Oh Happy Day!!

My first iPhone App is available in the App Store.

RADIO Dandelion is an audio streamer coupled with a content discovery engine. It plays the music from a radio station inspired by the late great John Peel. As it does so, it looks up info about what is playing, finding images, biogs, discographies, related artists, videos etc. etc.

It was a fun but challenging project.

The review process was more problematic than I expected. I sent it to Apple in late November, just after reading reports about single station radio apps being rejected, which was scary.

Actual review started two weeks later and it was almost immediately rejected.

The grounds for rejection were very vague and I cannot say I ever got a straight answer from them about what was wrong. It became almost Kafka-esque as they began to accuse me of trademark and content theft. Content that on even a cursory inspection you could see I was not using. I even told them at one point that it was not logically possible to prove that something did not exist. I was mildly rude a few times when I thought they deserved it, I was finding the process unhelpful and disrespectful, I even reminded them I had paid to be treated fairly by the review process.

Finally yesterday, out of the blue, someone wrote to say the process had moved on, thanked me for my patience and even left their name. Hours later it was on the App Store.

They do like their mystique.

So, quite a steep learning curve for me. This has got to be the most complex bit of software I have written. It is heavily multi-threaded, something I had done little of before. Making it behave sensibly in very poor conditions was a challenge. Reproducing variable networking conditions for testing can be very difficult. Manual memory management is not fun at first. Migrating from the iPhone Simulator to a real device was more of a shock than expected.

My first update is in development, I hope to send that to Apple in a few days.

Lots of ideas about where to take this.

Loving the combination of design and coding.

Please take a look, tell me what you think, write glowing reviews, then hire me!!!