Alaska Dev Girl: RIA and IOS Dev in the Far North!

I haven’t posted in ages as I dove head first into app development this summer, and have hardly surfaced for air since. I am psyched to report that my InstaSpanish Kids App has been chosen as a finalist in the Adobe Air/Sony App Challenge, and they sent me 2 interesting tablets to test with, and gave me access to some sweet new code over at the Adobe Prerelease program. Wow!

I plan on doing an article and maybe a tutorial on my development process, as well as the process of trying to get an app promoted and actually SOLD via the 4 avenues I’m pursuing right now: Barnes and Noble (Color Nook tm), Apple, Amazon, and Android. So far the Android Market has left me totally unimpressed as a potential for sales, as most people on there have phones that are just not my target market as far as a kids elearning app goes. Also, they make it impossible to upgrade an app published on a new computer, something to do with the certificate not being read as the same, even though it IS in fact the same certificate! So I’m having to leave my current customers high and dry and publish a totally new app, wasting the time I spent submitting the app to places around the web as well. What a waste…

Using Flash CS5.5 for development has been fun – while I probably should have used Flex, I guess I just wanted the design aspects that Flash offers. Based on some great feedback from a review site, I’m running an icon contest over at 99Designs.com, where my contest is probably too underfunded to attract anybody – I’m not sure, as they’ve changed things a lot since my last contest. I probably asked for too much for too little…but I didn’t want to spend $600, which was the only other option.

Development has been easier than I thought, with the exception of trying to get the touch and throw components working properly, and implementing good swipe gestures for some page turning.

I’m really excited about the Barnes and Noble store – I love the Color Nook tm (they want you to use the [tm] whenever you talk about it!), and the developers at their app program have been super responsive and friendly.

Apple is the big question mark, as I have no idea how tough it is to get into their store, or get some promotion once you are in. One piece of serious frustration is that I actually had to BUY an iMac just to upload my app, aggghh!!  Then it turned out that since I published it via my new iMac instead of the PC, the fonts were not exactly the same, so I had to delete my freshly uploaded app and plan to republish from the PC today, and re-upload. Now that is a serious pain. And was a pain in the wallet too, although I do like a few things about this new machine. Spent a few hours monkeying with things before I figured out how to use Quartz Debug to adjust the scaling. Does Apple seriously think people can read like 6 pt fonts on a 21.5 inch screen?

I haven’t been on Twitter much, I just kind of check Echofon occasionally, and tweet a reply if I see something interesting. Still a bit information overload for me.

I am also now using the Windows 8 Developer Preview on my PC…which seems to be a killer upgrade once you disable the ridiculous green interface and the jumbled, disorganized mess that it represents. They need to seriously kill that thing off – how the hell can a person trying to use the PC for work deal with that jumpy, useless mess of tiles? Give me back the regular desktop, thanks very much. A quick regedit adjustment will get your Win 7 look back.

Alright enough for now – but much more to come on the mobile front!