Friday, July 16, 2010

Flashlight 3.0 (and the pending 3.0.1)

UPDATE (July 20, 1:55PM CST): Flashlight 3.0.1 is approved and you should see it on the App Store within a few hours. My thanks to everyone for your support and patience during this time.

UPDATE (July 19, 8:30AM CST): Flashlight 3.0.1 is in review by Apple. I'm thrilled that they have responded to my urgent plea and expect to see Flashlight 3.0.1 on the App Store a bit later today!

Greetings,

Friday, July 16, Flashlight 3.0 went live on the App Store. I'm very excited about this update because I added the biggest requested feature, using the iPhone 4's LED light. The iPhone 4 LED is incredibly bright (don't look directly at it!) and it's great to be able to use this for navigating around when you need the brightest light possible.

Unfortunately, this update is causing problems. I have reports from iPad and iPod touch users that the app won't open. I'm very sorry. This is of course the last thing I wanted to have happen and I'm working on fixing this problem. As part of this, I am now the new owner of an iPod touch so I can do proper testing on iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches.

I will update this blog as I learn more. Thank you for your support and patience.

UPDATE (July 16, 11PM CST): I have submitted Flashlight 3.0.1 and requested that Apple give this update an expedited review. In the typical case, this update would appear in about a week (around July 23rd).

The issue is that any device running a version of iOS (aka iPhone OS) before 4.0 will have this crash bug. This means all iPads, some iPod touches and some iPhones.

For the programmers who might be reading this, the specific issue was that I linked to a framework which was new in iOS 4.0 (AVFoundation.framework) to add the LED functionality, but I did not set that framework to be "weak linked". Thus, when the user attempts to launch the app on an iPad with iOS 3.2, the app crashes immediately because it thinks that it MUST have AVFoundation and cannot find it on that device.

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