In one of the tab’s views I had a standard button with a Touch Up Inside event that I had connected to a buttonClicked method in the view’s controller.  For some reason, when I tapped that button the app would crash.  This was not happening when I built the same stuff in a single view app.

I went searching and was happy to find that the problem was well described and solved in the developer forums of MacNN.  It turns out that when you have have multiple view controllers for separate .xib files being controlled by a Tab Bar Controller you need to take an extra step of setting the Class Identity for that particular view. Here’s how:

1. Open up MainWindow.xib in Interface Builder
2. Expand the Tab Bar Controller item. (Your views are displayed)
3. Single-click the controller containing your button.
4. Hit ⌘-4 to bring up the Properties Inspector.
5. Under Class Identity at the top, you’ll see the Class is set to UIViewController.  You need to use the dropdown to select the controller for that particular view.  In my case it was called SounderViewController, but it should match the name of the controller where your button clicked method is.

Voila.  Hope that helped you. If it did, please leave a comment. If it didn’t, please leave a comment.  Follow me on Twitter for iOS, music and life musings: @jetsetter.

I’m pumped to announce availability of Rock Show 2.0.  This is the first version of Rock Show that works on the iPad and both the iPhone and iPod Touch.  A lot of fixes and tweaks are in this version of the application, along with some new posters as well!

Two articles are up about the release, Padgadget is hosting one item and a second can be found at IntoMobile.  For a full low-down and updated info on the app, visit its page: http://www.rockshow.fm

Apple doesn’t give much guidance on this important chunk of text. “Write your Application Description with a focus on what makes the functionality or design of your app unique.” was a tip from this past June from the App Store Tips blog.

We know that 4000 characters is the limit.  And App descriptions are made up of simple text, including unicode symbols like checkboxes (✔) and more (♣☢☂).  Apple takes your unicode text and formats it for display on the web via Web Preview, in iTunes and on the iOS devices themselves (the app store).

Since you probably have very specific points you want to get across, and users have a very short attention span, you need to pay attention to how Apple will format what you write.  In this entry I discuss how to create app descriptions that look great everywhere Apple publishes your app description.

Word Wrap and the Fold

Word wrap occurs in app descriptions when enough characters fill up a line.  Each line has a maximum number of characters and when a word goes over that, it is bumped to the next line.  This is important because one word of word wrap can waste an entire line of potential ad copy.  This is important: the length of your lines in your app description affects the placement of the fold.

The fold is the point where iTunes, Web Preview or the iPad App Store app decide to make the user click or tap the More… button.  Everything below the fold is out of sight, out of mind.  Without the data to prove it, my hunch is that at least half the time, users are not bothering to click More… before deciding whether they are installing an app or not.

All this means is that you must use the space above the fold as effectively as possible.

All app purchase vectors limit the top of fold line display to three lines.  Two important rules here:

1. Blank lines count as lines.
2. Lines over 120 characters in length will lead to word wrap and the use of an additional line above the fold line.

App Description Formatting on iTunes and Web Preview

Web Preview and iTunes behave in a similar way, Web Preview is just that, a summary of your app description and screenshots along with a link to view the app in iTunes.  The final step on a computer is to have iTunes open to the page where the user clicks purchase to download the app.  A history of Web Preview and SEO implications may be found here.

Both iTunes and Web Preview show the same number of lines from your app description before the “break” point.  A break point is where all text is hidden below the fold, and the user must click the More… link to display the rest.

Let’s look at some examples. The following three shots were taken from Web Preview.  iTunes displays the same amount of information as Web Preview, however only Web Preview has fixed width.  Resize the iTunes app window, allows longer word-wrapping lines but ultimately the same amount of information above the fold as Web Preview.

Note: Click any images to see the full size.

Here the app publisher has chosen to highlight two specific sentences and put a line of space between them for readibility.  Note that if the first line was longer than 120 characters, top of fold would be a complete and a partial line (due to the wrap) and the third would simply be a blank space.

