Looking for that perfect St. Patrick’s Day iPhone App? You just found it

iRISH is THE iPhone App for St. Patrick’s Day! Whether your blood runs green or you just have the Irish spirit - iRISH is the fun and very social iPhone app to ring in St. Paddy’s Day.

iRISH The St. Patrick's Day iPhone App. Celebrate St. Patty's day with a kiss!

On March 17th, ask that special someone - or that person you want to be your special someone - to kiss the screen.  On the third kiss, an imprint of their lips appear and the kiss is analyzed (drumroll please!) - if a true son or daughter of Ireland in spirit - the kisser receives the luck of the Irish!

Grab a Guinness, your four-leaf clovers and the iRISH app to bring the luck of the Irish to your St. Patrick’s Day festivities.

If you’re really lucky you’ll get that special someone to plant their lips somewhere other than your iPhone on St. Patrick’s Day!

The iRISH app is available for both the iPhone and iPod Touch (iTouch) in the Appstore today for .99 cents.

Turn your iPhone Green! Buy the iRISH app

Break out the Internet siren…

The status for the following application has changed to Ready for Sale.

Application Name: iRISH

Application Version Number: 1.0

The status hasn’t yet changed in iTunes Connect however.

Developing…

Sigh. Here we go again.

Thank you for submitting your application to Apple’s App Store. Unfortunately, your application cannot be added to the App Store because it uses standard iPhone screen images in a non-standard way, potentially resulting in user confusion. Changing the behavior of standard iPhone graphics, actions, and images, or simulating failures of those graphics, actions, or images is a violation of the iPhone Developer Program agreement which requires applications to abide by the Human Interface Guidelines.

We’re not even sure what to say about this one, since their reasons for rejection have literally no basis in reality. This isn’t sour grapes (no, really), but unless “standard iPhone screen images” means something completely different from what it says, this just literally is not true. I’m not sure what to say about “potential user confusion,” but the entire app experience is scripted and designed around the user in such a way that it is impossible for users to become confused. I know their rejections are form letters, but they picked the wrong one to respond to us. Frankly I would have been happier with “Sorry, we don’t like your app.”

We love the iPhone - I woke up this morning to receive this news on my iPhone - but for us, a viable business model is looking harder and harder to sustain on this platform. We’re going to have to think long and hard about what to do next. For now we’ll enter into the nebulous appeals process (namely, reply to the rejection email, making sure to “include the line below in follow-up emails for this request”) and see if we can get clarification.

We’ll also have a post later with more information, and more information on the app that got rejected this time, which we’ve been keeping under wraps until now. Stay tuned.

We resubmitted our homegrown app, iRISH, today.  Getting rejected for a completely arbitrary reason was a punch in the gut.

We were pleased with the first version of iRISH.  It was simple, it didn’t exactly have much function - but it was cute & fun.   Everyone we shared the app with loved it.  For Apple to just arbitrarily say it didn’t have enough user function seemed incredibly inconsistent and unfair.  If the people we tested it on loved it, surely there are other app aficionados who would have enjoyed it.  Let the market decide.  Apple takes 30%, why would they not want that money?

Still, we went back to the xcode drawing board and added some more functionality, some more images and some more sound effects - and we have to admit the end result is a much more complete experience.

Rejection breeds improvement, which could be what Apple was going for.  They saw the potential iRISH had and wanted the developers to make the most of it.   Or… the review process is just inconsistent.

The yellow “in review” light is back on.  We wait.

Hello RareApps,

We’ve reviewed your application, and we have determined that this application contains minimal user functionality and will not be appropriate for the App Store.

If you would like to share it with friends and family, we recommend you review the Ad Hoc method on the Distribution tab of the iPhone Developer Portal for details on distributing this application among a small group of people of your choosing or if you believe that you can add additional user functionality to iRISH, we encourage you to do so and resubmit it for review.

Wow. We knew this was a possibility, of course, but this is harsh.

