Yes!

… and whew!

After a day and a half of poking around turns out it had to do with the iOS 4 “multitasking” feature that all apps get for free. Apparently, Squares! does not play nice with this new feature – so, what to do? It worked just fine prior to iOS 4 so can I opt-out of “multitasking”?

Yep. Very simply add UIApplicationExitsOnSuspend and set it to YES in the Info.plist file.

Done. Check it in and wait for approval.

Now I can dig in and figure out why Squares! doesn’t play nice with iOS 4 Multitasking…

Bummer.

Anyway, the fix was easy and submitted immediately – but here I sit waiting for the fix to be “approved”, all the while gathering in 1 star reviews. So, one immediate lesson is that very few – if any – people using the app actually go to your support site if there are problems. Posting the “we’ve submitted a fix, please be patient” messages on the home page, the facebook page, twitter feeds, the AppStore description apparently are only seen by a small number of people.

I made a number of mistakes in the immediate panic dealing with the bug, and the mistakes and failures are all mine; I only have myself to blame. However, it does tweak me just a bit that a fix is there, has been there, sitting, waiting, begging to save me from frustrating any more people than I have to and there is nothing I can do about it.

But, I knew that was part of playing in the iPhone playground and I agreed to play by the rules. To paraphrase Neitzsche, “The App that does not kill me makes me stronger!”

Amen, Brother. Amen.

Hopefully it proves useful to more people than just myself.

I started building it simply as a way to populate my Address Book with at least some kind of picture for everybody.  After have a whole bunch of half-finished features, I cut them all back to a very simple, clean – and most importantly – functional set.

If you use Gravatar at all, it ought to look really familiar. The QR Codes were a simple freebie to do as well. Some of the other features that were partially done, or otherwise not ready for prime-time were:

• Update All – Update your entire Address Book with a picture of your choosing
• Use the favicon or apple-touch-icon as a picture – This would have used the domain of the email address and used the favicon or apple-touch-icon as the picture. E.g. Someone with a email@yahoo.com address would have an option to choose this picture:
  
• Use LinkedIn or Facebook profile pictures – Looking at the APIs for both these services, it appears possible as long as you have the user put their user name and password into the application.

Really?

Yes. Really.

Anyhoo. Look for some new projects coming soon!