iOS progress

Let's start with the good news.  Last week I built the MonsterCache app on the Mac with PhoneGap and it went quite well!  The only thing that didn't go smoothly was installing the Google Analytics plugin for iOS.  Eventually I remembered that I'd already downloaded it in a .zip file with plugins for different phone OS's.  And eventually, I found the instructions for installing the iOS version of the Analytics plugin.  It was exciting to see the first page in the simulator:

This weekend was the first test to load it on someone's actual iPhone.  That didn't go well.  

The first problem was my Apple Developer account.  I thought that I could load the app onto a phone connected to my computer without doing anything with the Developer account. For that reason, I hadn't even signed up for the Developer account yet.  Once I found out we needed to, I went to sign up and found that the approval process can take 24 hours.  So that killed our hopes for trying it that day.  Incidentally, I signed up yesterday afternoon, a Saturday, and haven't heard anything back as of Sunday night.  So I guess maybe they mean 1 business day for approval???

The second problem was that my friend's iPhone was an older one, a 3GS.  That would have been fine if the OS had been kept up to date, but it was still on 4.0.x.  Turns out the version of the iOS SDK that I'm building with in XCode only supports 4.3 or higher.  We hoped we could upgrade, but its not easy to upgrade to any iOS version that isn't the latest.  The latest is 6.0.x and apparently 3GS iPhone's don't run that very well.  So besides the Developer account issue, the particular phone we had wouldn't have worked anyway.

My parents are coming in to town for Christmas and they have iPhones, so looks like they will be my first iOS beta testers.  In the meantime, I changed the "Forgot Password?" handler to send a password reset link instead of the password itself in clear text. I've been needing to do that for a while, so glad to have that off the list!