Power Tunes Plus 1.0
I’m pleased to announce that Power Hour Plus Power Tunes Plus 1.0 officially went live [iTunes link] on the App Store.
The application plain and simple let’s you play the popular Power Hour drinking game on your iPhone or iPod Touch using the music library on the respective device. Besides the ability to play a song every minute for a set amount of time, we’ve included some interesting functionality such as integrating with Facebook and keeping track of music statistics, which will come in handy in future versions. 
More information regarding the various features and additional screen-shots can be found at the application Power Tunes Plus website.
The application took a few months longer to build then I originally anticipated, mainly because it was my first foray into iPhone development and Objective-C. Also, the first few betas of the 3.0 firmware were absolutely horrendous in their support of the music library and the music player. Even the release version isn’t completely up to snuff, as there are still issues with keeping the screen active when you’re playing music and issues regarding performance when performing queries on the music library. With that in mind the application was completed from a technical perspective and a testing perspective in early June and submitted for review prior to the 3.0 firmware going live in mid-June. As has been the case with many of the other developers we ran into issues and had to go through two rejections and had to wait two months before the application finally got approved. Personally, I still don’t understand why the rejections occurred. The statement was that our application was encouraging excessive consumption of alcohol, this coming from a company that approved ’101Drinking Games’ and ‘iDrink’ along with plenty of other drinking applications. Encouraging alcohol consumption on the App Store should be the least of Apple’s worries, at the time of our first rejection Apple had a top 10 application supporting school shootings and had previously approved the now infamous ‘Baby Shaker’ app. As you can see I’m still a little temperamental over the whole situation. I’m hoping Apple really improves the review process and makes it far more transparent and helpful for all of the developers.
While I’m pleased with the final product, I believe there is more work that needs to be done. Because this was my first attempt at iPhone development and Objective-C I took some liberties and the code is… how you say not object-oriented, clean, or readable. As such I need to do some major clean-up in that department. There’s also a performance impact that I’ve just recently noticed with incredibly large music libraries. While I could say that this is probably the SDK, I can’t clearly confirm that until I do some further testing. Other than the previously mentioned issues and some minor bug fixes most of the development time going-forward will be spent on enhancements from a feature and UI perspective as well as on development for the Facebook application. I’m really confident that the new features we have planned will make this application more enjoyable from a social and party perspective.
We really hope you give the application a try. Any questions, concerns, feedback, and or ideas are more then welcome – overthink.apps AT gmail