WeiWuWei: How to build and sell a subversive iPhone app
We did it! My brother Christoph and I have written WeiWuWei, the iPhone app that I had had in my head for months. What it does? Well, Wei Wu Wei means act without doing. And in this spirit, it automagically enhances your SpringBoard experience so that you can act (launch apps) without doing (search for them).
We hope it will soon be available on RockYourPhone and in the Cydia store. Unfortunately, iPhone guru and Cydia initiator Saurik seems a little slow these days in answering his mail. I can totally understand that, he probably gets millions of mails a day. It’s just that maybe he should get someone else to handle the Cydia store. The price? Not sure yet, but you can definitely afford it 
Why won’t it be in the AppStore? Read on …
As I said, the idea for this program had been looming in my head for quite a while. I just never found the time, plus I’m not really much of a programmer. Finally I found the perfect companion in Christoph, who loves to tinker with things until they work, which is exactly the part I can’t bring myself to do. It seemed like a straightforward idea, but I had no idea how complicated it could become. This is mostly because of Apple’s policies: It turns out that a product like ours could not be built using the means that Apple gives its developers. We needed access to non-documented APIs and techniques that are not in keeping with Apple’s guidelines for the AppStore. But before we found this out, we struggled hard to install the iPhone SDK on a PowerBook G4, which Apple has ruled out, yet some Internet gurus seemed to make that work anyway. Let’s just say I failed to get it working, but it wouldn’t have been useful anyway.
Gurus like Saurik (actually, it’s almost always him) have done tremendous and incredible work in making apps like ours possible. We could never have succeeded without things like Jailbreaking, MobileSubstrate, and the free developer toolchain. I am very grateful to these pioneers who fight for our freedom with brilliance and endurance. Needless to say, though, this is hacking, not professional software development. So there is basically no documentation, which considerably steepens the learning curve, and would probably have made me give up were it not for Christoph who patiently tried simple things a 1000 times until they worked.
Another minor hurdle is that you have to learn Objective-C when you start developing for Apple devices (well, there are some alternatives, but they are still rather thin on the iPhone). While there are some genius syntax ideas in this language (I love the way you can name and call methods), all in all it’s pretty annoying, because Objective-C’s idea of typing is extremely relaxed, which means that you can basically compile any bullshit without notice.
In spite of all this we finally succeeded, the app is now in testing, and I’m looking forward to present WeiWuWei to you here on sagesex.com, RockYourPhone, and hopefully the Cydia store.
Popularity: 9% [?]
english
deutsch