Here the app publisher has one long line of text with no carriage returns.  This means that all three allowable lines of text are the result of one word wrapped line.  This is the maximum amount of information you can cram into the top of fold, but it does not read very well here.  Wait until you see how ad copy like this looks in the iPhone’s App Store.  For your reference, this one line of text is about 343 characters in length.

Looking at the devices

Currently there are two different sizes in the iOS hardware family.  The long one, (iPhone and iPod Touch devices), and the wide one, (iPad devices).  In addition, there are three types of binaries, iPhone only apps, iPad only apps and Universal apps, which work on both iPhone (iPod Touch too) and iPad.

If your app is only for iPhone you need to focus on how it is displayed in the iPhone’s app store.  If it is only for iPad, you need to look at it there.  In either case you also need to look at how Apple’s relatively new Web Preview page displays your app description too.

App Description Formatting on the iPhone

Often users install apps directly on their device, rather than using iTunes and syncing a purchase.  It is certainly less clunky and you have instant satisfaction of getting to run the app right away.  That means your app description marketing copy should be influenced by how the lines of text look when displayed on each of these devices.

Here are some screenshots of how word wrapping of text affects readability on the iPhone App Store app.  Note that the iPhone app store app only supports portrait orientation.

Interestingly, a long line of text looks like a nice paragraph on the iPhone.  Also, Apple uses the bullet character to bullet features.

Note here that the long lines make the display of this text awkward and difficult to read.  (I use it anyhow!)

Note a few things here:

1. The first and third lines are used so Web Preview and iTunes display both lines top of fold.
2. The bulleted lists do not word wrap, (the max char per line is 45).
3. Unicode goodness makes it look crisp.
4. Attention goes to lines 17 and 18 in the app description.  They are the final ones before the user would scroll down to see the screen shots.

Here’s Rock Show’s Web Preview:

App Description Formatting on the iPad

The iPad app store app supports both landscape and portrait modes.  It also brings back the idea of the fold and its exposing link, “More…”  In this way, the iPad’s app store application is formated more like iTunes’ traditional display.  See for yourself by comparing iBooks Web Preview with the landscape view of the iPad App Store app. iBooks also happens to have a fancy custom background that 3rd party developers generally won’t have access to:

Conclusion

There isn’t an easy way to preview how your app’s text will look in all these different store fronts until after it is published , but you can at least know what you’re up against.

Experiment with your language and line length.  Every opportunity for a new installation of your software on an iOS device holds not only immediate, but residual value.  Since potential users may view your value proposition from a few different angles, pay attention to the quirks and write accordingly.

A Note on Media Alignment

It is worth noting that we’re beginning to see more media outlets align with or against Apple.  From my frequent review of popular mobile news coverage, it has become clear that Gizmodo and PC World do their best to highlight gaffes and problems in the iTunes ecosystem or just about iAnything.  Meanwhile a blog like MacRumors seeks to downplay news that might be viewed as concerning or add to the distress from iphone4antennaegate. (I just made that up).

While the title of these publications alone should serve as a strong indicator, keeping track is important.   The Clintons are well known for keeping their loyalty lists in order and it is entirely reasonable to assume Apple is doing the same.   For the record, I run an iOS app development group and generally advocate for the iOS platform.

The Recent Gaming of the App Store

Back to the issue at hand, MacRumors published a piece titled, “Reports of ‘App Store Hacked’ Greatly Exaggerated” that sought to downplay concerns related to the book category being hijacked by a rogue developer for over four days.  Indeed, the book category is small, however any evidence that challenges the fairness of the App store only adds to the mindset that not all developers get a fair shot.

When news like this is published it suggests that as an app developer, you not only must court and respond to any marketing opportunities provided by Apple (few and far between) but also worry about your app competing on its own merits in the top 50 ranking.

Apple ID Password Policy

Currently the only requirement for a password that may be used to access iTunes, MobileMe, the iOS developer portal and more is that it be 6 characters in length.  As far as I can tell, there are no other requirements and no common passwords are blocked.  (I briefly changed my password to ‘password’ to test this.)

