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Kris Markel let me know today via Twitter that Seattle Bus made Todd Bishop’s Top 5 list of iPhone apps. A very nice to thing to hear indeed!

It’s especially nice news coming back from WWDC where my good friends at Rogue Sheep won the Apple Design Award for .

I received the email notification tonight – Seattle Bus 1.2 is now available for sale again on the App Store. The new version is all about the new parser which is able to read the not-quite-valid HTML page that provides the data from King County Metro’s tracker site . Hopefully this will completely resolve the issues we saw once a quarter then the MyBus.org site became somewhat unusable for the better part of 10 days.

Seattle Bus 1.2.0 has been pushed up to the App Store for application review. This update changes out the underlying parser, allowing the application to use King County’s provided real-time data feed (http://trackerloc.kingcounty.gov/avl.jsp) instead of the one hosted by UW (http://mybus.org/metrokc/avl.jsp).

While the MyBus.org site has been responding fine for the past few weeks, we’ve now seen multiple times over the past year when their site has been down and/or unresponsive to the point of breaking the Seattle Bus application. Hopefully this will fully resolve it. A future point update may allow users to choose between real-time trackers, but that hasn’t been coded in yet and I hope won’t be necessary.

I’ll post an update when it’s past review and is available for purchase again on the iTunes AppStore.

Since I haven’t been able to get the site providing the data back online within the week, I’ve temporarily removed Seattle Bus from sale on the AppStore. I’m working on a “fix” (changing the data provider) now that will hopefully be available soon.

I apologize for the trouble and annoyances.

If you have the application already, it’s worth noting that the application does work periodically. Unfortunately, the data feed is just so inconsistent as to be nearly useless.

UPDATE:

I have a new parser functioning correctly with by MyBus.org and King County’s Metro Tracker site. The update should be uploaded to the AppStore shortly. I’ll post when I get the new version uploaded, and when it’s available.

I must say, it’s incredibly embarrassing that the King County site doesn’t even emit well formed HTML. The new parser is an interesting screen-scrape accumulation of regular expressions to pull out the relevant data. At least they’re posting it online…

A quick update for folks looking for help with Seattle Bus:

The site that the application uses for it’s data source (mybus.org) has been intermittently available recently, and today it’s been down completely. This is a site run at the University of Washington, and I’m afraid I don’t have a direct contact with the administrators.

There is another site with similar data provided by King County Metro (not as well structured) – so I may end up re-writing my scraper/parser to pull data from that site as I have no details on when or if MyBus.org will come back online.

I wish there was a better way of providing this data to you – I’ll keep everyone informed through this developer diary as I have updates.

I saw this from Daring Fireball: How people really use the iPhone. 

It is a fantastic, professional user-experience overview of a variety of applications – but most importantly some real information on how folks are using the interface. If you’re developing iPhone applications, this is a must see!

I was very glad to see that I hit most of my own UI elements right with Seattle Bus.

I found out this morning that I have competition for Seattle Bus!

Barry Kaplan made a damn-near copy of my application and is selling it on the App Store for $0.99. From the initial reviews, he apparently started selling it for free. He also appears to have completely ripped off the icon from Zhenwang Yao – author of iBus-Portland (a similar concept application, except aimed at Portland’s transit system).

Good way to get some notice, no doubt about it. I’m giving huge points for being original. Of course, I give those same huge points to Microsoft quite a bit, and they’ve done OK.

Unfortunately in the iTunes search, his is showing up where mine isn’t on the search results page. Not surprisingly, my sales have dried to nearly nothing.

I’ve dropped the price on Seattle Bus to $4.99 now – I’d originally intended to do this as a one week sale to see how elastic or inelastic the price was on the market. I’m afraid that’ll be almost impossible to tell at this point.

If Barry (author of Seattle Metro) was hoping to rake in the big bucks with this fancy app, I’m afraid he’s going to be disappointed. I am glad to see more applications along these lines out there – if nothing else it will at least encourage King County Metro to realize that they’ve got a completely unfulfilled need out here. Not that I expect them to be able to make a decent application, at least based on existing efforts.

