Road to devLink: Services & App Store

I am writing this post after pushing the following commits:

iOS App: 1cb26d2

Server: e2d8d02

In this commit, I have set up the first redimentary calls from the iOS app to my web service. The web service is written in node.js with a couchdb backend. I think I am going to make this one short, as the content here is more stuff that I am learning that it is stuff that I plan to cover at devLink.

iOS App

I added a lot of code I have been building up over time. I added some categories that I find helpful. I also added some stuff to manage asynchronous NSURLConnection calls. I parse the json to NSDictionarys and NSArrays using this code by Stig Brautaset.

I wrote some unit tests to validate the communication between the iOS app and the service. I was able to sort-of sleep the main thread for the tests for an arbitrary amount of time while it waits for the web call to return. It works, but it feels klunky. At any rate, these are probably more integration tests than real unit tests. Whatevs, I am not too concerned. It gets the job done.

Services

I created a README.md file, you can see that in the github branch here. That has links to the things you will need to install (node.js, npm, and couchbase). It also has some example documents that refer to the Candy Store products for sale from the App Store.

In-App Purchase Items

In iTunes Connect, I created the IAP items that will be used by Candy Store. Though it was a rather tedious effort of entering data in web forms, it was not very difficult. The best resource to guide you through the process is the iTunes Connect Developer Guide. There is also an excellent video from this year’s WWDC on In-App Purchases. Pretty much, these two things are helping me fumble through my app. Both of these resources require you to be registered in the Apple Developer Program.