Using Crittercism SDK to effectively find & fix crashes

This post is talking about iOS apps, but I'm sure most of it applies to Android as well...

Having a crash report framework for your app is not really optional.

While investing in the QA phase before submitting your app can find and eliminate a lot of the crashes, there will always be something you'll miss, and there's nothing like millions of potential users to help you find and fix these annoying crashes when they happen.

Crittercism is a great example of a framework that makes sure you are going to get all the needed data from your users, AND may also be very helpful during the development & QA phase (in case you are not connected with a debugger and an exception breakpoint and a crash occurred).

The framework is really simple to use and the documentation is very succinct, so I'm not going to elaborate too much about the basic integration and features (such as symbolicated stack traces for each crash), but I DO want to tell you about some of my favorite features in the framework, that got us at JoyTunes to choose and use it for our iOS apps.

Developing "Piano Dust Buster"

So... "Piano Dust Buster" - the game I've been working on in the past few months in JoyTunes - is live in the iPad App Store for two weeks now. This is very exciting to me, so I decided to write a blog post about it, sharing some thoughts about this game and how it was to develop it.

About the game

The game is a piano song game, that you can play both in touch mode and with your own real piano.
The idea is to give a tap-tap/guitar hero like experience, while being on the more educational side (e.g. piano keys are real-life sized + there's a game mode with a musical staff that you can learn reading sheet music through) + instead of playing with a toy guitar, you can play with your own real instrument, so you're actually practicing.

Here's the game trailer, so you can get a hunch of what's the game like:

For more info, visit the game's homepage: www.joytunes.com/piano
The link to the game: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/piano-dust-buster-song-game/id502356539?mt=8

Xcode vs. AppCode

Some Background
(mostly some personal info about me - skip if you're only interested in the comparison):
I've always been an Eclipse fan.
Eclipse was always my favorite IDE for Java, and therefore when I started developing in Python PyDev was the obvious and excellent choice.
I tried a little bit of Jetbrains' IntelliJ and PyCharm. They both seemed very impressive, but to be honest - whole the project settings there were a little bit scary for me, plus they cost money and I was happy with the free Eclipse so I didn't see a good reason to make the move.


Upon joining JoyTunes, I started to develop in 2 new technologies for me: ActionScript3, and Objective-C.