Last week I released SimCap, my first OS X application. This entailed — in addition to the whole 'designing and coding and testing' part — setting up the infrastructure necessary to sell it. Of course, I did all this at the very last minute, with SimCap sat there ready to go and the absolute minimum of advanced planning. That minimum planning was the decision to use Shine.
Shine is an application management dashboard, written by Tyler Hall and designed around the basic workflow of your average Mac Indie developer: taking payments via PayPal, generating licences with AquaticPrime, and pushing updates using Sparkle. I first heard about Shine on The MDN Show (epsiode 11) (which was — sorry, Scotty — the first episode I'd listened to in a long time). One of the things about iPhone development is that Apple does take care of most of the business side of things for you. While Shine doesn't exactly sit you down with a hot cuppa and tell you not to worry your pretty little head about all those nasty numbers, it certainly makes things easier, especially if you're starting out from scratch. Assemble components to fulfil the same roles Shine does would probably taken a few days.
I'm afraid that this won't be a complete Shine "how to" guide, but instead a collection of my thoughts on the process of setting the dashboard up, scribbled down while the experience is still fresh in my mind.
Firstly, did you notice that "especially if you're starting out from scratch" bit above? I mention it because Shine is rather inflexible in what it does. You can replace the AquaticPrime portion with your on licence generator, but otherwise the workflow is pretty-much locked down. Payment info comes in via PayPal's IPN service, so if you use a different payment processor you'll either need to write your own handler or look for another solution. Likewise, updates are stored in and downloaded from Amazon S3, without, say, the option to store them on your local server. In this last case, I decided that the ease of using Shine would probably outweigh the cost of using S3. (And I think I was right: this week's thousand downloads have cost me about 20 cents.)
Shine is basically a set of PHP scripts (available from the link above, either directly via Git or in the archive format of your choosing). Installation is just a matter of copying them to your server. The config file allows you to configure the exact same code for both your test and production servers. Documentation is minimal, basically amounting to the comments in the source code — but then this is aimed at Indie developers, who can probably be expected to feel comfortable diving into the code and figuring things out that way.
But just in case you aren't, or you've stumbled across this post looking for help... You build the MySQL database shine needs by running the .sql file from the archive using MySQL'a source command. You'll then have to create your own entry in the users table. There's an entry for using encrypted passwords in the config file, and if you set it, don't forget to also provide a string of random characters as salt. I ended up inserting random echo statements into the hashing function (on my test server) to see what value I should enter into the database as a password, but I'm almost certain there's a simpler way of doing it.
I can't personally say that installing Shine on my production server was a breeze, but none of that was Shine's fault. The code is neatly modular, which means that you may only encounter a problem with your server configuration the first time you go to use a particular feature. For instance, the first time I tried to test the PayPal IPN, I discovered that Shine needed libcurl, which I didn't have installed. (What followed was a couple of days of server re-imaging and mod_php re-compiling — but I'm sure that your mileage will vary. Especially if you have a grown-up looking after your servers for you.) As far as I can tell, the not-really-at-all-exotic-although-some-Linux-distros-seem-to-think-so modules you'll need are libcurl (for PayPal IPN), libjson (for everything(?)), and bcmath (for AquaticPrime — and this can only be added to PHP at compile time... sigh). A little pre-flight test script to check for these and warn of any potential nasty surprises might be an idea (and I guess if someone who knows their way around PHP doesn't write it then I'll have a go...).
Once you get this far, another little gotcha is that Shine will only process IPN messages with "Completed" status. Which makes perfect sense and is how you want it to behave, but can easily catch you out. If, like me, you're selling in a different currency to that of your bank account, you'll want to throw the "accept and convert" switch (it's under "Profile > Payment Receiving Preferences") to have transactions automatically completed. And while you're there, you'll also probably want to disable accepting eCheques, since transactions using them also won't complete straight away.
I've dwelt on the cons of using Shine because a post saying "use Shine, it's simply amazing" would be a little dull. But, honestly, I really can't recommend it enough. It has made the business side of launching an OS X application about as painless as you could hope. (And I haven't even mentioned it's integration with Tyler's OpenFeedback framework.) There are a couple of extra features which I'd like to see — some indication of the sample size used to calculate your Sparkle stats (did I mention Shine will also collect statistics from Sparkle?), for instance, and maybe auto-response and notification e-mails for OpenFeedback submissions — but otherwise Shine does everything it needs to so you don't have to. Get it and use it: it honestly is that much of a no-brainer.
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