Xblaze

So last week, I promised all Xblaze iPhone users Communities (clans/guilds) support.

Those waiting will be happy to know that today I submitted Xblaze 1.1 to the App Store reviewers. Xblaze 1.1 contains the communities support that I promised, and it’s working really nicely, if I do say so myself.

I’m hoping that the update won’t get held up too long being reviewed, and that you can all get hold of it soon.

Meanwhile, check out the screenshorts of clan Xblaze’s communities support:

Also in this update is

• Manage your Xfire preferences
  • Turn nicknames on and off
  • Hide/show offline friends
  • Hide/show friends of friends
  • Hide/show timestamps in chats
• Numerous bug fixes
  • Prevent a crash when a friend logs off while you’re chatting to them
  • Corrected ability to add friends of friends or clan mates to your friend list
  • Corrected the behaviour that allowed a user to attempt to delete a Friend of Friend from the FoF group (which also prevents a crash)
• Spruced up the Xblaze icon somewhat, looks a little flashier.

So I hope you all enjoy this eagerly anticipated update. And thank you all for your continued support for Xblaze!

One of the biggest features requested so far has been Push Notification support for Xblaze iPhone. The premise:

When a user quits the app, instead of being logged out of Xfire right then, the user would stay logged in and receive push notifications when new messages arrive.

There are a few problems with implementing this feature, some technical, some legal.

First the technical limitations.

Some people may not fully understand how push notifications work. So here’s a quick overview.

There are 5 major components:

1. The provider (In this case, Xfire)
2. The notification (The new message)
3. Apple’s Push Notification Service
4. The user’s unique iPhone
5. The Client Application (Xblaze)

For push notifications to work, the provider needs to know about the iPhone, and it’s UDID (Unique Device Identifier). Without knowing the UDID of the iPhone, there’s no way to get a notification from the server to the iPhone. If the Xfire could know your iPhones UDID, it would be able to create a notification and ‘push’ it to your device. But there is no way for Xfire to know your iPhone’s UDID.

So, the first technical difficulty is that there is absolutely no way to get Xfire to generate a push notification from its root server or no way to get it from the sercver to your iPhone. They’re not going to implement it, and we don’t have any access or control to make one ourselves. To get around this, we could set up a relay server that would maintain the Xfire Session and communicate between the Xfire server and the Client, and register the iPhone for push notifications (using its UDID).

Something like this (I don’t have time to make a pretty diagram):

Xblaze Sends UDID to relay server,
Relay Server receives message from Xfire,
Relay Server forwards message to Xblaze via push notification.

Unfortunately it’s not quite as simple as just setting up the relay server and carrying on. The relay server would require that all of the communication between Xblaze and Xfire go through this server. That includes logging in, sending/receiving messages, adding friends, retrieving game info, etc.,  etc.

It would be a massive undertaking and would probably require writing a complete implementation of the Xfire server itself so that it could proxy everything that the Xfire server does.

Once again, this is very unlikely to occur as the entire Xfire protocol is still yet to be documented, which large chunks still being undefined. In order to implement the entire server, we’d need to know exactly how everything worked…

Then, after spending the huge amount of time it would take to write and test the server, there’s the logistics of finding somewhere to host it, pay for it, maintain the health of the server, not to mention the cost of the server hardware. Also the server would have to be able to cope with accommodating thousands of Xfire users. This is not something that can be lightly thrown around as a “nice to have” feature.

Then even if someone did spend all the time, effort and money on writing this hypothetical relay server, they wouldn’t be allowed to use it anyway, which brings me on to the legality of this issue.

The Xfire Terms and Conditions specifically state (Emphasis mine):

You may not authorize any third party to access or use the Service on your behalf using any automated process such as a robot (or ‘bot’), a spider or periodic caching of information stored by the Service on your behalf, without a separate written agreement with Xfire.

It is against Xfire’s Terms and Conditions to implement such a server, and it would breach your agreement with Xfire if you used a service that relayed your connection.

