http://danielbigham.ca/cgi-bin/blog.pl?keywords=general Daniel Bigham's Blog en-us A month or so ago I wrote this article. My hope is to encourage other developers to be as successful as they can if they can learn anything from my experiences this year: Link to article I'm presenting these ideas at the KWBBDev group meeting today. 10 May 2012 00:00:00 http://www.danielbigham.ca/cgi-bin/blog.pl?mode=view&id=884 I was excited this week to get an email from RIM offering to fly me down to Orlando and put me up at the Hilton to attend BB 10 Jam. I'm also excited to be getting the BB 10 Alpha device to start developing BB 10 apps. Obviously my top priority will be getting iTunes Sync up and running, but I don't expect it will take much work. From what I understand, the alpha device screens will be the same resolution and pixel density as final devices, and will have the same ports, just not in the same places as final devices, etc. Of critical importance is the screen, especially for development. Knowing that it will have the same screen characteristics as final devices is great! I submitted iTunes Sync to the App Circus competition. There are 3 prizes each worth $25,000, and only 9 competitors so far -- even if there are 50 apps by the time of the conference, that's a pretty small pool of competition for such large prizes! Given that iTunes Sync has been the top purchased app of the apps so far in the competition, who knows?! Yesterday I finally enhanced iTunes Sync to create your iTunes playlists on your PlayBook. The feature is currently implemented for Windows/PlayBook, so if you have a Mac and/or are using the phone version, the feature has yet to be added. Hopefully App World will approve this update soon, I'm sure lots of people will be happy to get it! That's one of the neat things of having about 25,000 customers: You can spend a few hours coding on a Saturday and a whole lot of people can see, download, and appreciate your efforts. A couple of weeks ago RIM released my success story, which is great. I enjoy getting the word out about what a great opportunity App World development is. This week I attended my first mobile event, called "MoBeers" here in Waterloo. It was wonderful to meet people face to face and chat, such as RIM's Alex Kinsella. He strikes me as being a great person for his role. I also saw Alec Saunders there but didn't meet him. Also nice to catch up with a couple of former Navtech employees. As a person who works from home, it's energizing to be able to chat with people in person! All the more looking forward to my time in Orlando, which is coming up fast! Also of recent was meeting Mike Kirkup, former RIM developer relations person (at Navtech hockey of all places), and Wes Worsfold, president at Motek, and leader of the KW BB Dev group. I'm planning on giving a talk on May 10th to the KW BB Dev group of my experiences. 15 Apr 2012 00:00:00 http://www.danielbigham.ca/cgi-bin/blog.pl?mode=view&id=879 Here we are on the eve of the launch of PlayBook OS 2.0, can't wait to try it out! Something that has struck me recently is that whereas several months ago it seemed no one had a PlayBook, now it seems everyone and their dog has a PlayBook, especially in the Waterloo area where I expect a lot of people were able to take advantage of the $99 deal that RIM employees were offered for a few days, as well as the wider $199 offer. Many of my friends and family, perhaps the majority, have one. What a switch! Sales of iTunes Sync are still fantastic, although they are unsurprisingly much lower than they were the week of Christmas. I am curious to see when more details of BB 10 will start to emerge, and whether RIM will get devices of some kind into the hands of developers. I am definitely getting more excited about BB 10 for some reason, and about the QNX platform in general. Part of that is that, on the development side, the platform already supports so many languages and tools. It seems like QNX is not only leading the other platforms but way ahead in that sense. Pretty impressive. 20 Feb 2012 00:00:00 http://www.danielbigham.ca/cgi-bin/blog.pl?mode=view&id=876 NOTE: If you are looking for support for my "Send to PC" app, click here. NOTE: If you are looking for support for my "Print" app, click here. NOTE: If you are having any issues with the program and would like to resolve them, please send me email at daniel.bigham.software@gmail.com rather than posting a review stating what your problem is. Unfortunately, developers have no way to contact people that leave reviews to help them. Ensure Wi-Fi is Connected - If you are using iTunes Sync with your BlackBerry phone, make sure you have Wi-Fi enabled and connected to your Wi-Fi network. To check this, go to your BlackBerry's "Manage Connections" screen (the icon looks like a radio tower) and verify that "Wi-Fi" is checked. Also make sure that the name of your Wi-Fi network appears next to the checkbox. If not, scroll down to the "Set Up Wi-Fi Network" menu item and click it to walk through the WiFi network