Late on Monday night I finally submitted my very first App Store app(a simple number game) to Apple for review.   Aside from announcing it here, this post also happens to be my very first post on this blog.

I started developing this game on December 28th of last year.  Until I started working on the game I have had zero experience with Objective-C, and very little knowledge of Interface Builder.  I had picked up an iPhone Development Book (Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK) a few weeks before(also an iPhone Developer license 4 month earlier), which I managed to completely avoid until I started working on the app.

I spent the next four weeks reading parts of the book but mostly using it as a reference, and abusing the search features of awesome iPhone development sites such as iPhone Dev SDK.  Most of these communities are just amazing with extremely friendly and helpful people.  I learned more from sites like these than anywhere else.

In addition to the book and all the web resources, I also had the help of a really good friend, Erik Kastner, which had created some really cool iPhone apps back in the days where there was no iPhone SDK, and you had to be super cool to create an app by doing it all programatically.

After about 6 full weeks of learning, and coding, and learning more I finally got the app to a place where I felt good about it.   

For current and future iPhone developers: Learning about memory management is gold, and it will save you a ton of time if you do it right the first time.  Late last week I was getting ready to submit the app for review when I ran into a dreadful EXEC_BAD_ACCESS crash.  After carefully examining some of my earlier code, I noticed that I had not followed all the rules of memory management as well as I thought I had.  It took a while to rework the offending code, but now it’s correct.  

Now my app has been submitted to Apple and it’s pending review.  It can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks for Apple to even look at it, depending on the amount of apps they have in queue and how well your App fits in one of the categories on the App Store.  So I wait, patiently, and hope that it doesn’t get rejected for any small mistakes.

I will update again shortly with a description of the game!

Thanks for reading.