Lifecards appeared on the featured list last week and that made sales go up by a factor of more than 10. People have been generally extremely positive about it.

Since Lifecards 1.0 came out there have been several blog-reviews. Some of them are linked below:

• Touch Reviews http://touchreviews.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/app-review-lifecards/
• Epic iPhone Apps
  http://epiciphoneapps.com/epic-app-awards/lifecards/
• House of Husar http://www.husar.us/blog/archives/4407

It is has been great to read these posts and also the reviews on the US-iTunes store. I would like say thank you very much for those positive remarks and also to some of the negative ones. It took a lot of hard work to get Lifecards to a 1.0 release and I am sure I lost quite a bit of hair in the process. Thanks also to Apple for selecting Lifecards for the featured list.

Based on the positive reviews it hurts extra to read that someone had problems with resolution and therefore decided to only give it one star on the iTunes store. This was a huge puzzle for me. OK, the resolution is limited by the iPhone display and iPhone Mail's photo limits (can only send photos in maximal 800 pixel resolution). However, I didn't really think this warranted a one star review.

On the iPhone 2.2 firmware there was a huge bug with photo-saving; When you saved a photo to the photo album (from your own app) in resolution 800x600, Mail and Photos would only display a thumbnail variant of the photo (possibly 160x100 resolution). There is an easy work-around for this. Don't use even pixel resolutions; use odd ones -- i. e. use 801x601 instead of 800x600. If you do that everything looks OK on the iPhone 2.2. It is the weirdest bug but luckily Apple got around to fixing it on iPhone 2.2.1.

Lifecards contains that work-around so everything works on 2.2 firmware. I have tested this on my own phone many times to be sure.

That made me even more puzzled about the angry resolution comments. I was hoping that someone would send me more details, but for a couple of weeks all I would see was yet another angry review. Don't expect people to have the energy to write to you if something doesn't work -- It is too easy just to post a review on the iTunes store for that.

Finally I got a breakthrough last Thursday. One guy send me a thumbnail jpeg in very low resolution, and asked me if this could really be intentional. First I thought that he had some special variant of the iPhone 2.2 software because the bug looked similar. I asked him to update his iPhone and send me some more details, but just as I emailed my reply I looked at the bottom of his message; "Sent from my iPod".

AHA! I had been so preoccupied with iPhones that I had not thought about iPods. I searched the web and discovered that the guy behind ColorSplash (no. 3 on the app-store at this time) had experienced some problems with the iPod touch. He mentioned a work-around but the short-description he gave was exactly the one I had used for the iPhone 2.2 which obviously did not work since it was already in Lifecards. I decided to run out early Friday morning and buy an iPod touch for testing. A few hours later I had a solution.

It turns out that the iPod touch doesn't like photos saved in resolutions higher than 800x600 to the Photos album, so I simply reduced the output-resolution in Lifecards to a maximum of 799 pixels in either direction and that seems to have helped. The photos still look bad in the Photos viewer, but now the correct image is emailed with Mail. These bugs are really weird and it is very frustrating as developer to run into them because there is nothing you can. The bugs are completely on Apple's side. By the way, the guy got an iTunes gift-card for helping solving the puzzle for me.

I should also note that the high-resolution photo saved by Lifecards is still on the iPod in any case and you can use the SendPhotos app to email them.

Anyway, Lifecards 1.0.1 with this workaround has now been submitted, and based on the user comments Michael and I have gotten some great ideas for Lifecards 1.1 which we are already working on.