Xblaze and other 3rd party Xfire clients are already treading a very fine line in terms of legality, because they’re only made possible by reverse engineering the Xfire protocol. If at any moment Xfire decided that they wanted to pursue the issue of reverse engineering, they could send a cease and desist order to all 3rd party Xfire clients, and make them stop working – or they could change the protocol and lock everyone out.

If Xblaze received a C&D order from Xfire, I would have no choice but to comply, as I am technically in breach of the Terms and Conditions, as is every other 3rd party Xfire client developer.

I’m hoping it will never come to that though, but I don’t think implementing any kind of push notification support is feasible. Possible: maybe, feasible: not right now.

The next version of Xblaze iPhone will contain a major new feature that has been asked about since its release. That ferature is Clan Support.

Clan support is definitely being worked on for Xblaze iPhone and is getting pretty close to being releasable. The current implementation is currently integrating the clan as a group within your friends list, kind of like a custom friend group, but not managed by you.

I have a better way to display the clan groups (and it’ll be sexy, I promise), so don’t get attached to this method, this screen shot is just to show that clans are working so far!

You may notice the “Communities” tab at the bottom-middle of the screen. If you don’t know, Xfire don’t call clans “clans” anymore. They’re called Communities now, so that’s the official title. And that’s where the better clan (community) interface is going to go.

Hope you’re excited!

PS. At some point – when I have time – I will merge all these new Xfire features that are in the iPhone version back into the Adium plugin. I’m sorry it’s taking so long, but all my time is being used up by the iPhone version and real life.

It seems to be some kind of trend – the hip, cool thing to do – to share your stats on your iPhone App. So I’m going to join in!

First of all, the amount of downloads received in 10 days is pretty impressive for an app with no marketing strategy and a fairly niche user base:

over 1,400 downloads in 10 days! Incredible.

From this we can see where the downloads spiked on Jan 20th when Xblaze 1.0.2 was released. Jan 21st is the latest data available for this graph, but there are even more downloads since then!

Next up is the usage stats. It seems that the majority of people are using Xblaze in 6-7 minute sessions which is exactly what I would expect from an app like this. It’s something you can just pull out of your pocket, sign in, tell someone that important tidbit you needed to, and then log off and not have to worry about not being able to tell someone what you needed to!

With 7,334 session, we can see proof that users are coming back to use Xblaze time and time again, which is the signature of a good app. Why would people keep using it if it wasn’t good?

Next is an interesting one. Of the 1,400 downloads mentioned earlier, it may appear that a majority of them were upgrades from 1.0 or 1.0.1 to 1.0.2. This would support the spike seen in the first graph. The number of active users (those that have used the app at least once every day) climbed quickly at the beginning of Xblaze’s release. It seems to be still growing, but also slowly levelling off at approximately 250. 250 people use Xblaze at least once every day for 10 days – that shows some loyalty right there.

The yellow spot and dotted line shows that the data for that period is not yet finished being collected, which means there’s still more to come before that spot turns white.

Finally, and I think most importantly are the reviews on the App Store. I think iPhone App Reviews are a huge part in whether or not an app does well on the App Store. Even one bad review amongst a sea of good reviews can have a negative impact on the applications downloads. However, it seems that people love the app so much that they just want to shout about it. Here’s a small sample of some of the reviews Xblaze has received over the past 10 days.

People all over the world are showing their appreciation for Xblaze, and I thank you all for your kind comments and excellent feedback!

Here’s to another excellent 10 days! Things can only get better!

I’ve received a few emails asking why apps crash more often on Jailbroken iPhones. So I’ve collected my thoughts and written down a number of reasons why Jailbreaking is a pretty bad idea.

• Jailbreaking Allows Background Apps
  • Extra strain on the CPU
  • Extra drain on the battery
  • Heavy consumption of available RAM
  • Usage of your data connections (this might incur costs that you’re not aware of if you’re not on an unlimited data plan)
  • It’s impossible to know what the background apps are doing, if they request more resources and can’t get them because Xblaze is using the available RAM, maybe they’re written to kill other apps and take the memory for itself? No-one knows, except the developer of that app, and since Apple don’t approve these apps, they could be doing exactly that.

