I’ve started a new blog, Code the Phone, with a friend of mine. The purpose of it is all things related to application development and the business of selling apps on smartphones. Not surprisingly, we aren’t talking about anything other than the iPhone at the moment.

I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of In Season 1.0 for the iPhone and iPod touch. In Season is a produce shopping guide, inspired by a couple of recent books that address the problem of missing flavor in most produce found in American markets.

Here in America, we’ve become rather used to the idea that fresh fruits and vegetables are available whenever we want them. What we don’t always realize is that this convenience comes at the cost of flavor and price. Plants grow according to a schedule, and while we can force things somewhat (hothouse tomatoes, for example), if you want peaches in the dead of winter, they aren’t coming from the northern hemisphere.

Shipping produce from South America is a long trip to an American market, though, so food has to be bred to survive the journey and someone (the consumer) has to cover the costs of that travel.

There are even disadvantages to strawberries grown and sold in season. Strawberries are so fragile, growers have had to breed them exclusively for shipment, resulting in a berry that has only a pale shadow of true strawberry flavor left.

I created In Season to help my own family, and hopefully others, with this problem. Food tastes better when it’s grown according to its natural schedule, and even more so if you can find a local farmer supplying produce to your market. It will take less effort to grow it and supply will be higher, so you will pay less. Locally-grown produce also means less fuel is burned bringing that food to market, further bringing prices down and reducing your carbon footprint at the same time.

The economics of the App Store being what they are, version 1.0 is a toe in the water. If it is well received and I can justify further development, I have some great ideas to make it an extremely useful and educational app.

If you are interested in those books I mention above, they are terrific reads: How to Pick a Peach: The Search for Flavor from Farm to Table, by Russ Parsons and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver.

Hallelujah: Apple is now offering official developer forums for the members of the iPhone Developer Program. It’s tied to your Apple ID, so they know who’s in and who’s not, and part of the usage agreement implies that they may provide forums for the discussion of pre-release software.

I hope they extend this to Mac development, too. The Apple mailing lists are great, but up until Leopard was released, the moderators on cocoa-dev were constantly fighting the tide of questions about Leopard-only APIs.

(Seen on Daring Fireball.)

This evening I finally received an email from Apple informing me that our first application for the iPhone and iPod touch is ready for sale. I’m pleased to announce Pat Counter, a simple way to keep track of a running count without having to hold something in your hand or look at a screen to tap a button.

It’s a simple application, but it was an interesting experience in developing and shipping an application for a new platform. Rands was right about 1.0: it’s amazing how much work and time it takes to take care of all the little details, even in something as simple as Pat Counter. Valley start-ups really do go out of business because it can be so hard. (Aside: Rands’s book Managing Humans is quite good.)

I wasn’t able to find any data points out there about lead times, but for me it was five days between submission of the binary to Apple and approval for sale. That includes a weekend, but it seems like apps are still approved then, just at a slower rate.

Finally, a word of advice: make sure your binary is right the first time. I goofed my initial build and it took seven days before Apple told me about it, by which time I’d already noticed it myself. Replacing the binary was effectively the same as the initial submission; I went to the back of the line. Read the instructions for a distribution build closely and follow them exactly.

Update: It’s now available on the App Store with a direct link, but isn’t in the search results.

Update 2 (Sep. 15): It now shows up in search results, a mere five days after approval.