To quote Wikipedia’s entry, “Password policies are usually a tradeoff between theoretical security and the practicalities of human behavior.”  In the case of the iTunes music store the practicalities of human behavior are that the general public is really bad at remembering passwords, especially if they require numbers or upper case letters.

From Apple’s perspective, when someone forgets their password they can not buy virtual goods, whether that be music, videos or apps.  It is my belief that Apple forces you to re-enter your password when ‘buying’ free applications or upgrading previous applications specifically to make sure you always know your password just in case you decide you want to buy something.

Given the number of accounts out there linked directly to credit cards, it is fair to assume that if Apple were to implement a stronger password policy it would have a negative effect on sales.  And, at least for the moment, the number of negative publicity associated with compromised accounts and their use to game the app store does not outweigh this figure.

Apple ID password requirements appear to have been unchanged for years, as hack reports have been reported for some time.  What is new is the app store gaming.  No one cares about others’ poor password choices until they start affecting their own bottom line.

This of course affects those who have unauthorized charges to their credit card, and also those developers with apps in competition for rankings in the book category.

My guess would be that the unethical developer behind this push would also game up competitors apps so that it is unclear which is at fault or benefiting the most from the hacking.  It seems that Apple should have checks and balances to detect for and trigger a flag when a previously unpopular, over-priced iOS app is suddenly in the top 10.

Evidence of folks who have discovered hacks are currently in the comments for some of the apps that have made their way up through gaming.  Currently “Conan 3″ an app described as “this is a application to read book” by Thuat Nguyen is in position #9 in the books category today. One of the reviews is as follows:

Watch Out!

Someone out there is hacking into people’s iTunes accounts.  This just happened to me last night.  Luckily, my bank is right on top of things like this and did not authorize release of the funds and closed the account.  Keep a watchful eye on your account information….often!”

Here’s a screen shot of that app’s preview page as it stands. Here are a few tweets about folks getting their iTunes account hacked and an article from May on what the fallout when your iTunes account gets hacked.

Consider updating your iTunes password to include numbers, characters and capitalization!

When I went in search for the course files, I found them all individually linked on the course downloads page.  Since I don’t want to have to return to this page, I used a Firefox plugin to download all of the files and then organized them into folders. The result is one single archive for you to download.

Download – Stanford CS193P.zip – 81.3 MB

Most people are going to get an error when building projects from this set: “error: There is no SDK with the name or path…” Gonzalo Gasca posted a four step solution to this:

1. From the Projects menu in XCode, choose “Edit Project Settings”
2. Click on the “General” tab. Near the bottom of the inspector window, you should see the path to the non-existant SDK that’s troubling you.
3. Change the selection for “Cross-Develop Using Target SDK:” to another listed SDK instead of “Other” as it probably currently reads.
4. Click Build, and away you go!

It is nothing short of amazing that this level of educational material is available for free.  I came across the Stanford course after Windows Phone 7 evangelist Paul Thurrott pointed out that Microsoft has a lot of catching up to do in the realm of developer documentation and free training products.  He’s right.

My software company, Neutrinos, has been hard at work on an application for the Apple iPad called Rock Show.  Rock Show is an interactive art gallery for concert posters that lets you view, share and buy original limited edition artwork.

We’re very excited about the potential of the iPad and hope that this application does the device justice enough to be included in the launch of the grand opening of the  iPad App Store.

For more information about Rock Show, visit the official website, RockShow.fm. You can enter your email address to be notified of availability. Be sure to follow the app on Twitter @r0ckshow.  (The first o is a zero)

I’m going to list reasons these are not adopted, reasons they should be and a score for how hard it would be to adopt it where 1 is super easy, and 10 is hard. Here are three that I’ve identified and feel strongly about today:

3.  Mac OS X

The growth in quality of OS X as a Windows replacement has been a long time coming.

Reasons it is not adopted: Too expensive to buy a mac, unfamiliar methods for doing common things “I know how to do” in Windows, not seen as business ready.

