The adventures and calamity of eager yet grumpy developers.
Take it with the grain of salt. Might get slightly rude.
Not offensive.
Privacy matters.
Woke up around 4 AM today after realizing something important was missing. Privacy controls inside Hydra Bridge itself. The app already allows hiding certain attendee information, but that still means the data gets forwarded to the device in the first place. Which effectively puts the person operating the check-in device in possession of attendee data. Not ideal. Started by adding a whole new Privacy tab to Hydra Bridge. Then realized that was unnecessary overkill. Removed it all and went with a much simpler approach instead: a small privacy icon that opens a popup with controls for disabling forwarding of first name, last name, and email address to the app entirely. Took me an hour to select an icon. Talking about wasting precious time. May expand it later with more options. And if the data never leaves the server, it obviously can’t be displayed. Works exactly as intended. Quite happy with this one, not going to lie. As soon as the apps are fully approved and published (Google… please…), I’ll update the app itself so display options become unavailable when corresponding data isn’t being forwarded by Hydra Bridge. Small detail. But it feels like the right UX decision. I think.
Windows happened
Got a Windows machine a few days ago and built the first Windows flavor of Hydra. Works nicely. Even made a proper installer. Then I started researching what it takes to sign the app properly for distribution. That’s when my jaw left the table. Signing certificates are absurdly expensive. Before giving up on that route entirely, I’m looking into Microsoft Store distribution. From what I’ve gathered so far, it might be a much more reasonable option. Not fully sure yet. Also not fully sure how relevant Microsoft Store is these days. I’ve been living in the Apple world for the past 15 years, so my awareness of the Microsoft realm is… limited. Still, if it saves some money and gives users a cleaner install path, I’m fine with it. Microsoft Store it is. Probably.
Approved. Properly this time.
It’s there. The macOS version got approved. After the initial f-up powered entirely by yours truly and a quick resubmission, Apple approved it. Not gonna lie… seeing something you spent ages building, powered mostly by sleepless nights and questionable nutrition choices, sitting on the App Store next to all the big names feels… strange. In a good way. Hard to describe properly. Also managed to gather 12 testers for the Android version today. They’re clicking around now. Scanning dummy tickets all over the place. The Android countdown has officially started. 14 days, assuming everything goes well. If not, I may have to perform ritual codekiri. This process takes forever.
Well that was dumb
The macOS release got rejected. At first, the reaction was somewhere between confusion and “what the actual f…udge?” It’s the same codebase. Then I read the review notes. Turns out I left camera entitlement enabled for the macOS app. The funny part is that the app itself already had conditions preventing camera-related check-in methods from even appearing on macOS. So yes.The functionality was hidden. The entitlement wasn’t. Fixed it.Resubmitted. Somewhere at Apple, there’s probably a reviewer wondering what exactly I was trying to accomplish there. At least someone may have had a laugh. I didn’t.
Couldn’t sit still.
And here we go again. While waiting for the apps to hopefully get approved, I started building another one on top of the existing Hydra infrastructure. Hydra Telemetry. Right now it’s mostly a skeleton running on dummy data. Still, it already looks promising. The nice thing about having a stable foundation underneath is that new ideas move much faster now. At least compared to the early days of figuring everything out from scratch. Have some fairly big ideas for this one. Will see where it goes. One thing at a time.
One huge W
One down. Apple said yes. Somewhat. They sent a few questions yesterday to better understand how the app works and what exactly it does. Fair enough. Oddly enough, it felt like exchanging emails with an actual human being. Didn’t expect that. Today, the iOS version was approved and is ready for release. Now waiting for the macOS review. Hopefully that one behaves too.