wizard. If you are having trouble connecting - There is an ugly bug in that if you exit the iTunes Sync PC app by right clicking on it and selecting "Exit", and then you open the app again, the PlayBook won't be able to connect. This is because the .NET program calls a native library that listens for an incoming TCP connection, and there is no way for the .NET program to tell the native library to stop listening, so the program doesn't exit properly. Therefore, if you can't connect, log off of your Windows session and log back in again -- that will kill iTunes Sync and it will start again automatically when you log back in. (So make sure you don't try and start it a second time after logging back in) After you log back in, verify that iTunes Sync is in fact running in your Windows tray, which is at the bottom right of your screen. (You may have to click the little up arrow) - Ensure that your Windows Firewall has an exception to allow iTunes Sync to talk on your local network. When you started iTunes Sync for the first time, it likely caused a Windows dialog box to be displayed asking if you want to "Unblock" the program and allow it to talk on either the local and/or remote networks. Hopefully you clicked "Unblock". If not, these Windows Firewall exceptions may be missing. If you are finding that the program cannot connect, then you should probably start by disabling Windows Firewall to remove the possibility that this is the cause. Also note that if you uninstall and re-install the Windows PC program, it should prompt you again for whether you want to unblock the program, so if you missed clicking Unblock the first time, that will allow you to have a second chance at responding to that dialog appropriately. - If you got any sort of errors during the installation of the program, it may be due to a virus checker interfering. For example, Norton seems problematic. In these cases, disable your virus checker, uninstall iTunes Sync, log off of Windows, log back in, ensure your virus checker is still disabled, and then reinstall iTunes Sync. Then, check to see whether it is working properly. - If you are still having trouble connecting: -- Open a web browser on the computer running iTunes Sync, and go to: http://127.0.0.1:4556/hello You should see a message "Hello!". If you don't, it indicates that iTunes Sync isn't running properly. If logging off of Windows and logging back in doesn't fix this, then please contact me by email: daniel.bigham@gmail.com -- If that worked, go to a web browser on another computer running on your Wi-Fi network and go to the same address, but substitute for "127.0.0.1" the IP address of the computer running iTunes Sync (which can be found by right clicking the icon in the Windows Tray and selecting "What's my IP address?) If that doesn't display the "Hello!" text as it did on the computer running iTunes Sync, that indicates that something is preventing other devices on your network from connecting to your computer on TCP port 4556. Usually this is a matter of disabling Windows Firewall, but if that still doesn't work, please contact me by email and I will try and help you troubleshoot: daniel.bigham@gmail.com If not all of your songs are getting sync'd - The primary cause for this is that if your iTunes music is DRM (digital rights managements) protected, then it can't be used by mobile devices other than Apple products. To check this, right click on one of your non-sync'ing songs and select "Show In Windows Explorer". If the file extension ends with ".m4p", then it's DRM protected. Fortunately, Apple allows you to pay an additional 40 cents to free your music forever. The relevant URL for that is: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1711 If your virus checker is preventing installation - Be rest assured that the PC program doesn't have a virus. I uploaded the EXE to a website that runs it through virtually every virus manufacturer, and none of them flagged it as being a problem. As noted in a section above, disable your virus checker, uninstall iTunes Sync, log off of Windows, log back in, ensure your virus checker is still disabled, and then reinstall iTunes Sync. Then, check to see whether it is working properly. If the download link on the web page doesn't seem to be working - For the Windows PC version: Try right clicking this link and saving the .exe file to your hard drive, and then run it from there. Does the program run on Mac? - Yes! On December 29 I released a Mac version. The PlayBook app is the same one, while the download for the program that runs on your Mac can be found here: iTunes Sync for Mac. Note that the app description on App World is still pending a change to indicate that Mac support is available, but rest assured that the app available on App World is ready to go for use with Mac. 24 Dec 2011 00:00:00 http://www.danielbigham.ca/cgi-bin/blog.pl?mode=view&id=867 It has been a few weeks now since I released iTunes Sync, and amazingly sales continue to be very strong, even though the app has long since moved on