You never know, it might help someone

The iOS5 SDK, by default, only builds executables for the armv7 architecture. This is supported by iOS 4.3 and above, but not earlier versions. Previous SDKs have built jointly for armv6 and armv7, covering all versions back to (at least) iOS 3.0.

When building an update to Jigsaw Party, Xcode gave this warning:

To be honest, I skipped over it the first time, alongside a bunch of other warnings from third party libraries like Facebook and AdMob, which haven’t been updated to compile cleanly for iOS5 yet. (OK, let’s be honest, they never compile cleanly…). But Application Loader eventually rejected the app with this same warning.

My hunch on how to get around it was confirmed by a random posting I found on the internet that said “just add armv6 to the build architectures”.

Not really knowing exactly how to do this, I pressed the “+” button in “Architectures”, tapped in “armv6″ and this is how the build settings looked.

No build errors. Hunky dorey. Submitted to Apple and – amazingly – reviewed and approved within hours!

Then the user complaints started.

With the version built and run directly from Xcode, it was all good. With the version from the App Store, crazy things happened! Maths got all broken!

The screenshot below really only shows part of the problem.

As well as the play area not being in the right place (there should be a thin border all the way around, not that big stripe of picture at the bottom), adverts were floating away, sometimes to the middle of the screen, sometimes off screen completely. Pieces were landing in the wrong place. Drop a piece (correctly) in the top right corner, and would ping over to the left side of the screen.

On the iPhone, the advert problem was slightly more apparent.

Apparently I boobed, and Apple’s tools didn’t spot it.

While they were keen to tell me that iOS versions prior to 4.3 needed the armv6 architecture including in the build, they didn’t tell me that 4.3 and above would break nastily if armv7 wasn’t included.  I didn’t even realise at first that it wasn’t included, but that setting above should actually have looked like this instead:

The way I did it first time actually said “only build for armv6″.  This new way says “do both”.  The key is not to touch that tempting little “+” button to add an architecture.  That would be too intuitive, obviously.  You have to edit what’s already there instead, like this.

Oh hang on, that plus button is a good one

After forcing a release build onto my iPad using both settings, I could finally reproduce the error and resubmit with (a little more) confidence an update that should fix this insanity.

Well, almost.  Perfect timing for this wouldn’t you say? …

The game was created as a web application for iPhone, but publisher Enego, Inc decided it was necessary to create a native app to provide a better user experience.

We advised Enego’s developers how to create a private REST API for the game engine that could co-exist along with the web app.

We then built an iPhone app using the Appwardly Mobile Framework to interface with the Poker Buddies API, ensuring that communications took place quickly and reliably – even on devices with slow mobile data connections.

The result is a game that has reached the top 25 overall apps in the iTunes App Store, and scaled seamlessly during large spikes of activity. Poker Buddies provides entertainment – and prizes – to thousands of players every day.

Players put their face in the game and answer questions in a head-to-head battle of knowledge. The winner of each round gets to “sticker” the face of their opponent with a funny nose, crazy hair, oversized glasses or a silly hat.

It’s a unique and hillarious way to compete in a quiz game, and first appeared in two titles by Lightwood Games, which were designed for educational use: Number Battle and Vocab Battle.

However, statistics showed that a large number of users downloaded the game and quickly gave up because they couldn’t play immediately. The two-player format required them to either have a friend nearby (with their own iPhone), or to find an opponent online at the same time.

Accordingly, a new game was developed which better addressed the demands of casual mobile gamers.

Rather than requiring an opponent to be available whenever you want to play, Face Rivals uses a turn-based format, allowing each player to answer a round of questions in their own time, and then be notified after their opponent has taken their turn.

The Appwardly Mobile Framework is used to handle communication between players – including in-game chat, as well as the game turns themselves. Special attention was paid to keeping the amount of data sent over the network to an absolute minimum to ensure a fast user experience: each photograph is downloaded to a device only once, with the app then using geometric functions to transmit and apply stickers using only tiny chunks of data.

While Face Rivals retains the math and vocab questions from its predecessors, it also includes thousands of trivia questions. As more questions are added to the game, the Appwardly Mobile Framework allows them to be delivered immediately over-the-air, without requiring an update in the App Store.

Face Rivals is a free app, available now on the App Store.

After a lot of investigation it seems that sometimes when I ask Game Center for my score, instead of giving me my score, it tells me the value for my highest scoring friend! Obviously, this wasn’t an issue during testing, as I always had the highest score. Equally, I didn’t see it on the live game until I added Hektor666 to my friends list to congratulate him on being the first to reach 10,000 words. Then all of a sudden I realised things were going a bit peculiar, as I leapt to the top of the score board and had to go on a hunt to find out why.

The other issue we’ve spotted is that the larger valued achievements (for 5,000 and 10,000 words) don’t seem to be recording correctly. At first I assumed it was because the scoreboard wasn’t actually reporting your correct score and that’s why Hektor666 hadn’t got the awards. Then I noticed my own achievements:

If I’ve found 500 words, then surely I should have at least 50% of the 1000 words achievement, and 10% of the 5000 word one. Clearly something was going wrong here!

