depl0y.com

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Wallpaper, bandwidth eater

So, my app is in the AppStore for about a week now and it is still very much in development. Version 1.1 is currently the latest version in the store and v1.2 is in the latest test phases.

It is getting a LOT of hits, the last 2 days it did serve 24.000 wallpapers a day!

Wallpaper App v1.1, bandwidth

Version 1.1 of my application is submitted to Apple. It will be approved as soon as possible. As you could read on my wallpaper site it will give you a new category selection screen. Also there are some memory leaks fixed.

So, I had a few expectations on how my application would sell and it is really going better than I thought. The more users use it, the more the power of the application will be noticeable. Wallpapers are uploaded by a lot of users (113 at this moment).

The application DOES use a lot of bandwidth, at this moment it burned more than 2.2GB in just 4 days. This is not that bad, if you look at how many wallpapers have been served in those 4 days… A whopping 34.000!

So, if you haven’t bought my app yet, just do it ;).

On sale!

My own Wallpaper application is on sale!

Buy it here: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=292397567&mt=8.

Ready for sale!, v1.1 and new site

Ok, so I submitted my application on September 28th and I had to fill in a lot of forms. Most of them were tax related and were to make sure I would not need to pay an extra 30% over my royalties for my application.

This night, my application got the most wanted ‘Ready for sale’ status, so it should show up in iTunes/AppStore any minute now ;). I will post a link to my application as soon as it is available.

The cool thing is, the minute you buy v1.0 you won’t be stuck with the same features till the end of time. Version 1.1 is almost finished up and should be submitted to Apple this week. I am keeping track of the bugs/features I want to implement over here.

The report tool is part of my new website (which has an awful design, but it works) WimHaanstra.com. This site will have information and stats about all my applications I plan to release. Check it out ;).

Huge dip in visitors ?

Ok, I think something went wrong with switching my hosting. I have been looking through my Google Analytics stats and I noticed since my move, that I lost about 300 unique visitors per day.

Hello?! Where are you? Visitors?

I think it might have to do with the permalinks no longer working. I can’t really seem to find out why, but they are no longer working.

So, if you are looking for my Call of Duty lists, just check them out here.

Getting .NET 3.5 apps to run on 2.0 hosting

As I mentioned earlier, I moved my hosting to MyDomain.com, which has a nice Windows based hosting plan. There is only one problem, they are running .NET Framework 2.0 and don’t have the intention to actually upgrade it for you.

I wrote the backend of my iPhone app in C# 3.5, using LINQ and Ajax, so this application wouldn’t run on the MyDomain.com hosting. I knew this before I took the hosting, but still… I love LINQ and I want to use it!

So, I actually was thinking, how do I get this to run? Well it is easier then I thought. All you need to do is precompile your application locally and upload it to your hosting.

I am precompiling using a small batch file I wrote:

md %2
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_compiler.exe -p %1 -v / %2


The batch accepts 2 parameters. Parameter 1 is the location of your project sources and the 2nd parameter is the directory where you want to store your precompiled app.

After I uploaded the precompiled app, I still received a few errors about DLL’s not found, so I actually copied some 3.5 based DLL’s from my Windows GAC.

Here’s the list of DLL’s I had to copy, it could be that you need a different set of DLL’s based on the functionality you used.

System.Core.dll
System.Data.DataSetExtensions.dll
System.Data.Linq.dll
System.Web.dll
System.Web.Extensions.dll
System.Xml.Linq.dll


Those were all the files I needed to get Linq up and running :D.

Moving my hosting and the AppStore

So… after a week of hard work, I am finally finishing up the move of my hosting. It took me some work to get everything to work, but it looks OK now.

I was at Bluehost, which was a great host for my PHP pages, but the server-side application of my iPhone application is completely written in C# (3.5), so I needed a new host. It took me a long time to find a good one. First I came accross GoDaddy.com, which seemed nice for it’s price and features. But as always… cheap isn’t the best hosting to get, especially when your iPhone application depends on it.

I completely installed my server app on that server, but in 4 days time my site went down over 12 times!! And exactly at the moment that Apple was first reviewing my application. So that sucked.

Now I am hosting my applications at MyDomain.com, where I also register most of my .com domains. The hosting is not very cheap, but also not very expensive (especially with the great euro-dollar conversion at the moment). Officially it only support .NET 2.0, but I found a way to actually make my C# 3.5/LINQ application run on it. I did this by copying my .NET framework DLL’s to the ‘bin’ directory of my application and pre-compiling my application, so that was a new thing to learn also.

About my app: it was reviewed by Apple today and I needed to remove the Apple wallpapers from my wallpaper server. Also there was a situation where the application would stay in an endless loop, when there was no internet connection via WiFi, GPRS and 3G. So I fixed those errors this evening and submitted my new version to the AppStore. Hope to get it approved soon ;).

Wallpaper application submitted!

So, I have written my first iPhone application, which is currently submitted for review to the AppStore! After a couple of hours/days of work, the iPhone SDK isn’t all that hard to get used to. If you have ever programmed in C/C++, then this Cocoa is also do-able.

I also put up a website for this small application I made and you can check it out here. Register at the forums to suggest some new features!

Blog getting slow

So, I have been getting a lot of emails of readers about the speed of my blog. I noticed this too and I was wondering if there was anything I could do about it.

I asked Bluehost if there was a way to get more bandwidth for my blog, by maybe upgrading my account. There was one possibility that might help and that was upgrading to the “high-cpu” version of the hosting. They told me I could try it for a month and see if it would help me, and if so, my account could be upgraded. Very good service!

But, I am dutch which means I always look for ways to get it cheaper and/or better.

I came across HostMonster. Their website looked a lot like the Bluehost website, but I was thinking they might been using the same site templates/software for their hosting.

So, to ask them if I could test out transfer rates from their servers to Europe, I clicked on their “Live chat”, just to ask them if I could. After a couple of seconds waiting, I was connected with this very friendly ‘Jake’.

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