from the "Newest" section. Having CrackBerry cover the app was another shot in the arm which returned sales close to first-release levels. Since then, sales had settled in at about $150/day (of which I get 70 percent), which for a guy who previous had at best $10/day apps, is incredible. This week has brought yet another surprise: Yesterday sales shot up to $320, and today, even though it's still early in the day, the numbers are looking similarly great. What is causing this big surge? I have yet to find out. One possibility is that it's my release this week of a phone version of the app. Unfortunately, RIM's spreadsheet downloads are down, and so I am unable to check whether these sales are PlayBook or phone sales. I have been receiving a steady supply of email from people using the PlayBook, but haven't received any mail from phone users, so I'd be surprised if these were phone sales. Also, I was very disappointed that when I released the phone version, it didn't show up in the "Newest" section of phones. There seems to be some underlying App World issues at play whereby PlayBook is treated as "just another device", which it is not. Something fun that happened a couple of days ago was that a friend from church sent me a message on Facebook that she had just bought a PlayBook and had bought iTunes Sync, then realizing that she knew the author. I love making connections like that! 22 Dec 2011 00:00:00 http://www.danielbigham.ca/cgi-bin/blog.pl?mode=view&id=866 I've been working at Wolfram Alpha for two years and three months now, and I'm finally working on the project that I always dreamed of working on: Next generation core parser design. Being moved onto this project has breathed new life into me, and I've been busy filling up my notebook with ideas. Doing this kind of R&D is extremely exciting, and so far, I feel like I've been more successful at it than I could have imagined. With any luck, my efforts along with the contributions of others will lead to a serious IQ boost for Alpha. 06 Dec 2011 00:00:00 http://www.danielbigham.ca/cgi-bin/blog.pl?mode=view&id=865 Since danielbigham.ca is my support URL for my mobile apps, I should have posted any/all support help instructions here several days ago, but I'm just getting to that now. If you are having trouble connecting - There is an ugly bug in that if you exit the iTunes Sync PC app by right clicking on it and selecting "Exit", and then you open the app again, the PlayBook won't be able to connect. This is because the .NET program calls a native library that listens for an incoming TCP connection, and there is no way for the .NET program to tell the native library to stop listening, so the program doesn't exit properly. Therefore, if you can't connect, log off of your Windows session and log back in again -- that will kill iTunes Sync and it will start again automatically when you log back in. (So make sure you don't try and start it a second time after logging back in) Or, alternatively, ensure iTunes Sync is running, and kill it forcefully using the Windows Task Manager, then start it again. - Ensure that your Windows Firewall has an exception to allow iTunes Sync to talk on your local network. When you started iTunes Sync for the first time, it likely caused a Windows dialog box to be displayed asking if you want to "Unblock" the program and allow it to talk on either the local and/or remote networks. Hopefully you clicked "Unblock". If not, these Windows Firewall exceptions may be missing. If not all of your songs are getting sync'd - The primary cause for this is that if your iTunes music is DRM (digital rights managements) protected, then it can't be used by mobile devices other than Apple products. To check this, right click on one of your non-sync'ing songs and select "Show In Windows Explorer". If the file extension ends with ".m4p", then it's DRM protected. Fortunately, Apple allows you to pay an additional 40 cents to free your music forever. The relevant URL for that is: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1711 - Another common cause of this is if you are trying to sync music that wasn't purchased and which doesn't have proper meta information. What I mean by this is that each purchased iTunes song is tagged with information about the name of the song, who the artist is, and what the name of the album is. The iTunes Sync program uses this information to put the songs in proper Album/Artist folders, and to name the song files appropriately. If your songs are missing this information, such as if they are .mp3 files that were created by some means that did not add this information, then the iTunes Sync program currently doesn't touch them. You can verify whether a song is missing this information by going to your music folder, then iTunes, and looking in the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file, and searching for the song name. There should be XML tags giving the song name, artist, and album. If not, you have discovered why iTunes Sync isn't sync'ing the file. I would like