Reasons it should be: The added expense is worth it in design and customer service, the new ways of doing old things require only minor variation in user behavior, you can run your legacy business tools on Windows in a Parallels window.

Difficulty of Adoption: 6.   Four points for learning how to launch programs and handle files in a new operating system. 2 points for the expense.  Great Macbooks can be found for less than $700 on Craigslist!

2. Lala

Reasons it is not adopted: I’ve never heard about it

Reasons it should be: Apple purchased this company because Lala negotiated an excellent set of deals with the recording industry.  These deals allow you to stream (almost) your complete mp3 collection from any computer anywhere in the world.  Forget bringing over your iPod to your friend’s house, just log into Lala there and boom you’ve got all your tunes via the internets.

Difficulty of Adoption: 2.  You have to download the Lala “Music Mover” which actually just scans your music collection and tells Lala what it is ok for you to stream.  This is a no-brainer, do it now.

1. Twitter

Reasons it is not adopted: Irrational fear of change, confusion over how it works, concern that the service is used for mindless updates only.

Reasons it should be: If you graduated from respecting only your local newspaper to allowing for reading the New York Times on the web, you are also ready to get updates via Twitter.  Anything is confusing if you have dedicated almost zero time learning about it. Yes, there are tons of mindless updates but also some of the world’s greatest known and unknown luminaries are sharing their thoughts and links.  You can screen out the silly people, you just don’t follow them.

Difficulty of Adoption: 6.  Four points for getting over your prideful indulgence that you already have as much information access as you need.  Two points for the time you’ll have to spend finding people to follow, what it means to @reply and what a RT is.

Apple enthusiasts are often quick to point out that the iPhone would run out of batteries too quickly or the processor would not be strong enough to support snappy use of multiple applications.  This proves true in testing a jailbroken iPhone.  But the iPad Apple tablet does not get the same defense.  The carefully touted A4 chip should have no problem running a sophisticated 3rd party application and the native mail client at the same time.

This is big trouble as more complex games for the device are introduced.  For example Grand Theft Auto, The China Town Wars, is a complex 3D game recently released for the iPhone and iPod Touch. GTA: CTW has the potential to lose mission progress by dropping you back to your apartment every time the game is left unexpectedly.  While this clearly negatively affects the gamer experience, imagine how frequent push notifications begging gamers to leave for just a moment will affect more persistent, longer-session games like World of Warcraft.

The A4 is pretty tough chip and conceivably should have the ability to safely run multiple iPhone and iPod Touch applications, if not the more weighty future iPad-specfic titles.  So why isn’t multitasking being allowed?

Apple does not want people to use streaming music services like Pandora and Last.fm until it is ready with its own cloud-based, Genius-powered streaming music recommendation engine a seamless listening experience through the iPod application and iTunes.

Currently, the only ways to play back audio while running another application (crippled multitasking) are:

• Using the iPod application
• Downloading an mp3 or other audio attachment from an email and hitting play. (Plays back from within the mail application)
• Downloading an mp3 or other audio from the web. (Safari plays it back)

Similarly, the only way to playback streaming audio is using the Last.fm application, the Pandora application or a few other apps that use a recommendation engine to create lists of songs you do not own and stream them to you.  If Apple were to allow you to playback Pandora today on the iPad and work with the iLife suite to author documents they will be training you not to use iTunes!

“But they can’t get away with that!” That’s right, they can’t.  That’s why Apple will introduce its cloud-based iTunes offering either before or in tandem with the release of the next generation iPhone this coming around June. Using the brains acquired in the purchase of Lala, Apple will be introducing a mixed-mode local and cloudbased listening experience where any iTunes music collection can be played back in part on the locally stored disk or streamed from the cloud using an iPad.

Apple will use Genius to identify and stream audio to iPad users in its own competitive play against Pandora and Last.fm.  Once a strong streaming, Genius-powered solution is available to iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users future devices will be able to multi-task all applications, including the most threatening, streaming audio services.

