Project Unicorn

Do you know what a unicorn is? It is a mythical creature, impossible to catch.

Each developer has his/her own unicorn, which means that there is a project they just can’t seem to finish due to several reasons. I have such a project.

Some time before I join the army, I had began working on a new project, which involved networking in such a way, that iPhone’s memory would be drained in an instant, when downloading. When I realized that, I began working on optimizations to make it consume less and less memory, and I managed to do it.

However, the application would crash at random points, without giving any explanation on why it did. I tried contacting Apple, and asking about this in forums, to no avail. Then, the time to join the army came for me, and the project was abandoned. I released Rapid Choice instead, waiting patiently until I had the time to get involved with this project again.

In May, I had fulfilled my army duties, and I tried getting involved with the project again. Again, I was frustrated by failure, and I released iGreekNews HD instead. It’s not that I couldn’t finish it, it was that I wanted to release a new application for the iOS, and iGreekNews HD was something that many people had asked for.

I am now getting involved with “Project Unicorn” again. I hope I will be able to finish it, because it feels like a dream at this point. When it is released, it will come both as a standalone application and as an add-on for iGreekNews HD and plain iGreekNews.

Right now, I am struggling with iOS’ lack of support for SOAP web services and XML parsers, and regular expressions library for iOS. Seems I have a long road until I consider myself to release something new.

However, I have something ready. iGreekNews HD 1.2 is waiting to be released. It will have some new features, updated UI, and and many bug fixes. I would release it now, but I wait for Lion to show up. Compiling with Lion will eliminate some memory leaks concerning the UIWebView… or at least it does in the beta I am using. I believe it’s worth waiting a little longer…