Quality Assurance

BelleChat is finally in the hands of Nokia QA. Thanks to the help of my trusty beta-tester Daniel Ferguson, who not only tested the app but also designed some wonderful icons, it became ready at the weekend. Once it passes the QA process, it will be available for purchase in Nokia Store in 5-7 working days.

Purchase? Well, yes. I figured that surely our hard work is worth the price tag I've put on it. I've put it up at the €1 price point, which will be £1, or US$0.99, or the local equivalent. I'll get 70 eurocents for every download, and this money will be used initially to invest in further development. I want to investigate Android and Windows Phone development, so I'll be purchasing phones for testing purposes. My workplace is in interested in my development skills, such as they are, so there are possibilities there.

Communi, the IRC library which I've used to develop BelleChat, also has IRC clients available for Symbian and Meego in the Nokia Store, at the same price point as BelleChat. I encourage you to check them out.

BelleChat almost ready to publish.

BelleChat is finally just-about ready for publishing to the Nokia Store. With the help of Daniel Ferguson, I've been bug-fixing and tweaking, and got it into a fit state to publish. It's going to be available in the Nokia Store for the equivalent of €1 (that's £1, or US$0.99, I think). I think that's a reasonable amount. Of course, you could always fork the GitHub repository and compile it yourself if you really want...

I already have some ideas for the future. The channels list needs some sort of search facility. I tried adding parameters to the IRC LIST command, but this didn't give the results I wanted. I think I'm going to have to play about with ListModels. I'm also thinking about being able to store details for more than one server, and parsing the server INFO messages to improve the UI. More advanced features of IRC need looking at too. Suggestions are gratefully received...