Jobs made it a point to illustrate Apple has 125 million credit cards on file through iTunes.  Every streaming audio selection that is in turn bought by the user can be facilitated using that payment information.  Not the case with Pandora or Last.fm!  Denying these applications the ability to gain traction gives the iTunes ecosystem time to evolve to include their services.  This will make the future allowance of multitasking apps delivering this music less impactful in pulling users away from greatest cash cow in software’s history: iTunes.

The idea is that the iSlate will communicate and be driven in part by nearby iPhones and iPod Touch devices over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.  Authorized iPhone and iPod Touch devices nearby the iSlate will act as sophisticated remote controls.  This use case takes advantage of the user’s likely existing Apple hardware in the Touch platform and focuses on the fact that the iSlate will likely have a large, bright screen with a reasonable viewing angle. Let’s examine a potential killer application of this idea.

The tablet screen will be able to lie flat on a table between two or more people.  Through iTunes, the owner of the tablet will purchase an application that runs full screen on the tablet.  The publisher of the tablet application will also make available free applications that run on the iPhone and iPod Touch and communicate directly with the app running on the tablet.

Using the Apple Tablet as a Centerpiece to Electronic Board Games

A great example would be the classic board game, Scrabble.  In Scrabble, you have a board that requires physical placement of letters on a major center area.  It also requires players to keep the letters in their tray secret from other players.  In a Scrabble for the iSlate scenario, players need only to have an iPhone or iPod Touch to virtually hold their letters.

The iPod Touch or iPhone could vibrate or make a noise when it is a player’s turn and it would be used to send the results of the player’s decisions to the Apple tablet at the center of the table.

One important aspect of this is size, the traditional Scrabble board is a fair bit larger than the expected 10.1″ Pixel Qi powered display.  I believe that this type of thing could be overcome by the tablet giving intelligent focus to the most relevant portions of the board.  Additionally, the iPod Touch and iPhone could be used to manipulate the current viewing area on the tablet, or that area could be manipulated directly using standard multi-touch.

Many other board games would work in this scenario, including Monopoly, where you are handling all kinds of cash, property cards and frequent score calculations. The value you get out of the pairing of a Tablet and the iPhone is that there is a new bridge between physical social interaction and the convenience of an electronic presentation.

Using the Apple Tablet to Share Presentations in Small Groups

There are many other killer applications where the iPhone and iPod Touch serve as input devices to the iSlate or Apple tablet.  One I would use in my meetings for my iPhone application design company, Neutrinos, LLC is a business application is in small group presentations.  The tablet is set up to run a presentation application full screen.

The tablet is handed to one or more clients seated near each other.  The presenter uses an iPod Touch or iPhone to control playback of the presentation.  The presenter’s multi-touch device offers presentation notes, previous and next slide previews and allows them to trigger in-presentation events like animations or even jumping out to a web-view for the clients to explore.  This gives the presenter an opportunity to give a private and engaging presentation in the middle of any cafe, airport or public space.

Using the Apple Tablet for Illustration and as a Supplemental Display Area for Floating Windows

A final use case scenario for using the iPhone and iPod Touch to drive the Tablet is in illustration.  I’ve been working directly with Portland artist Carolyn Main who spends a lot of time with her Wacom tablet.  While the Wacom offers a great deal of pressure point precision that the Apple Touch Platform is unlikely to compete with any time soon, it is reasonable to think that app developers will try to deliver illustration and animation applications that allow creation on the go.

Having an illustration application like Adobe Illustrator running on the tablet, and then being able to use an iPhone or iPod touch for swatch, tool or layer management would leave more of the iSlate’s screen real estate for drawing.

In John Gruber’s recent post about the tablet he writes: “And so in answer to my central question, regarding why buy The Tablet if you already have an iPhone and a MacBook, my best guess is that ultimately, The Tablet is something you’ll buy instead of a MacBook.”  My suggestion is that people buy the tablet because they already have an iPhone or iPod Touch.  Having both a Tablet and a touch makes the Tablet more useful with some great use case scenarios the low-tech realm of board gaming to business.