Like he did last year, little Coolio is visiting Apple’s developer conference WWDC to learn about all the new and cool things he’ll be able to do with an iPhone or an iPod touch in the future.

Last year’s visit finally brought us the iPeng App, let’s see what this year’s results in…

Let’s just hope that someday they design badges that fit little penguins 🙂

iPeng 1.1.2 is now available on the App Store.

It’s a bugfix release that fixes a crash and an update issue on the Current Playlist.

The iPeng 1.1.1 update is now available on the AppStore.

1.1.1 is mainly a service release targeted at fixing some issues with wakeup from standby and crashes upon rearranging/deleting tracks from the current playlist.

It does have two additional features, though:

• IRBlaster volume control: If you set volume control commands for IRBlaster for a player, iPeng’s volume slider for that player will be replaced by “up/down” buttons that send volume up/down commands through IRBlaster. These commands will repeat at a rate of 5 commands/s

NOTE: If you disable IRBlaster, please also remove the volume commands for the player since iPeng detects IRBlaster using these settings and will otherwise still show the IRBlaster interface instead of the slider.

• Albums and Playlists in Music Services like Rhapsody or Napster will now be shown and act like albums and playlists do in the local library.

This means: You don’t need the “touch-and-hold” gesture anymore to play tracks and also album/playlist playing behavior and look is now consistent with the local library menus.

Folks, this may be a bit off topic for iPeng, but since it’s experience I gathered developing this it might just be of interest for you as well. Take it as a read while waiting for an update to come out 🙂

There are quite a few bad tempered comments on Apple’s review process for the App Store and I agree I did have my share of getting angry, too. But I whenever I calm down a bit I tend to see it not that bad and – most importantly – I believe I somewhat understand what’s happening. Maybe this is of value for others, too. So this blog entry is mainly for those who want to develop for the App Store.

I tried to look at this from Apple’s perspective to understand it a bit more and that offered some eye-openers.

What I’ve Seen

Just some sampled facts upfront:

• I got some rejections due to the fact that the tester obviously did not understand the product or the test environment, even though some of these aspects were written out clearly in the product description. The most prominent case being a rejection due to “Your App doesn’t have the features given in the product description: no tune can be heard on iPhone”. Well, yes. Indeed. It’s a remote control application, it’s not supposed to play tunes. Sentence #1 of the product description says so.
• The sooner iPeng got reviewed, the better the success rate. Generally, my experiences with the duration of the review process are much, much better than what you read on the internet. I never waited for a review for more than 7 days! The longest lag I had was when I got a rejection but the actual state was not changed from “in review” to “rejected”. For rejections that came in early (the quickest one I did get was after only one day) were generally more qualified and sometimes even contained detailed suggestions on how to fix things.
• Yes, they DO even work on weekends!
• I did have rejections before on grounds that I did not accept as valid. I generally felt that answering to these aspects in the submission comments did help, obviously my comment were heard.
• I only had one release (the ill-fated 1.0.3) that came through on the first try.
• I did only get very few answers to e-mails I sent. I do believe they got read and I do believe the information I gave was used in the review process but usually I didn’t get an answer.

How Should You Sumbit?

Now what do I conclude from that? And how can this be of help for you to get to the App Store?

1. Time matters. There are obviously times when there are more submissions and times when there are less. It looks like Apple tries to make sure you don’t have to wait for more than a week. This can of course put a lot of pressure on the testers in busy times and I suspect that under these circumstances in case of doubt they don’t try to find out what’s wrong but put that burden on you and reject. Especially if it’s the first try for a release.
2. Explanations matter. Apple must have more than one tester. Don’t expect the one that gets your submission to know your App. I have made very good experience with giving details on how to expect the App to behave in the submission comments. The same is true for answers to the reasons for rejection. Explain why your App is just behaving fine.
3. Explanations matter. We had that? OK, just again because it’s so important. Don’t even expect full attention for your App, I don’t know if that’s the case but I believe Apps get tested in parallel. Don’t expect the product description to be remembered in full.
4. Calm down. This is the most difficult (at least for me) but also the most important part of the story. A rejection is not the end of the world, you can resubmit. Do a new build. If you can, fix what they objected to even if you don’t see it the same way (who wants to argue), write a nice and well-tempered e-mail in response to the rejection and – most important! – follow steps 2 and 3.

“Please, Apple, add a feedback loop!”

Now, that doesn’t mean the process is perfect. And just in case somebody from Apple ever reads this (and hasn’t become completely angry on me writing this), here’s what I’m missing from the process: A feedback loop. It would just be sooo helpful (and if just for peace of mind) to be able to answer to feedback. And not always have to resubmit and wait another week. Some process that let’s you answer to the very tester who did the first review and make him or her have another look at it with your feedback in mind. Probably even before rejecting.

Yours sincerely 🙂

I’m happy to announce the availability of iPeng 1.1, the second “major” release of iPeng, your ultimate Squeezebox™ remote.

While the 1.0.x releases were mainly focusing on bug fixes and minor enhancements, iPeng 1.1 will bring some more fundamental changes:

iPeng goes SqueezeNetwork

Long awaited by those of you who don’t operate their own server or don’t want to run it 24/7, iPeng now also offers access to SqueezeNetwork. Just “swipe right” on the “NowPlaying” home screen and you will find it on the MultiPlayer Control along with any servers you might have. There is also a new button for each player that will connect or disconnect that player from SqueezeNetwork.

What does SqueezeNetwork offer with iPeng?

iPeng will support the full functionality of SqueezeNetwork, that is: Play internet radio, podcasts and music services, manage your favorites, and control your players. You will also be able to set alarms and this brings us to the second big change in iPeng 1.1…

Plugin Support

iPeng 1.1 offers support for the SqueezePlay menu system which allows it to support a lot of functionality as it would show up on a Squeezebox™ Controller or a SqueezePlay software player.

This open up iPeng to a lot of internal SqueezeCenter features that were not yet supported: Alarms, Sleep, Browse by Years, Random Mix, TrackInfo Details,… almost everything offered by SqueezeCenter will now be controllable on iPeng.

Yet it’s not limited to that, because using this interface, iPeng also has access to 3rd party plugins, so now you can define your own library queries using CustomBrowse, browse by statistics using TrackStat, get background information using Biography or Album Review, build custom mixes using MusicIP, it’s a whole world…

Performance Improvements

“Oh my, iPeng was such a nice app, now with all these new features it’s growing fat and slow…”

No!

It doesn’t, the opposite is true. iPeng’s internals have been completely re-done and use a faster protocol now but also, thanks to great support from Logitech we have been able to make iPeng cooperate better with recent versions of SqueezeCenter so if you use SC 7.3.2 or newer, iPeng will offer some notable performance improvements:

• Much faster loading of large databases. Our benchmark in the beta phase was for remote(!) access to a huge database with 247.000 tracks and 24.000 albums, iPeng was synchronizing this database in under 6 minutes! A small database with < 2.000 albums should load well below one minute. Note: This may also depend on your server; iPeng can not make up for slow server performance.

• iPeng now supports SqueezeCenter’s list sorting. This is not only a speed improvement but it also means that ALBUMSORT and ARTISTSORT tags or custom sort orders will be respected by iPeng. Your database will now show up in iPeng as it would in SqueezeCenter.
• New option to keep server connection open. This will allow you to get immediate access to your server once your iPhone comes out of standby without having to establish a server connection first. Note: this will use more power and can eventually drain your battery.

Along with these big changes, there’s a lot of small improvements that make the iPeng experience more feature rich and streamlined. Just upgrade or get your iPeng now on the App Store and…

Have Fun!

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