Spent much of this week finishing off the next stage of development for the Chess Viewer. One of the key things we wanted to get into this version was the ability to buy books from Everyman Chess’s website. If you look at their iPhone app page you’ll see that they have a selection of books available in the right format for the iOS app. Each of these is sold for $19.99. At the moment it would be quite a faff to buy the book in Safari on your phone and then download it and get it into the app, the new functionality aims to make this much easier by letting you browse the books on the phone and purchase them with your iTunes details. I was a little nervous about how difficult this could be having read some horror stories, but it did all seem relatively straight-forward so I had only allowed 2-3 days for it. In the end it did take just about 3 days and wasn’t so bad, I think I was well prepared having read some great web pages about it so that when I did have problems I knew how to handle them. This page had some great information and a class to use to work with the app store. This in-app purchases walkthrough was also invaluable. The first of those links seemed to be aiming for a different sort of thing than I was so I actually used the second more but reading both was good to know what to expect. The second one was good for taking you through the steps you’d need to do, including setting up the items to be purchased in iTunes Connect, and also telling you what you’d need to do before testing. A second page by the same guy gives a good breakdown for how to handle “Invalid Product ID” messages from the app store. I did get to a point where I was repeatedly getting no valid product IDs from Apple’s servers and so was seeing no products in my store, in this case (following the instructions on that page) I needed to delete the app and reinstall it to get things going again.

I got all of this working and managed to finish the other features and fix a few remaining bugs. I’m really happy with how things are looking, the app has gone from being a fairly basic looking iPhone app (with lots going on under the hood) to a much better presented app (with even more going on under the hood!) Hopefully we won’t find too many bugs while testing over the next few weeks and can get the new version on the store soon.

A few more libraries that really helped me were ASIHTTPRequest - a great iOS class for handling web requests which made it really easy for me to submit files back to the server if people have problems with them, I’m sure I’ll be using this one again. Also ZIStoreButton - a class that mimics the buy button on the app store, it shows up as a blue button with a price in and when tapped changes to green and says “Buy Now”. I’ve linked to my own github fork there as I did make a few changes to make it more compatible with pre-iOS4 devices and to (IMHO) better match the style of the app store button.

Apart from this I attended the 4th Maker Night of the year. That was good fun, we had a great turn-out and had people working on all sorts of different things. I found I wandered between projects catching up with people and helping out but did get time to help complete a few pieces for the Cupcake 3D printer we’ve been building. Also this week, on a similar vein, I’ve been writing up my experiences with my new “home management” system - YAHMS. There’ll be more to come from that when I get time.