Here’s the change log:

General

• Added support for older firmwares, iPhone OS 3.0 and onwards.
• Improved French translations.
• When wrong credentials are filled in, an error message is shown saying the username and/or password is wrong.

Main screen

• Improved display of remaining time in main screen, now shows remaining hours when less than 1 day is left.

Analysis

• Solved issue related to having more than 1000 text messages in the bundle.
• Solved rounding issue related to calculating how many minutes and/or text messages can be called/sent.

Call history

• Call history now displays how many KB’s/MB’s where used for data connections as well as a duration.
• Minor improvement related to display of names.
• Solved issue causing dates to be displayed as (null) when AM/PM mode was chosen.

Although updates should get approved relatively faster than new applications, I don’t foresee it getting approved any sooner than a week. As WWDC is starting tomorrow & I’m sure that’ll slow things down a bit. Once it gets approved I’ll make it available in the Dutch & American stores.

Once the 1.0.1 bug fix version has been released, My Viking will be made available in other stores as well besides the Belgian one. Specifically thinking about the Dutch & American store.

The link to the AppStore can be found here.

Although several similar applications are available in the AppStore, I still pulled through and made the app since scratching your itch is a great way of making a good product.

My Viking has some distinguishing features, multiple accounts support being one of them. I won’t ask why you need it, whether to check your iPhone and iPad balance or to spy on your significant other, just know you can.

Another obvious feature, which surprisingly no other Mobile Vikings iPhone app to my knowledge has, is the cross-referencing of numbers in the call history with the iPhones address book. Instead of showing the phone number, the contacts name is displayed when found in the address book.

The last distinguishing feature is the analysis screen, this screen tries to give some meaning to your remaining balance by showing how many minutes you can call and/or text messages you can send. It also makes a prediction how many/much text messages and data you’ll have left at the end of the bundle. So you know whether to step up your text messaging rate or start slowing down.

While there are certainly some areas where the app can be improved, the call history only displays today for instance, this 1.0 release is “good enough” & postponing the release even more made no sense. The core functionality is implemented and I intend to improve/extend the app whenever I have time. Suggestions, questions and bugs may be mailed to me using the appropriate button in the extra screen.

When the app gets approved, I’ll post a new post with the link. [Edit: it's available, see next blog post]
My Viking can also be followed on Twitter: @myvikingapp.

Once you have updated the app, hit the reload button on top of the Now Playing screen to fetch the extended data, which includes program details, if you have already launched the app today. Because Be Tv has already loaded & cached the data, the new version will by default just use the cached data.

Important: this version requires firmware 3.0 or newer. If you haven’t updated your iPhone yet, now is the time!

Here’s the iTunes link.

If you’re having issues with the new version, be sure to leave a comment. I already know of 2 (minor) bugs which will be fixed in version 1.3.1, so if you leave a comment, I might be able to squeeze it in the bug-fix version too. Suggestions are also welcome.

All programs have a genre & most of them have extra information like a short comment and/or a long summary. Movies have a list of the main actors and series the episode name. There is however one huge issue which might be a showstopper for non-dutch speaking users. The extra information is in dutch, even when the interface is set to english or french. We unfortunately do not have access to translated info.

One of the small improvements is how long program titles are displayed. Long titles are cut off in version 1.2 & some of them are – even with holding the device sideways – not readable. Long titles are displayed over 2 lines in version 1.3, greatly improving the readability. Nothing earth shattering, but as said before a logical improvement.

Having said that, I think we’ve given a nice preview of version 1.3. As soon as the upgrade shows up in the App Store, I’ll post it on the blog & Twitter. One final word, for those wondering, Be Tv remains a free program.

The main improvements of version 1.2 have been mentioned before and can be found here. This new update is fully compatible with firmware 3.0, but isn’t built for 3.0 specifically. Users with 2.x firmwares are still able to install & use Be Tv.

In the mean time I can announce that Be Tv has been downloaded more than 20.000 times and has never left the top 50 since version 1.0 was released almost 3 months ago. It is currently at position 43 in the general top free applications and at position 9 in the entertainment ranking.

Unfortunately the new release was hindered today by a datacenter problem. And as with most things, it wasn’t something we could do much about ourselves. A firewall was misconfigured at the datacenter causing traffic directed at the Be Tv server to be rejected for a timespan of 6 hours, which is of course totally unacceptable. This downtime had nothing to do with the new Be Tv release, nor with firmware 3.0, there is and was no need to reinstall the application. We have started the quest to find a new hosting partner, since our current partner hasn’t proven to be reliable & responsible.

Update now and enjoy the new release!

Be Tv ranked 11th after only 430 downloads, 7th after 759 downloads, 5th after 1057 downloads, this was in the first 24 hours after the iPhoneclub.nl article. The number 1 spot was reached by the 6th of April after a little over 4.000 downloads.

Another interesting statistic was the ratio iPhones vs iPod Touches, I somehow anticipated more iPod Touches than iPhones, since they have been introduced a lot earlier than the iPhones. The firmware graph is pretty predictable, firmware versions older than 2.1 we’re negligible (44 devices in total) and to my surprise there are some developers who are already running 3.0 on their (main) devices.

Be Tv remained 6 days at the number 1 spot and is at the time of writing (12th of April) still the number 1 in the free entertainment list.

At the moment Be Tv is being downloaded at a rate of a little over 1 download per minute (75 per hour to be more precise) and Be Tv is being fired up at double that rate, slightly less than twice per minute. Totaling 350 downloads in less than 6 hours, landing us on spot number 49! The server providing the schedules is holding up quite nicely, despite being hammered a bit. The launch has been quite hectic (no crashes though), due to all sorts of PR-stuff, but it has been (& still is) great fun!

I’d like to thank everyone for their positive comments & I’ll try to review every feature-request and see if it’s feasible in an upcoming release.

Update: as of this morning (3rd of April) Be Tv is ranked at #11!

The new Emmer Inc website has been launched as well and for being a developer, I think it turned out ok. As for Be Tv, I’d love to hear what you guys think of it in the comments.

See you in the App Store.

Eventually I found what caused the error, I had flagged the Info.plist file as Target, thinking it was necessary. (The checkbox at the far right) Unchecking it (which is the default state) solved it. When faced with the dreadful codesign error, here’s something extra you can check.