After the success of iDiwali, we(Appinos team: myself, avis, raghul, madhu, tilak) were brainstorming for almost a month on what to do next. We fixed the idea of doing an app for Christmas, but to get the actual idea we struggled a lot. Each and every one of us came up with SOOO many ideas, but we couldn’t settle with a single idea.
Awesome Christmas Decoration Idea …
We decided finally to develop a christmas tree decoration app and then jumped straight into the development. We neither planned the project development nor think about the planning. The worst part is some of us(including me) couldn’t spend much time on this work because of some other things. So, as any unplanned project goes we neared our deadlines with not even a prototype in hand. It was already December.
… Turned into a Countdown app:
We all sat together, blamed ourselves, slapped each other and finally cut down our awesome idea into a mini count down Christmas app. With the time we got, we had no other choice. So we focused on the small goal that we set for ourselves and worked day/night on it (only on weekends, had to go to our offices on weekdays!!!).
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| Go Christmas – Splash Screen |
Deadline and Final Twists:
Apple announced christmas holidays from Dec. 23rd to Dec. 28th. So we need to submit the app to them before 23rd. Also we were skeptic whether the app would reach the store if we submitted it on 22nd midnight. So we strived our best to finish it ASAP and submit. In much hurry burry, we finished development, added music ourselves(which we got from http://www.incompetech.com/), tested in devices to fullest. When we are about to submit the app, Avis found some strange timing problem because of some locales. We fixed them and submitted the binary on 21st.
After submission only, I checked the device in an old iPod without Retina Display and unexpectedly it crashed in splash. Its because I packed all the sprites into a big sprite sheet of dimension 2048×2048. But the older devices only supports texture resolutions of 1024×1024. Damn me!! Then we withdrew the submitted binary, fixed this by splitting the sprite sheet into two, tested it again thoroughly and submitted the binary on 22nd, with the hope that there shouldn’t be any another issue like this.
Christmas passed and also New Year:
The next day apple closed, still we had some hope that app review team will be working and our app might show up in store anytime. But unfortunately, it didn’t happen. Christmas passed, but app didn’t reach the store. Myself, Raghul and Avis were so upset. Then New year came, still app didnt showed up. Then on Jan 5th, it reached the store.
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| Go Christmas |
Aftermath:
The sales were not so good. At the time of writing, iDiwali gets an average of 15 downloads / day, but Go Christmas not even 5. But anyways we learned a LOT from this project. Both technical wise and project management wise. I take Go Christmas not as a failure, but as a lesson, a hardly learned one. The product succeeds or not, but working with our Da Vinci Avis, giving life to his awesome graphics and co-programming with our Steve, Raghul Jobs gives me full satisfaction which is what I want in the end…
See you all with our next app(most likely a hit) soon 🙂