This reason alone is suspect enough to be a big cause of concern for people running Jailbroken iPhones. People forget that the iPhone is a mobile device, because it is so capable. It’s important to remember that the iPhone does have a very small amount of RAM compared to laptops and other computers. The iPhone was not designed to run many apps at the same time – this is why Apple restrict it to one 3rd part app at any time. They didn’t do it just to annoy people…

If there are several apps consuming vast amounts of RAM already running on the device (this include ssh servers, themes for springboard, notification apps, etc) then what hope does a legitimate app such as Xblaze have of surviving? Those not familiar with the iPhone SDK and how the iPhone works, may not know that the iPhone OS will kill an app if the device starts to run low on memory. Non official apps may be able to be coded in ways that ignore these warnings, forcing the OS to kill the legitimate apps that can’t ignore these warnings.

The result is that Xblaze will simply quit if there are low memory conditions on the iPhone it is running on, and since Xblaze only consumes a mere 4MB of RAM while running, the jailbroken iPhone would have to be using almost all the RAM before Xblaze is even started, which is actually quite likely considering some jailbroken apps such as themes that are rich in graphics and sounds.

• Modified Frameworks
  • Changes the expected behaviour of the iPhone so that a legitimate app will crash while trying to access a function or class that has been modified by anyone but Apple.
  • May cause the app to not even launch if the required APIs aren’t available at launch time.

When writing an iPhone app, a developer is given a set of Frameworks which allow them to access the iPhone’s functionalities, user interfaces, etc. Think of them as hand grips on a climbing wall. You need them to hold onto to be able to reach the top. If you tried to grab as hand grip and it wasn’t there, you’d fall. This is exactly the kind of thing that can happen to an application that relies on a framework being in the state that it was originally in when released by Apple. Changing these frameworks simply breaks any app that requires them. And once again, since it’s impossible to know which frameworks have been changed or how they’ve been changed, developers simply can’t program their app to work in that environment.

• Inter-Process Access
  • Jailbreaking an iPhone removes all restrictions. One app may be able to access the insides of another app.

If any malicious apps decide to snoop around the memory space of a legitimate app, anything could happen, ranging from the app crashing, due to memory corruption, to having something like your password and personal details stolen… Is that something you’re willing to risk? All restrictions are removed on a jailbroken iPhone – if you’re checking your online banking through Safari, what is stopping any malicious app from stealing your account details and forwarding them on to identity thieves? Are you happy with the possibility that your xfire password may not be safe when running Xblaze on a jailbroken iPhone, because there’s nothing I can do to protect it if it is. On a legitimate iPhone, Xblaze stores your password, encrypted using an SHA1 encryption algorithm, safely inside the iPhone’s Keychain (the same way passwords are stored safely on Mac OS X). The keychain can be accessed freely by any application when running on a jailbroken iPhone… Consider it carefully.

Unfortunately, due to the shady nature of jailbreaking iPhone devices, it is impossible to say whether any of this is 100% accurate, but I know I’d rather err on the side of safety, stability and security when it comes to my personal data, my entertainment and my overall mobile experience…

The truth to the question “Why does jailbreaking cause more crashes than normal?” is that I simply don’t know. If I knew, I’d be able to prevent it…

So Xblaze has been in the App store since the 12th of January, almost 2 weeks.

I have been following the stats and feedback very closely, and so far the response to Xblaze for the iPhone has been great! Xblaze has over 20 reviews worldwide, most of which are 5 star ratings! I can’t thank the people who left these reviews enough, it’s these users that make Xblaze what it is, and without them, Xblaze would float away quietly…

However, there is always a downside. Unfortunately the downside here is that some people are running Xblaze on a Jailbroken iPhone, and leaving bad reviews when it crashes.

For those who may not know, Jailbreaking is the process of “hacking” the iPhone’s OS to allow open access to the entirety of the phone. It allows 3rd party developers to write applications that don’t need to be approved by Apple.

Since Apple aren’t approving these Applications, they could be doing anything from gathering your personal information, running in the background using up your battery and data connections, installing malicious software such as worms — literally anything is possible.

