iPhone App Development: The Missing Manual

Chapter 7. Finishing Touches

You've now finished coding the best thing ever seen in the App Store. Or have you?

Now's the time to put the final spit and polish on your app. That includes testing your creation with a wider group of people and their devices. Since your development is winding up, now's the perfect opportunity to clean up your interface graphics. Then it's time to start working on screenshots and other promotional materials for a product website.

Beta Testing

Testing your application before submitting it to the App Store is an important part of the development process. Getting your work in front of other people will help you find problems with both your design and code.

Your App Works for You…But

You and your development team already know how the application works. You're intimately familiar with how each component should function. The code runs perfectly on your test devices.

In other words, you're the exact opposite of every single person who will download your product from the App Store.

Users find the darnedest things

Giving your application to people who've never seen it generates a lot of great feedback. As you learned on Feedback: Don't Take Your Own Word for It, customers are your greatest feedback mechanism, and beta testers are your first customers.

When you give your application to other people, two things will happen:

• They'll find bugs in your code.

• They'll find things they don't understand.

Finding bugs in your brand-new code may be disappointing, but it's much better ...