I've just completed my first iPhone app for the app store. It's called Holiday Bells and is a handbell-ringing app. I'm so pleased at how it turned out; I think it looks and sounds great.

The app has three views: jingle bells (shake to ring 'em), a single handbell (swing the phone to ring the bell), and a set of eight handbells that you can tap out Christmas tunes on. Of course you have to know the tunes you want to play. Maybe next year I'll modify it to include some tap-along tunes...

It's definitely been a learning experience. It took me a lot longer to finish than I expected it would, between writing the code to detect a swing/ring, and finding good bell sounds to use after I decided that synthesized sounds just didn't cut it. Then I had to find (or make) nice art for the app. I got a lot of the background art from iStockphoto, which allows iPhone developers to use art under their standard license... at least until you sell 500K copies. (I know I won't get anywhere near that, though if I sell even 1% of that amount, I will gladly buy extended licenses for all the art I used.) Then I had to make a nice looking icon for the app, a bigger (512x512) icon for the app store, and screen shots to show on the app page. I definitely spent a lot of time in Photoshop while polishing off the app.

I also ended up changing some of the functionality; originally I had wanted the single handbell to change pitch depending on how you twisted the phone. I had it kinda working, but accelerometer noise often resulted in stray bell tones, so you couldn't play an accurate tune that way. It was more frustrating than fun. I also found that twisting the phone a lot resulted in wrist strain. So I changed it to just play one tone, and then added the musical scale panel so you can change the pitch of the bell:

I debated whether to make the bell play a sound when you tap a new note on the scale. Ultimately I decided not to - if you change the note, you still have to swing the phone to ring the bell. My theory there was that in the remote chance someone were using this for a performance, they would not want it to make noise when they re-tune the bell. I'll probably make this a preference in a future version though.

So, there it is: my first iPhone app. I'm proud of it, and I hope it'll be well received in the app store. You can download it here from iTunes.