Ryan Grier Dev

MyCntdwn HD, my first iPad app, has been approved and released by Apple. 

My original plan was to just port (slightly modify) the existing MyCntdwn code to work on the iPad. After doing this for a bit, I decided that this just wouldn’t work. I needed to start from scratch. 

MyCntdwn (and MyCntdwn 2) didn’t allow for the iPhone to be displayed in landscape mode. The layout of the screens were also very iPhone-centric. I needed to rethink most of the app for the iPad verison.

I developed and tested this application without owning an iPad. I hadn’t even touched an iPad until I had been developing the app for a few weeks.

During development, I decided that I needed to see how the pop-overs work, I ran to a local Apple Store and played with an iPad over lunch. I am glad that I did, my idea of how the pop-overs should work was wrong and I needed to change things. 

I had an excellent tester though. He played with the app for a number of weeks. He provided a ton of feedback. He also let me play with MyCntdwn HD on an iPad a number of times. It let me find a number of issues that I couldn’t find just using Apple’s iPad simulator. 

Some of this must have been what the initial iPad developers went through while developing apps before the iPad was released. 

Even thought MyCntdwn HD was released last night, I have already submitted a small update to Apple. My next goal is to get the push notifications working on the MyCntdwn HD. I also have a few more updates planned to get some of the editing screens to work better (more intuitive).

Look forward for more changes.