem was my own fault- when I originally set up my developer account, I used my work address, because I was just planning to teach the program in class. For a personal project (for pay), however, I needed the legal address to be my own. This took an email to request the change. 48 hours later, I got a response requiring me to fax my driver's license in to prove I was who I said I was. (As I said, it's all reasonable; I'm glad they did.) Then it took another 48 hours for that change to go through.

So today I approved the Apple contract, set up my business officers (all of them are just as good looking as the chief programmer), told them where to send the money, and gave them my tax info.

After that, I went to another section of the site to register my application for the App Store. This required setting a price, a description, screenshots, etc. All stuff I was expecting.

So then they told me to "upload your binary." Right. Where is this binary?!.

I remembered that I hadn't yet built the program as a "release" product - just as a "debug" product. So, I switched it over and hit build and run. And all the old settings bugs I'd had to hunt down months ago had to be done again. Ok. Still can't find the binary file.

I hunt around online. After many false leads with people on the Internet telling me to edit the internal files of my project with a text editor - a bad idea, IMHO- I found instructions to "build and archive." Great! But where's the binary file?

A little more poking around, and I discovered online that the build and archive command sends its result to the Organizer window, where there is also a "send to app store" button. After a few false starts where I realized that I had the program set for both iPod and iPad, I got it set to go. (My app is just for the iPad, at least for now.) But when I tried to send it in, I got a message saying that my provisioning profile didn't match up.

So I sent quite a while looking for what that meant. Finally, I found (in yet another part of Apple's website), a page that indicated that I needed a different profile to submit the apps than the one I was using to test them. A little more trial and error, and I got it to upload!

So now my little app is officially uploaded and "waiting for review." There's nothing to do for it now but to wait... In hindsight, there was a lot of this I could have done earlier; I didn't have to wait to finish my program to get started. Still, I am flush with the glow of victory!

But I still don't know where that binary file is.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad