Test Flight and Notifications
Mobile Makers Week 7
This week we are in the throws of our final project app development. We only have about one week left and I’m feeling both confident and worried if that is even possible.
We’ve done tons of work in just a matter of days. We’ve added ‘big rock’ features like favorites templates, notifications, friend grouping, vote tally, and a places search Yelp api, and we still have a couple big rock features left.
One thing I’ve learned is that thinking through a user workflow before adding features helps to clear the way for making cleaner code. This depends on the time you have, but that helps out a lot in the end.
It’s so tough trying to self manage our project, our scope and our development between only the two of us in a completely ridiculously short timeline. But it’s been awesome so far.
Days are long and still fly by. I feel like I’ve been in a pseudo dream state while sleeping, thinking about code architecture, design patterns, app features, etc. I’m exhausted after 10 to 12 to 14 hour days, and yet all I want to do is jump back into the code.
This week we figure out a couple cool things. One was using Test Flight. Yes, it’s kind of a complicated process. Yes, the dev site on Apple is confusing. Yes, the cert and profile thing is difficult to figure out. But it is such an amazingly cool tool.
Another cool thing that Dennis got working was Push Notifications via Parse. An certificate has to be created on the Apple dev site to allow push notifications. This certificate has to be uploaded to Parse. The certificate has to be associated to the provisioning profile (either developer profile or distribution/production profile) that is built with the app so it allows notifications to be received on the device.
Our current snag seems to be that Push Notifications crash the app when a distribution profile is created with the certificate. Not sure why. It might (?) be a setup on the Apple side, but really have no idea. Right now, we have it associated with a developer profile.
Another mini snag is that Test Flight prefers that an ad-hoc profile be created. However, this is a type of distribution profile, which seems to crash the app. So, we currently just have the profiles and certs set up on a developer profile.
Tomorrow is the end of Sprint2 (of our 2.5 Sprint project). Better get back to it. ☺
