Announcing Hiragana Lite

I have decided to make a free version of my japanese study aid application Hiragana available on the iPhone App Store.

This free version is exactly like the paid version except for 3 small differences:

1. It's called Hiragana Lite.
2. It contains the 46 basic hiragana characters, as opposed to the full set of 104 hiragana caracters available in the full version.
3. Buttons on the info screen which open the App Store using the technique described in my earlier post Launching the App Store from within your iPhone application.

I'd be very happy if you gave it a try and leave your feedback here, or using the support form at support.theevilboss.com.

Hiragana Lite (App Store link).

I have also decided to mark the occasion by lowering the prices for the full versions of Hiragana and Katakana to $2.99.

Phil Schiller and the case with the missing menu bar [Updated]

I just watched the video stream of Phil Schiller giving the Macworld keynote presentation.  I am as usual hugely impressed with the software Apple churns out, this time the addition of face detection and recognition to iPhoto was my personal favorite new feature. Look out Phil, $79 is coming your way.

The one thing, though, that stuck in my mind more than anything about the presentation was the mysteriously missing Mac menu bar in the demo of the new iWork.com service.

First Phil prepared a document for sharing using Pages on his computer.

Phil with the menu bar

He then switched to the fictional user Tia's computer to show us what she would experience on the receiving end. Tia's computer however didn't have the Mac menu bar at the top of the screen.

Look, no menu bar

I have had a slight look around to figure out how to hide the menu bar in Leopard, but to no avail. This begs the question, can it be done or was Phil not using Leopard in the demo?

By the way, good news about all iTunes songs being DRM free! Finally I can commence my long planned iTunes shopping spree.

UPDATE: The iWork.com demo starts at 1.01.20 into the video stream.

Launching the App Store from within your iPhone application

Today I decided to figure out how to launch the App Store application from within an iPhone application using the SDK.

It turns out this is pretty simple, but you have to beware of a few issues.

• First and foremost, it doesn't work from the iPhone Simulator, in all probability since the App Store application is not available on the simulator.
  
• Second you need to provide a valid URL to an application in the App Store. You can access the URL to an application by simply right clicking the Application in iTunes and selecting the "Copy iTunes Store URL" menu item.
  

Here is the core code needed.

[[UIApplication sharedApplication]

 openURL:[NSURL

  URLWithString:@"http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=291170459&mt=8"]];

The above URL points to my Hiragana application.

I then chose to store the App Store URL in the info.plist file under a key named TEBAppStoreLink, so that I can use the same code for any future applications.

I ended up with this method for launching the App Store with the URL in the info.plist file.

- (void)goToAppStore

{

  UIApplication *app = [UIApplication sharedApplication];

  // Get the url from info.plist.

  NSString *appStoreLink = [[[NSBundle mainBundle] infoDictionary] objectForKey:@"TEBAppStoreLink"];

  // Open the url if it was available.

  if(appStoreLink){

  [app openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:appStoreLink]];

  }

}

What really happens is that Mobile Safari is launched with the provided URL, and upon realizing that the link is an App Store link it in turn launches the App Store application.

Of course, if you provide any other URL it just opens in Safari as usual. I haven't tested what happens if a YouTube URL is used, but I imagine the YouTube app would launch. That, however,  is not the problem i set out to solve today.