Apple iTunes Connect Trend/Transaction Report Processor

Process Transaction ReportsI’ve written a droplet which takes a transaction report, as downloaded from iTunes Connect and containing a summary of sales, and produces a single figure representing the total earnings, in a particular currency.

Because the report shows sales for each separate region, a bit of work is required to get a total earnings figure, involving multiplying royalties by number of sales for each region, and then converting each currency type and adding all results together. This droplet does it all for you – just drop the downloaded text file from iTunes Connect onto it and it’ll bring up a summary. A preferences window allows configuration of the currency.

Currency conversion information provided by timegenie.com.

Download it here: Process Transaction Reports droplet

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Impressions of iPhone development so far

A friend recently asked for my thoughts on iPhone development so far. I thought I’d copy them here:

My thoughts: Well, it’s certainly fun, for the most part – the development environment is generally very well designed and the APIs are intuitive and well documented. There are a few glaring exceptions, and when things go a bit wrong, they go very wrong. That’s a feature of any closed-source API, though, so not Apple’s fault. The other thing is there’s a pretty strong developer community and a number of reasonable forums (Apple’s Beta Developer Forums, the Developer discussion forums, the #iphonedev channel on irc.freenode.net) to discuss problems.

A very impressive part of it all is the speed with which one can accomplish great things; I wrote most of Loopy in about a week – the rest of the time has been adding polish. I wrote TSWebServer, which I’m now integrating into Loopy (http://twitpic.com/rjw4) in two days. So it allows for quite rapid, satisfying development.

I can’t comment on the non-tech side yet, as I’m yet to release Loopy, my first app. I know there’s a big community of iPhone users and they’re quite vocal; there are quite a few sites that cover new apps and such. I get the impression that once you get lucky and get the attention of some important individuals, you can accelerate pretty quickly in publicity. Apple’s featured and top lists are the holy grail, of course; with over 10,000 apps now on the app store, the competition seems quite fierce though.

You do hear success stories, but that’s just a couple out of many thousands of developers, so… Who knows. Maybe we’ll all get lucky.

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Links for November 24th through December 9th

Links for November 24th through December 9th:

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Links for November 13th through November 17th

Links for November 13th through November 17th:

  • How to Price Your iPhone App out of Existence Write-up on the dangers of pricing an iPhone app too low, and the need to 'correct' the market
  • Open Radar Community-driven, open Apple bug reports
  • Free Australian Postcode location data "…Both the original CSV is available zipped below and contains Postcode, Suburb, Latitude and Longitude, a MySQL dump of the data is also available in a Zip file below. You can also download the PHP functions we coded to interface with the MySQL database. Simply call the postcode_dist() function with the two postcodes as shown in the example and you'll have a result in Kilometers returned quite quickly, these functions are freely available under the BSD licence."
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Core Audio and freakin’ error -66632

This will only be of interest to a very small minority, but for those of us who have used Core Audio and come across error -66632 in all its glorious undocumented-ness, this is a helpful note.

The error occurs when using AudioQueueEnqueueBuffer. It happens when one tries to enqueue a buffer when the queue in question is no longer running.

Wrap the AudioQueueEnqueueBuffer in a statement that checks to see if the queue is actually running, as in the SpeakHere/SpeakHear (depending on where you look) example. Something like:

if ( [track recording] ) {

  // Re-enqueue this buffer

  status = AudioQueueEnqueueBuffer (inAudioQueue,

                     inBuffer,

                     0,

                     NULL);

  checkStatus(status);

}

..Should do the trick.

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