Meteor Shower Guide Approved

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The wait is over, early this morning Apple approved my app. Now the iPhone has a respectable meteor shower reference. You can read a bit more on the support page.

Don’t have an iPhone? An app is available on the Android platform from Chris Wilcox. This has a ‘feature’ I don’t like but understand the motivation for: ads. Another app is available for Windows 7 mobile but I have no idea how well it works or what data it contains (let me know if you try it out).

Obviously I’m pretty biased but I don’t think any other meteor shower app has all the features of Meteor Shower Guide. Now that version 1.0 is released I can start incorporating new features into future releases.

The Waiting Begins

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Last year I searched for a iPhone meteor shower app and what I found was pretty poor. Pathetic actually. So I decided to write one myself. Thus began a journey that has taken up much, no, all of my spare time the past months.

In the beginning I had grand ideas carried over from an unfinished web project. Along the way I scaled back my expectations. I don’t have the expertise yet. Just learning the intricacies and quirks of Objective-C was enough to keep me busy for many months. This has been fun, I’ve not been so immersed in code and algorithms as this for a long, long time. I focused my attention and skills on a simple goal: write the best meteor shower app.

Over this time I have learned much more than I ever knew about meteor showers. I can’t even count the number of technical articles I’ve read on them. Sometimes I wonder if that has changed my outlook. Before I simply enjoyed watching them, perhaps trying to capture them in a photograph. Now I ponder how to incorporate various data points into a table, how to quantify the duration of a meteor showers peak, why there is conflicting data on shower timing and intensity.

Tonight though I’m happy to say I have submitted version 1.0 of Meteor Shower Guide for approval in the Apple app store. The waiting for approval begins.