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iTunes Connect Availability Date

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What time will an app go live in iTunes when setting an Availability Date in the future?

The answer is quite simple. Assuming your app has been approved and is in the ‘Ready for Sale’ state, it will be published in each App Store territory at midnight local time.

For example, if you have chosen to publish your app in the Australian, UK and US App Stores and set an availability date of 1st June then your app will go live at 0.00 hrs local time on the morning of 1st June in each territory.

The time in London when your app will go live:

  • Australia: 31st May 15.00 hrs
  • United Kingdom: 1st June 00.00 hrs
  • United States: 1st June 08.00 hrs

This means that your app will go live in some territories before it is available in the UK.

Problems with 1Password Reader for Android

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I’ve been using the 1Password application from AgileBits for a few years. It has been a Godsend for keeping track of the hundreds of logins and secure notes I need to keep in sync across multiple machines.

One of the more recent additions to the client portfolio is the free 1Password Reader app for Android.

The app allows you to read your secure credentials from a 1Password keychain stored on your SD card or Dropbox folder.

This app has been working well right up until the v1.8.1.1 update which was released to Android Market on 20th June. After that the app would no longer import my 1Password keychain and was reporting the error “Urecognizable keychain”.

After some investigation I found that the cause of the problem was that my 1Password keychain did not have the correct file extension, in fact it didn’t have a file extension at all and was displaying in Finder as a folder.

The 1Password keychain is in fact a package file and the latest version of the Android app needs the keychain to have the file extension of .agilekeychain.

To find out where your 1Password keychain file is have a look for a hidden file called .ws.agile.1Password.settings in the root of your Dropbox folder. The contents of this file is the location of your 1Password keychain file.

To fix my Android problem I closed the 1Password Mac client and then added the .agilekeychain file extension to my 1Password keychain folder in Dropbox. The next time I fired up the Mac client I went into Preferences > General and updated the Data File location to match the renamed keychain.

This has fixed the Android issue which now imports the Dropbox keychain without any problems.

My Internet Anniversary

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I noticed this week that I recently past the milestone of the 20th anniversary of my first public Internet post in 1991. This was the same year that the first ever web page was published by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.

My first verifiable post was to a Usenet newsgroup (now commonly known as Google Groups) on 6th March 1991. It was my first post on the public Internet, although I had also been active on the Fidonet BBS network for some time before then.

I’d love to say that my first post was about something terribly profound or academically significant, but in fact it was incredibly frivolous and befitting of a boozy student.

As an exercise for the reader – can you find it? 🙂

Why I dislike 1&1

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I couldn’t find a lot to like about 1&1.

Here are some of the reasons why I ditched them …

  • Loyal existing customers can’t benefit from the same offers as new customers
  • They took over 9 months to support the .me TLD in their Control Panel tools
  • You can’t add TXT DNS records for domains hosted by 1&1 (so you can’t use SPF)
  • They don’t renew UK domain names until the very day of the domain expiry
  • You can’t register a new domain name with different registrant details
  • Their anti-spam service sucks
  • Their support people discuss your personal account details with third parties
  • My web sites hosted by 1&1 kept suffering unexplained downtime
  • They ‘improved’ their Control Panel and removed support for Macs!

I have never known their service status page show anything other then “All systems functional” even when their own web sites are failing with spurious error messages:

Finally, to add insult to injury they rip you off when you leave.

1&1 invoiced me on 12th May for six months of pre-paid hosting service from 10th May to 10th November. I finally moved over all my domains to another provider and sent 1&1 notice of contract cancellation on 3rd June.

I contacted 1&1 and asked when my refund would be processed. Their response was “the charges are non refundable“. I asked them to re-instate my account in that case and was told “We regret to inform you that your account is already terminated to which our system can no longer activate.”

I had been a customer of 1&1 for over 5 years and that’s how they treat me.

Great customer service – thanks 1&1 !

Xcode freezing when opening a project?

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A possible solution to Xcode 4 freezing after you open a project:

If your Xcode project source path contains a space then rename it and try opening the project again. This is the most likely cause.

If it still freezes after renaming then do the following:

1. (Force) Close Xcode
2. Delete these cache files:

rm ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.dt.Xcode
rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Xcode.plist

3. Restart Xcode & keep your fingers crossed!