Well, the first alpha of the new game is just about complete. Most things have gone as well as I'd hoped, although one section of the game was causing a few more fits and starts than it should have had I just bothered to think about it. I chalk it up to my progressing illness which resulted in being practically incapacitated yesterday and unable to breathe. I have asthma and am not unfamiliar with breathing problems, but this was closing in on how I felt when I was hospitalized with pneumonia and some exotic secondary infection modern medical science was unable to identify (gotta love those). Regardless, I resolved the issue moved on with life.
I then got to the final two things I needed to do before I could begin looking at an Alpha - a basic help screen and, you know, actually getting it ON a device. :) I got a basic help screen image typed up and figured I'd just add a UIImageView object with that as the image to a UIScrollView and voila - it'd all just work. But, no. Nothing on the iPhone seems truly simple and this was no exception. I began working through my primary reference book but it was silent on scrolling. Crap. So I began surfing the web hoping to find something - a few ideas, but nothing that actually did what I expected it to do. As of this morning, no change - help is still not scrolling. *sigh* I may need to create a completely separate application to test the theory and then make sure I've dotted all of the i's and crossed the t's in my app to enable everything.
The second part, which I decided to do after punting on the help, was to get it installing on the device. I had already done that with a previous version and figured this wouldn't be a problem. I built it, installed it, sync'd my iPhone, ran it - and it crashed. CRAP! Oh, wait! Glimmer of hope - I was referencing a local file (I was developing sans network at one point and changed the code). Change the code, reinstall, sync iPhone, run app - crash. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? This was working fine in the simulator... and still does. Okay... Wait - there's some kind of crash log available. Quick search on the web and I find what I need - where it is and what it looks like. And it looks like a symbolic dump of a Windows app with the same level of detail (i.e., none). Wait - what's this "symbolicatecrash" script? It enables you to turn your crash logs into something with actual symbols? Cool. I'll at least know where the crash is. Except that it didn't work. I poked around a little today and think I might have an idea why it's not working as expected, but again - it's delaying Alpha 1. I did try adding some additional checks this morning quickly to see if I could get around what I thought the bug was, but it did nothing. Great...
So, Alpha 1 is practically in the bag. Unfortunately, there are still 2 bugs holding up release to the wild. Okay, it's more of a caged environment, but still. Hoping it will be done in the short term. I would hate to have ANOTHER application for the iPhone that gets stuck in "Alpha Hell".
