Today marks the beginning of a new venture for Polkapps: iPhone application development. During the past few weeks, I have been heads-down learning how to program for this small computer that you can hold in your pocket and the fruit of my labor is already available on the iTunes App Store!

The application I built is called DutchTab. It lets you easily split bills between friends and co-workers, and is most useful when a bunch of people order lunch and there is only one bill for the whole order. It lets those who have cash with them cover the bill, then get paid back their due later.

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, I invite you to check it out and tell me what you think! And if you have a device that runs Windows Mobile, you too can enjoy DutchTab: my good friend Martin from slimCODE is putting the finishing touches on DutchTab for Windows Mobile, and it should be available soon.

I took the release of DutchTab as an opportunity to finally build my new website, which had been in the “coming soon” state for way too long. I’m not quite done with the migration of the TuneSleeve content from its current location, so the new Polkapps site still links to the old TuneSleeve site for now. But the move to the new website should be complete within a few weeks.

Speaking of TuneSleeve: those of you who have been patiently waiting for an update to TuneSleeve should rest assured that I still plan on doing the upgrade I talked about months ago. In fact, I should be getting back to TuneSleeve pretty soon now that my first iPhone project is behind me.

Also, this iPhone development experience means good news for everybody who have been waiting for TuneSleeve on the Mac: Since programming for the iPhone is very similar to programming for the Mac, I now have the skills required to make a Mac version of TuneSleeve so it could become a reality sooner than expected.

Have a great summer!

Although Blogger has been a great host for this blog, I have decided to move it over to the main Polkapps web site.

The new site is not quite ready yet, but Polkapps News already has it’s own space over there.

Since the feed for this blog is provided by FeedBurner, current subscribers should not have to modify their settings unless you have subscribed in the first 2 days of this blog’s existence. If that is the case, please update your subscribtion to the feed address listed below:

The official URL for the feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/polkapps

The official URL for Polkapps News will now be: http://www.polkapps.com/blog

Well, it has already been one full month since the first commercial release of TuneSleeve! So far, the experience has been very positive and the results are encouraging. I am more motivated than ever to work on version 2.0 of TuneSleeve, which will include many of the most frequently requested features. I should be able to start working on version 2.0 as soon as I am done with the non-programming tasks that kept me busy during the past month:

• Paperwork
• Shopping for web hosting
• New website design
• Submission on download sites
• Feature roadmap

Most of these tasks are already behind me, so this summer should be dedicated to TuneSleeve!

It has been nearly one year since I’ve published TuneSleeve, my album art importer for iTunes, on the web. I had originally developped this application for my own needs but figured that other people might find it useful as well, so I decided to offer it for free and accept voluntary donations.

Today, I can say that the experience was very positive and worthwhile. Not necessarily from a revenue stand point (I won’t be leaving my day job any time soon), but I have gathered quite a few happy users who expressed their appreciation of TuneSleeve.

Of course, I also got feedback from a lot of users about things that did not work quite right for them in the application. My typical response to them had been “this is a known problem in the current version of TuneSleve and will be fixed in the next version”, without promising any release dates for the “next version” in question.

And weeks became months, during which I pasted my canned reply to user after user submitting the same bugs or feature requests, without actually doing anything about it. I do have good reasons for letting the TuneSleeve code rot on my hard drive for so long (young kids, busy day job and major renovations being top of the list), but as I got more and more daily downloads (and more and more bug reports), I felt like I should really do something about it.

So last week I fixed the most frequently reported problem in TuneSleeve, which affected users on a dial-up or unstable internet connection. There was a problem in the error-handling code of the image query/download process which prevented users from saving the images that had successfully made their way when a single image would fail.

As I was posting version 1.0.6 on the download page, I realized that I did not have a place on my site to advertise this new version and post the release notes for it. This simple problem triggered a series of thoughts and ideas which ultimately led to Polkapps.

Polkapps is the name of the company that I’ve just started, under which I will continue the development of TuneSleeve as well as some other projects that I have in mind. Starting a company represents a commitment, to my users as well as to myself, that I will spend serious time on TuneSleeve, adding cool features and fixing bugs on a regular basis.

It also means that TuneSleeve won’t remain free forever, as my goal is to move beyond the “application-developed-during-my-spare-time” state and provide professional-grade applications with prompt technical support and everything users can expect from a serious software company for applications they paid for.

My plans are not quite set in stone yet, but one thing is for sure: it won’t take another year before you see an update to TuneSleeve!

I invite you to keep an eye on this blog to follow the history of Polkapps as it is being made!