to think about this some more and update the program so that it can do something sensible with these files rather than ignoring them. If your virus checker is preventing installation - Be rest assured that the PC program doesn't have a virus. I uploaded the EXE to a website that runs it through virtually every virus manufacturer, and none of them flagged it as being a problem. You could try disabling your virus checker during installation of the PC program. If the download link on the web page doesn't seem to be working - Try right clicking this link and saving the .exe file to your hard drive, and then run it from there. Does the program run on Mac? - Not yet, but I hope to do that. The description of the application refers to the program as being for Windows PC. I will edit the description to hopefully make this clearer. If you would like a refund, developers unfortunately don't have any means to do that, but if you contact App World Support, they may be able to help. 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 http://www.danielbigham.ca/cgi-bin/blog.pl?mode=view&id=864 A couple of months ago I wrote a post about the news that only 200,000 PlayBooks were sold that quarter, and how things were looking pretty rocky. Fortunately, the feeling of things has picked up a bit recently. The biggest help has been discounts to the price of the PlayBook, which at first were $200 off, and are now $300 off. I seem to be reading things indicating that stores are for the most part completely sold out, and that RIM has even started selling the devices directly from its website. My guess is that this will lead to a lot of PlayBooks getting out into consumer hands, which is great. (especially for developers) Next, is the announcement that BBX phones will have the same resolution as the PlayBook. It still remains unclear how easy it will be to port PlayBook apps to BBX phones, but it is starting to sound pretty easy, and that's exciting because it means that most of the work developers have been putting into PlayBook apps will pay dividends down the road. Music to my ears. Another change is that, as time has rolled along, more apps have started popping up. I wasn't sure this would happen given the glum mood a couple of months ago, but it has. A bunch of EA games have been published, Duke Nukem showed up recently, and a couple days ago a really beautiful game Machinarium appeared. I can't imagine any of these will get much return on investment, so it's hard to say whether this will be of long term significance, but still, having some good content sprouting up lightens the mood. I have published some new apps as of recent. Since I create really light weight, simple apps, one would only expect them to be drops in the bucket, but I think that two of them are pretty solid additions to the PlayBook repertoire. The first was Picasa Sync, which allows you to wireless keep your PlayBook up to date with your best photos. It got covered by BerryReview, was a featured PlayBook app, and all around I think was a notable addition to the PlayBook app selection. I have since publish Flickr Sync and SmugMug sync, and just last night significantly upgraded Picasa Sync to allow selecting which albums to download if you so desire. Another app that I published recently, which I hope is about to be approved (fingers crossed) is iTunes Sync, which allows you to keep your PlayBook up to date with your recent music purchases, sans wires. This is a really really nice feature to have, something that I always wished mobile devices did well, and if I am successful at delivering that to the PlayBook, I think that's another significant up-tick. So it has been exciting not only to see positive signs, but to feel like, without much effort, I have been able to make real contributions to the community. 24 Nov 2011 00:00:00 http://www.danielbigham.ca/cgi-bin/blog.pl?mode=view&id=863 I was treated to a surprise this morning when I peeked at my app sales: It was only 8 AM and my Baby Names app had already generated $20 of revenue, whereas typically it would be between $0 and and $4 for that time of day. Nothing like that has happened before, so I wondered to myself what could be going on... a couple hours later, it was up to $30, then $40. Obviously something was up. I discovered that my app was was a featured application on BlackBerry's app world page. Of the 40 or so apps, it was the 40th one. To my amusement however, the last app shows up to the left of the first app, slightly dimmed, whereas apps 2-39 aren't visible at all unless you wait on the page for the carousel to slowly rotate through. By the end of the day I've earned $50, and the extra revenue has caused my app to show up on the PlayBook "Top Purchased" section of App World, which is cool too. Interesting to know that the 20th highest grossing app on PlayBook brings in around $50 of revenue every day. (I'd bet the equivalent spot on the iPhone's charts brings in > $2500/day) 30 Sep 2011 00:00:00 http://www.danielbigham.ca/cgi-bin/blog.pl?mode=view&id=859