Music Quiz 3D released! (finally!)

2009-11-18T13:54:00.000-05:00

It has been ~~weeks~~ months since we first submitted "Music Quiz 3D" to Apple for review, and as of today it is available for sale on the iTunes App Store. Hurray!

So what took so long? Well, about two and a half rejections from Apple. Odd number, eh? Let me briefly explain.

A few weeks after "Music Quiz 3D" was first submitted for review, it was rejected for a problem unrelated to the app. I had listed the term "iTunes" as a search keyboard. Listing the names of other apps is not allowed, but it didn't occur to me that "iTunes" might fall under that rule. It did occur to Apple.

No biggie. We resubmitted the app right away (even though the app was unchanged) and got ready to wait another three weeks. Four weeks. Five weeks. What the heck!? Checking on the app revealed that it was rejected, but we had never received an e-mail informing us of the rejection. But wait, did we really submit it the second time. There is no log to verify this, so maybe the fault was on our end. We resubmitted it again and started waiting.

At this point a very nice and helpful person from Apple called to say, essentially "Why did you resubmit the same app that we just rejected?" After a pleasant, but long, conversation all became clear. We had resubmitted the app the first time, and Apple did reject it a second time, but while they drafted an e-mail to us, it never got sent. The person from Apple was very apologetic, helped me understand why it was rejected the second time (an edge case I had never seen before), and encouraged us to modify the app and resubmit.

Well, the third (?fourth?) time's the charm. "Music Quiz 3D" is in the wilds of the iTunes App Store ready and waiting to entertain and amuse you. Enjoy!

Blogging it up

2009-09-12T17:04:00.006-04:00

Like so many others, I'm part of the iPhone gold rush. I've spent some of my last few months not enjoying a baseball game on the tube with beer in hand, or out in the garden in the slow evening dusk, or any other manner of recreation. Instead I've been learning OpenGL and coding on the iPhone. I've got nobody to blame but myself for this extra workload, and to tell the truth, I like learning new stuff, so in a way it was my summer recreation.

The end product is Music Quiz 3D ... a straightforward game that tests how well you know your own music on your iPhone or iPod touch. It quizzes you on song names and artists while playing clips from your music library. Tap the correct answers fast to score more points and hit new high scores. And it provides some eye candy with spinning buttons and swirling backgrounds. Ooooo ... shiny!

Music Quiz 3D is in Apple's review queue, and has been for a week and a half. Like so many others who submit their iPhone creations for Apple's approval, I have no idea where it is in their process or when it might emerge from that opaque world. Fingers crossed here that it won't be much longer, and toes crossed that it won't get rejected. Meanwhile, if you would like to see a brief demo of the app in action, try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5PX8QSRIZs

Oh, and this blog? Well, besides putting up some info at PewterSoft.biz (yes, that is ".biz" ... ".com" was taken ... shucks), I thought I would try to share a bit here and there about my trials and tribulations working on PewterSoft apps. Truth be told, such public sharing goes against the grain of my nature, but change can be a good thing, right?