YELLING ROBOT!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, January 6th, 2011

Yelling Robot is a FREE Mac App that is an animated robot avatar which yells at you at regular time intervals!

The “yelling” capability is done through Mac OS’ speech synthesis Text-To-Speech (TTS) engine. It uses the “Zarvox” voice, since it is a robot.

It has a Questionaire for you to fill out, so that it can yell personalized phrases at you. It is almost like a “Mad Libs” activity, except that it actually says it out-loud through Mac’s TTS capabilities and you don’t see the complete phrases.

It is the most simplistic behavioural “robot” that you can get.

Please DOWNLOAD Yelling Robot and check it out. Leave a rating too!

I will have a video up soon, as I accidentally maxed out my Vimeo data with the BubbleBoy video, haha.

This was a quirky little Mac App that I created to share on the App Store when it is first opening. It is a fantastic day for the Mac OS, and software in general!

Happy Mac App Store Day!

DOWNLOAD YELLING ROBOT

Posted in: Animation, Art, Projects, Robot.

Canada Spirit!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

Canada Spirit is now available on the App Store! Woot! It is a Free App, with an optional In-App upgrade. You can check it out here:

US: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/canada-spirit/id394637853?mt=8
Canada: http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/canada-spirit/id394637853?mt=8

The App has actually been complete for 3 months now, but there were complications along the way. It’s a long story:

For Apps that use In-App purchases, you have to have your App reviewed (without the In-App purchase capabilities) and rejected. This takes approximately 1.5 weeks. Not to mention, that you have to make the App without the In-App capabilities, which, depending on the complexity and time dedication, could be a few days. We’re already looking at 2 weeks waiting here.

Once your App is rejected, you can finally test the In-App purchase sandbox part of your App. SWEET. Add a few days for debugging. We’re up to a total of about 2.5 weeks used to be waiting here.

This is when the crazy part happened to me. For the In-App purchase, I selected the option “Canadian English” for the language. When my App moved to “In Review” (yesss finally!), they removed that language, which forced my In-App purchase to be in a “Developer Action Required” state- and thus no In-App Purchase approval. The whole point of submitting your App (without the In-App purchase capability) to be rejected was to get the In-App purchase approved.

For this, an additional 1.5 weeks were added. We’re already at 4 weeks here! >_<

Depending on how carefully you read the guidelines for the App Store, then you can be waiting about a month. That’s what happened to Canada Spirit. It got caught in the payment for hardware devices clause. This added another 1.5 weeks…

Once the App was resubmitted, the In-App purchase language options changed AGAIN. Luckily though this time the App Store review team actually contacted me and I was able to fix the In-App without having to go to the back of the line. YAY!

You have to have a lot of dedication to survive the App Store review process. Canada Spirit went through 6 weeks of poking and prodding just to get to you guys, so I hope you enjoy it Post your screenshots of whatever photos you decorate on Flickr so that we can see them!

Also, sharing this story isn’t meant to be against the App Store at all. I still enjoy the App Store as a consumer and developer! It is to cast some awareness on the time investment you will have to make if you want to do some In-App purchases!

Posted in: iPhone, Projects.

CRAZY stars on App Store! :)

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, September 3rd, 2010

CRAZY stars is now finally on the App Store. If you have an iPad, go to itunes.com/apps/crazystars to play with the free App! ^_^

If there’s 1,200 downloads in 3 weeks, it will be released Open Source!

Enjoy! Let me know what you think of CRAZY stars!

Posted in: iPhone, Projects.

App on the App Store – Instant Bacon

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, June 22nd, 2009

The first app I seriously focussed on developing is now in the APP STORE!

You can check it out by searching for Instant Bacon, or clicking here.

Hooray!!!

Posted in: Art, Other, Programming, Projects.