We haven’t decided where to take this yet. We definitely believe in the app and the concept, and there are numerous apps in the App Store with less functionality than we offer. This is fine — we think that the market is capable of determining app value — but this is a concrete reminder of what it means to have a gatekeeper conception of app sales. So while we’re not exactly sure where we came up lacking, we’ll try to see what we can do to address their concerns. Unfortunately, we also have a pretty tight deadline that we were trying to meet, in order to most effectively market our inaugural application, so timing should be interesting…

Finally, Apple, can we note that ad hoc distribution is ridiculously finicky? As in unusably finicky? Please don’t recommend this as a viable distribution method except solely for testing purposes — or better yet, fix it?

We just submitted our app to Apple. Except it wasn’t the one we had been planning on submitting all along. That’s right - App#1 didn’t make it in first (we’re squashing the final few bugs in our developer’s most recent build). Instead, App#2 is on its way into Apple’s loving (or not-so-loving) arms. It’s pretty exciting and satisfying to be at this point, particularly since we developed this app independently. A month ago, we never would have thought that we were capable of doing this, but here we are.

Fingers crossed…

Wow, 30 Rock was a riot tonight. I loved the reference to 99 Luftballons, the famous anti-balloon protest song.

Hast du etwas Zeit fur mich? Dann singe ich ein Lied fur dich…

A funny thing happened on the way to getting our app.

We sort of learned some xcode.   Enough to build a simple concept app, anyway.   Provisioning is now (mostly) a cakewalk.   We understand the ins and outs of the resource library, and the way the different headers and main pages of the code works.   Throw in some “Hello World” examples from Apple’s Developer resources and you’re on your way to an app.

Basically, it looks like we have App #2 on the way - one created directly by your friendly developers at RareApps.  This is pretty exciting stuff.  It’s still in the early stages but we’ll have more on this in future.

We’re still waiting on another revision of App#1, but discussions with the developer have gone well, and we’re pretty sure we’re all on the same page now.

We got the first build of the app back today and it was pretty damn exciting to finally have something to actually take a look at.   Of course, nothing is as easy as it seems - as we keep learning over, and over, and over.

For an xcode n00b, first loading the app in there and trying to test it on your device does not “just work”, like most other things apple.    Xcode itself is actually pretty self explanatory.  20 minutes of looking through the different resource files and code and you get a pretty good idea of how things work.  We’ve worked with some coding before (Intro to C++ in college!) and have some experience with web development.  For the most part all basic coding terminology is the same, so we could quickly figure out how stuff was working.

Provisioning is another story.   Now, I’ll give it to apple.  The documentation is pretty clear and has a walkthrough that makes sense.  From what I gather, this wasn’t always the case, so thumbs up to apple on that.  However, this process is laughably complex.  It takes no less than 20 steps to get your device provisioned for testing - creating and uploading certificates from Keychain,  downloading and placing certificates back into Keychain, loading your provisioning profile into Xcode, setting the Bundle identifiers, making sure you select the provision within the project build properties - all this and then it won’t work and you’ll get some error message that means nothing.

Fantastic.

Well after an hour of googling the error message I finally decided just to quit Xcode and restart it.   It worked.  Awesome.

But the app as delivered is not quite what I had expected from our SOW (that’s scope of work for the rest of us).  This was to be expected though, this was the first build - a test run.   So we draft an email with our thoughts and we’re back to the waiting game.

At least next time we won’t spend 3 hours trying to provision our devices for testing.  Hopefully.

Now we wait to see what the developer can come up with.  The app is pretty simple so we should have a first look at something in the next few days.  At that point we’ll have to actually figure out how to use xcode.   We’ve read about some people having nightmares with provisioning and the like, but surely with nearly 20,000 apps in the store it can’t be that hard.  … Right?

We’ve decided that we’re going to keep the specifics of our app under wraps until we can get it into the approval process.   Not that we don’t welcome competition - hell, we went ahead with this project after discovering that there were at least 3 apps in the approval process that are relatively similar - No, it’s more that we aren’t in control of the code right now, or the timing, and frankly we don’t want a very quick, very skilled individual from taking the concept and running with it.  There’s already so much noise in the appstore, the last thing we need is another app with the exact same concept landing before us.

So a secret it will remain, and hopefully this journal of our trials and tribulations will keep you interested for now.