Ever wanted to travel through space? Me too. Growing up in the 60s, it was hard to ignore the moon program. If there was a launch in the morning, my teachers knew I’d be late to school. My penance? Bring my models and explain the latest mission. Every Friday evening you would find me at a local observatory or planetarium. They were magic. I’d sit in the back row trying to “catch” the stars as the planetarium’s projector rotated the sky against...

Some have reported store-problems with the in-app purchase of the new Hubble Guide Star catalog. It might be an Apple issue, as things worked fine in final test. I’ll be digging in tonight though. Update: This has now been fixed.

When we released Distant Suns on the Kindle over a year ago, one of my hopes was that it would be selected as Amazon’s Free App of the Day. And suddenly a couple of months ago I was contacted by Amazon and told that they wanted precisely that and to expect between 75K to 100K downloads! In theory it would generate thousands of new users who would hopefully show their friends Distant Suns and inspire future purchases later on. After...

Thanks to all of you who have picked up CometWatch (and to Space.com for reporting it). A couple of things I wanted to do missed the release simply because I found either no way to slow up Comet ISON for a few extra days, nor was I able to integrate iOS 7’s new CoreTimeTravel framework to zip me back a few days for that “extra edge.” But for the main task to help you located ISON, particularly after closest approach, it does...

Some iOS 6 users have been having problems with the latest build of Distant Suns. I have the fix ready to go, but will take a few days to get it approved and into the store. In the meantime if you are experiencing problems with the constellation selector, you should be able to rollback to the previous build for a few days. The Management.

5 Years ago today, I got this fun little message in my mailbox: Dear Mike Smithwick   The status for the following application has changed to Ready for Sale.   Application Name: Distant Suns Application Version Number: 1.0 Application SKU: 2001   I sold 8 copies that first day. It’s been a fun ride, most of the time. At the start it was pretty easy, in spite of the Appstore crossing the boundary into the unknown land of more than 10,000...