From a pricing perspective, I wonder if the application market can sustain the niche efforts at the incredibly low price points of $0.99 and the like. I staked my price higher because I believe in the value first and foremost – not comparing it to other applications (shoot, it’s free on the web) but to the value that you’re getting from the application compared to other things you’re paying. A ride at peak on Seattle Metro (outside the free-ride fare zone) is $1.75. That put Seattle Bus at roughly 6 rides. Seemed like a very fair recompense, especially considering that I didn’t have any base data to work from and put together all the points myself.

The money I have made on the application to date would not have been enough to pay a decent contractor for the exact same work. I seriously doubt that Barry will be able to make up the time he spent on the application with any reasonable wage.

In the larger market, I can see where a $0.99 application might just win for everyone. Low cost, impulse purchase, and a potentially huge market. You’ve fundamentally got to have the scale to make that work. For the niche applications like mine, it’s a much more limited demographic market – the scale just isn’t there.

This isn’t new news – just bits that I couldn’t post because of Apple’s NDA on the technologies behind the iPhone. I wrote the results a little while ago – but I wanted to put something up here for Google to find and help out other folks in case they run into the same issue.

When a distribution binary is created, it gets signed with provisioning profile that has some specific certificates embedded within it. The whole kit gets cryptographically signed, and that signature gets embedded within the application bundle. Buried inside your application, there *should* be a file named embedded.mobileprovision. The file is a serialize plist with a bunch of certificate and signature information embedded within it. If your build settings are incorrect or otherwise screwed up (which was happening in my case), the signature process simply doesn’t create this file. The AppStore won’t even accept a binary without this file inside it and with the appropriate signatures.

The specific problem was that I’d put in a target specific build setting some time in the past, and when I changed the project build settings according to the directions for distributing a binary, it was getting overwritten with the target specific settings that were incorrect. Instead of giving a warning or erring out when the provisioning file I was pointing to didn’t exist, it just continued on it’s merry way – the log looking for all the world like it was working just fine.

I’ve filed a bug against Xcode for it not warning about the incorrectly specified provisioning profile (radar 6095242).

Like a number of other Mac developers, I caught the word and then the bug for using Clang Static Analyzer. I remember when I first caught wind of it, hearing about it on twitter and spotting a number of del.icio.us links to it. The note that really caught my attention was someone mentioning it and saying “too bad you can’t use it with the iPhone development…”.

That completely surprised me, because the first project I tried it on was SeattleBus. It was great for identifying a few memory leaks and missing -dealloc methods, I was hooked right off the bat. It wasn’t until later that I started trying to figure out that statement and realized that the analyzer doesn’t support analyzing ARM binaries. It does a great job on intel binaries though, so I realized that when I set my project to default to building for the simulator, I could use the analysis program.

My workflow after I’ve really worked on the codebase is now:

• Make sure the project default settings are “debug” and “simulator”
• Close Xcode
• open a terminal window and “cd” to the project directory
• run rm -rf /tmp/scan-build*
• run rm -rf build/;scan-build --view xcodebuild
• Open Xcode and fix errors

That’s been working great for me ever since.

Seattle Bus version 1.1 took 12 days to clear through the App Store review process. All that and I had a really, incredibly stupid bug in it that basically screws up your favorites when you upgrade.

Pretty much a one-liner typo “looks right” until you realize it isn’t bug. I’ve got it fixed in version 1.1.1 – in fact, that’s pretty much the only thing in version 1.1.1. I fixed the bug and uploaded it to the App Store to put it into review.

If you haven’t upgraded from 1.0.2 or earlier to version 1.1, then consider waiting for this update to clear. If the timing is the same, it’ll be available roughly October 8th. I’m afraid I don’t have any control over how fast it moves through the App Store approval process, so hopefully sooner and not later.

It’s one of the sides of the App Store/sales channel setup that I really wish I could change. If I was delivering this application myself, then that update would be out right now and damage limited to the few folks who upgraded in the past 8 or so hours that the broken update was available. At this point, I’ll have to guess a large number of folks will get the 1.1 update/upgrade before I can get out a properly fixed version. I’ve got a good sense of how many customers I have – so I’ll keep track. I hope it’s a low number, but I fear it won’t be.