My iPhone App

My iPhone App was just accepted by Apple and is now in the App Store! The app's name is rfcalc (radio frequency calculator).

It still needs a lot of work, in fact there's a mistake in it that even shows up in the screen shot. But I'm excited that it got it to the point of being accepted so now I can build on it.

The app is aimed at RF electrical engineers, which is a fairly small target audience, but it also means that as far as I can tell there aren't other apps that do the same thing. The idea is to have a whole list of calculators for common calculations done by RF engineers. Right now there's just one that goes between impedance as a complex number and the equivalent series and parallel components. Fairly simple, but I've actually already used it a few times at work.

Saeed was nice enough to write some code that I used as a guide to get me going and most of the code for the interface is just a few pieces of example code I found online and hacked together. One of the most interesting moments was when I first used the app on my phone instead of the iPhone simulator on the computer and realized that I kept trying to scroll the window even though I knew I didn't include scrolling. I guess that'll be the first item for version 0.2.

It is also interesting to see the difference between how apple treats developers and users. Considering that most apple programs are installed by dragging a file to a folder, I was very surprised that it took me hours just to figure out how to get all the certificates set up so that I could submit the app to the store. On one hand I did ignore their extensive set of tutorials, but on the other hand since when do apple products require a manual for basic use. That's just one example of everything I found more difficult than expected along the way; although, I did go from never having seen object-c to submitting my app to the store in about a week so maybe I shouldn't complain. But I will complain about the iPhone keyboard - they have several keyboards that can be used in an app, but don't seem to want developers to modify them. A custom keyboard would do a lot to improve the interface of this app.

Oh, and this all means that I did pay the developer fee so if any of you develops a free app and wants to put it on the store without paying the fee let me know.