iPhone, 99 cent therapy

Step 1: Download Pocket God onto your iPhone or your iPod Touch. That's the 99 cent part.
Step 2: Rename one of the island natives to someone; like your boss, neighbor, that guy that cut you off on the way to work this morning, or someone else that is particularly deserving.
Step 3: Spend the next 10 minutes flipping that native into the water. Or feeding them to the shark. Or punting them into the volcano... well, you get the picture. My favorite is the lightning strike.

Ah, much better.

Sqlite and 'Database is locked'

For some reason I started seeing a few 'Database is locked' errors during development yesterday. This error was showing up when I tried to do an update/change on a row. This was really perplexing to me because I had used this kind of update and select code regularly before. Why the problem now? The error seemed to show up more frequently if I had done a large number of select statements prior to doing the update. But that of course doesn't make sense because as we all learned in our DB classes in college, reads do not cause database locking.

It took quite a bit of looking to finally find something that pointed me in a good direction. A user posted here to check out the SqliteBooks sample app from Apple. http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/iphone-sdk-development/14106-sqlite-database-locked.html

It turns out that finding a link to download an SDK 2.x sample app is quite difficult. But I digress. The SQLiteBooks sample app was very educational.

It turns out that I had learned to do sqlite from one of the books I bought when I first started this journey. I think that somewhere in my cut-and-paste journey I had lost the sqlite3_finalize statement that should come at the end of an sqlite sequence (read or write). I added it back all over the place and all my locking pain went away.

Why aren't iPod Touch users upgrading?

I use the analytics package from Pinch Media with my apps. One of the interesting things that I get to see with it is the breakdown of what OS version my users are using. I also get to see what percentage of my users are running an iPod Touch vs an iPhone. Now what I do not get to see unfortunately is the breakdown of OS usage by device type. That would be very interesting indeed. What really piques my curiosity is that the percentage of my users that are running iPhones (70%) and the percentage of my users that are running OS 3.0 (72%) is intriguingly close to the same number.

But, as my Pragmatic Marketing friends are fond of saying, "Your opinion, while interesting, is irrelevant."

So I've done a little poking around on the web. Admob published some interesting numbers the other day that claim that only 1% of iPod Touch users are upgrading. Admob published those number June 22, 2009. So here we are a few weeks later and I suspect that the numbers are a bit different. But as an iDevice developer, I still find that number disturbing.

So, why aren't they upgrading? Performance statistics like these from PCmag can't help. Is it the $10 upgrade price? Are there just not enough compelling new features in the new OS?