Jailbreaking also allows users to install pirated applications, and get apps for free when they would normally have to pay. It is important to note, however, that not all Jailbreakers are pirates. About 38% of the Jailbreaking community have used pirated Apps, which is approximately 1.5Million out of 4 Million.

But piracy is not a problem for free apps, and we all know that Xblaze is free. So what is the problem?

Jailbroken devices have had their software “tampered” with. The iPhone OS running on a jailbroken iPhone is not the same as that installed on regular iPhones. For this reason, it is impossible to know exactly what has been tampered with, or how it will affect how the phone works.

A study has been done, using data gathered via the Pinch Media Analytics framework that shows how jailbreaking an iPhone can negatively affect application performance.

Specifically, “all jailbroken phones (whether the application is pirated or not) suffer from increased application crash rates,”. ()

The very frustrating thing is that as a developer, I have no control over who runs Xblaze or what iPhone they run it on. And as a direct result, Xblaze will get run on Jailbroken iPhones, and the statistics show that it is likely to crash more often than if it was run on a normal, official iPhone OS.

It is impossible for me to code Xblaze to not crash on a jailbroken iPhone because it is written using the official iPhone SDK (software development kit), using the official APIs (application programming interfaces). In nearly ALL cases, jailbreaking an iPhone installs older APIs, or changes their behaviour to be more flexible and open, and in some cases, installs extra software at the system level that could affect how certain processes work.

Because of this fact, the application may expect an API to behave one way, but in fact comes up against an API that behaves completely differently to how it is programmed, and as a result, will crash. It is important to understand that this will not happen to every single application or on every single Jailbroken phone. It’s almost a “crash lottery”. You take your chances when you jailbreak and accept the risks.

It is also very important to understand that there is nothing I can do to fix it, because jailbreaking is not an officially supported development option.

At the end of all this, Xblaze suffers in the app store, receiving one star reviews for crashes that aren’t Xblaze’s fault.

You’re free to run Xblaze on any kind of iPhone you like – but please don’t leave a bad review if your device is jailbroken and the app crashes… If you want the most stable experience, don’t jailbreak your iPhone. If you don’t find that acceptable and you make the decision to jailbreak, please don’t make Xblaze suffer because of it.

Just got the email last night that Xblaze iPhone 1.0.2 is now live on the App Store .

New in this update:

• Better support for Avatars
  • Xblaze iPhone will now download the same avatar that is shown on your Xfire profile page, regardless of whether it is a custom upload, a screenshot clipping, a gallery avatar or the default Xfire avatar.
  • Avatars are cached properly, Xblaze no longer relies on the system level cache, and the avatars are written to the filesystem for faster loading and to prevent unnecessary network access
• A few UI tweaks, mainly using a grey selection style for the table cells and a new icon to dismiss the keyboard in the chat view.

Go grab it!

An update for Xblaze iPhone has just gone live on the App Store.

This update fixes a timing issue where the app could get stuck on the “Connecting…” screen while attempting to log in. This seems to happen more often on very fast internet connections (so using Xblaze over 3G is more likely to work than on a super fast wifi connection).

This has been fixed now, so those of you with super fast wifi connections can rest assured.

I’ve also just pushed the 1.0.2 update into review, which includes better support for avatars and caching, and a few UI tweaks too, so there’s something to look forward to in a few days.

(Ps. I’m absolutely loving this new faster turnover with the App Store approval process! Hehe)

Very happy to announce that Xblaze has just been approved by Apple and should appear in the App Store very very shortly!

I’m really happy about this, and I’m really impress at how fast Apple worked through my submission. The app went into review at 9:15am EST, and was approved by 15:51pm EST. That’s just over 6 and a half hours! Excellent work Apple!

So everyone must go and download it, and don’t forget to leave a review!!

PS. I’ll have a page up soon where you can see a screen cast of the app…

I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who signed up for the Xblaze iPhone Beta. Your input and feedback has been extremely useful throughout the testing period.

I would also like to announce that Xblaze iPhone has now been submitted to the App Store for review! I’m hoping the approval process won’t take that long, and Xblaze should be available to download very shortly.

Here are some screen shots to tide you over