I just released my newest app, which is a word jumble style game called Jub Jub. For more information, check this out:
http://benrimbey.wordpress.com/jub-jub/
It took me just about a month to make the game from start to finish. I wrote it using the Corona SDK, which was a fantastic experience.
Next up is an update to Stitchopedia, and then I’m going to start on another game. Woohoo!
Well, I have just had my first official rejection from Apple. Turns out the request for help making images that I have in the app description and the app itself constitutes as a ‘contest’.
The problem with that is that I did not explicitly lay out the rules or liabilities of Apple or myself in the description. Makes sense – I wish I had thought of it when I did it. I went ahead and removed the information from Stitchopedia and re-submitted it as this is pretty much over with -there are 14 images left and they have all been assigned out. I will be doing the drawing for the knitpicks.com card when those images come in to me.
Anyways, I just re-submitted the update to apple. Here’s hoping I have everything right this time 
I just submitted Stitchopedia 2.1.2 to Apple for approval. This update contains imagery for 37 stitch patterns, as well as a couple of new abbreviations and pattern corrections.
In this update I took a slightly different tact in how I seeded out patterns to people to knit samples for. I had a very large number of people emailing asking if they could help. I had more people than stitch patterns, to be honest. So when I had assigned everything out, I went back to the beginning and started re-assigning what had not come back in yet. I ended up doing this a few times.
The up side of this was that I received a lot of images for inclusion; I am happy to say that there are only 15 remaining stitch patterns that need images! However, the downside was that in several instances, I received submissions from multiple people for the same pattern. When this happened, I used the first images that I received for the pattern.
Anybody and everybody who submitted images had tickets for their names thrown into the hat for the $50 Knitpicks card, as well as getting promo codes for the app.
I wanted to briefly touch on this in case someone downloads the app expecting to see their image in it and walks away disappointed. If you have any questions on this or would like to talk to me about it, please email me at ben.rimbey@gmail.com
I have met a lot of awesome people during this project, and I am continuously amazed at the quality of imagery that comes in from you guys. I owe all of you my sincere gratitude.
I found the issue… I had the release compiler settings incorrect for this library I just integrated called Three20 (written by Facebook).
I have submitted a new build to apple. Stitcopedia will remain removed from the app store until the new build is approved. Hopefully it’s fairly quick this time (last time was 5 business days).
I just installed the latest build of Stitchopedia on my iPads, and i see this:
I never saw any behavior like this in my debugging. I pulled the app from the app store for the time being and am submitting a new version that backs out the functionality causing the issues.
To anyone who bought this version, or updated to this version, I sincerely apologize. The updated version is going to the app store tonight and I am working on fixing that functionality for a subsequent update.
Thanks for your patience!
This is kind of a random topic but today I set about syncing both my wife’s and my photostream accounts to one iPhoto library.
I tried several approaches but in the end I did this:
On my Mac OS X lion server, I made separate user accounts for both her and I. Each account is tied to our apple ids. On each account, I setup iPhoto to automatically import everything that comes through over photostream to disk. I made sure not to sync stuff to photostream though as that seemed to be making duplicates (kind of an obvious bug, but whatever).
Pretty easy so far. Here’s the tricky bit.
I needed to get those photos into the iPhoto library synced with the apple id that I use for our house media server. So I needed a process of extracting the photos from the user accounts I mentioned above and injecting them into the server iPhoto library. I found a utility called Hazel which could automate this kind of work – it can watch directories for new files and then perform actions on the files. The problem however was that I had no way of marking the files I had just extracted as already imported. I also couldnt remove them. This is because the server account didn’t have permissions to modify the iPhoto directories in the user accounts. I fiddled with this for quite a while modifying permissions here and there with no luck.
What I ended up doing was enabling the root user account, logging into it, and then setting Hazel up there. Works like a charm. The root user account runs with highest permissions, so it can do whatever it wants anywhere in the system. Security wise, kind of a risky thing enabling it but I’m (fairly) confident in my abilities here heh.
So now the root account has a Hazel script that does the following:
Iterates over the iPhoto directories for my wife and I.
If it finds new photos, it copies the files from the iPhoto libraries and places them into the Auto Import directory (inside of the iPhoto library) on the media server user account.
Then it deletes the found photos from my wife’s and my user accounts so that the photos don’t get imported again.
Since my wife’s and my user accounts on the server are only for iPhoto, it doesn’t matter if the photos disappear from there, especially since they are being migrated to the media server account. Also, since it’s just copying stuff from photostream, I don’t run the risk of messing any actual data up.
Now if my wife or I take a picture on our iPhones, it automatically gets injected to the media server iPhoto account, which syncs all over our house. Also, it’s convenient having one library for the family.
If only photostream handled videos…
Anyways, hopefully that helps someone out there. I did some googling before I did all of this and didn’t see anything too helpful.
New features:
* inline term lookup in stitch pattern directions. Terms such as psso will be highlighted; clicking on them shows the definition for that term.
* ~40 new images added
* performance improvements
* splash screen images
I’m pretty happy with this update – hopefully the users are too
I’m trying to decide what I should port Stitchopedia to first… Mac OS (via the Mac App Store), or for Android (Google Marketplace, not Amazon). Anyone have any preferences?
The next major feature I plan on implementing in the new update of Stitchopedia is inline abbreviation lookups. So if you are a viewing a stitch pattern, any directions in that pattern that are defined in the abbreviations library become hyperlinks. Clicking on one of these will show the abbreviation window for that term.
This has been a harder undertaking than I had anticipated, but I think it is going to be cool. Here is a rough screen capture of what the code is generating so far:
Last night a user emailed me offering to help make swatch images. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, since it is taking so long to get all of the images in there. My wife was helping me at first but we have two young kids who demand a lot of her time and she is also buried by knitting projects for the holidays.
So here is what I am thinking:
1) if you make 3 swatch images, I will give you one promo code for Stitchopedia. Unfortunately, I can not refund a purchase that has already been made, but you can use the promo code as a gift for someone else.
2) for consistency, the swatches need to be knit with worsted weight yarn on size 8 needles.
3) in addition to the promo code, I will add a list of image contributors to the ‘About’ section of the app.
4) for every swatch image you submit, you will have one entry submitted to a drawing for a $50 Knitpicks gift card. After all of the images are submitted, I will email the winner with the gift card information.
5) when you supply an image, you are agreeing that the image is owned by me for the explicit purpose of being displayed in Stitchopedia.
If you are interested in this, please email me at ben.rimbey@gmail.com to talk over what swatches you would like to help with, so that we can make sure multiple people aren’t working on the same swatch
Thanks in advance!