After much investigation and then confirming on the Apple Developer forums that it wasn’t just me, I found the answer. Whilst I can tell Game Center that you have earnt 5.8% of an achievement, if I then ask Game Center how much you have, it tells me 5.0%! With it constantly rounding down percentages, trying to build up the larger awards just isn’t working. Obviously I tested the lower value achievements before release and given they all worked fine I had no reason to expect this strange behaviour.

I have sent a bug report to Apple regarding these issues, but there’s not been any response as yet. I was hoping for a response before I wrote this post, so I could tell you all that it would all be fixed soon… but it’s been 2 weeks and as we’ve had a couple of emails enquiring about the strangeness I wanted to explain.

My initial decision to let Game Center manage the scores and percentages, and to always ask for their current values before updating, was to allow people with the same account across multiple devices to have one score & set of achievements updating correctly regardless of where they played. Obviously, I wasn’t prepared for the two oddities which have appeared now that we have so many people playing our game and finding so many words! I have a plan to do all the score and achievement calculations locally, but of course this means if you’re playing across multiple devices there might be some small discrepancies, but hopefully not to the extent we have been seeing!

When we thought we just had a leaderboard issue, our intention had been to reset your score based on your achievements, but now we know they’re not correct either. We’re still discussing the best way to approach this. It might well be to start a new leaderboard, using your achievements to make a best guess at your score, and go from there. I realise some people really have found crazy numbers of words, and for them, I will hopefully be able to keep the old leaderboard updating too. Hopefully we can come to a resolution everyone can be happy with.

The app was one of the first live action multi-player games to take advantage of Apple’s Game Center to allow 2 to 4 players to compete on the same word grid. Each word can only be found once, so it’s a battle of quick thinking and nimble fingers!

Word Search Party also features a large, community-generated library of word lists, and this is where the Appwardly Mobile framework comes into play – managing the client-server communication which ensures that players are always offered the most up-to-date game selection.

Players are given the opportunity to rate puzzles as they play them.  The system collates rating data and presents a “top rated” list within the game.  The free app includes access to the ten top rated puzzles and users can pay a small fee to unlock access to the entire library, containing hundreds of word lists.

It’s also possible to add your own word lists from the app.  Each word is spellchecked as it is entered and once a list has been completed, it’s reviewed to make sure the content is family-friendly before being added to the library.  As soon as a word list has been approved, it’s available immediately in the app to players.

The iPhone game is supported by a web site, wordsearchparty.com, where you can also enter word lists as well as and create printable PDF puzzle worksheets.

Word Search Party is a free app, available now on the App Store.

In fact, scrap that, there’s no point even trying to pretend it’s something other than showing off.  My company has been involved in producing an iPhone app that can legitimately be considered a hit – and I’m very proud of it!

Of course, I’m still delighted with our other output, and how we continue to thrill customers by exceeding their expectations.

However, what we’ve been doing with Appwardly Mobile so far has tended to be geared towards small businesses, hobby apps and niche products.  We deliver results very quickly and affordably, so our offerings suit those with limited budgets, or those that want to get into the market right away and evolve their app as their business grows.

As a result, we’ve produced a lot of apps that, while they happily enjoy success in their field, have not yet made a visible impact in the iTunes Store charts.

Yesterday, however, excitement struck.  The daily sales report from AppFigures.com (a service that I can’t recommend highly enough for any app publisher) landed and I really thought there was a mistake.

“How many?”

Now, before you start to think this makes me rich beyond my wildest dreams, think again.  It’s still a niche product that’s useful only for a certain group of people.  But it appears to have struck a chord within its target audience and this weekend it blew my sales projections out of the water.

Allow me to present the Winmau Pro Darts Trainer – a top ten iPhone app!

We produced this app in conjunction with CrunchMedia: we made it work and they made it look great.

It’s for the darts player who wants to practice without the inconvenience of needing another person around to compete against: essentially a “virtual opponent”.

As you throw darts into an actual dartboard and punch your results into the app, your iPhone shows you how the other player responds, based on a selected skill level and using some sophisticated statistical analysis to create a game against a realistic opponent.

You can select a skill level based on your average three-dart throw from 40 (I believe a monkey can do better than this, but I wasn’t feeling brave enough to set up an experiment to prove it) to 104 (based on the world’s number one player).

The designers gave us some excellent visuals to work with and the end result was a stunning little app with a cunning thumb-sized user interface that is fast and easy to use.  After all, users just want to play their game of darts – not have to mess around trying to type on a clumsy phone keypad!

On Saturday, Winmau Pro Trainer officially became a top ten app, peaking at number 7 in the Sports category!

By registering at BiznessApps.com, users can select a predefined template for their app and be up-and-running in minutes.  The system allows finer customisation and a selection of pages which can be added into an application and tailored to suit each individual customer.

Apps are geared towards small business owners, such as bars, restaurants, gyms, lawyers, realtors and other professionals.  The system enables anyone to increase their customer reach using the latest mobile technology.

Because it uses the Appwardly Mobile Framework, apps created by Bizness Apps are lightweight and deliver content quickly over-the-air.  There is no need to release updates through the iTunes App Store – each app can be instantly updated with news, events, special offers and other information by its owner.

A location-aware feature allows businesses to set up promotional offers that require a “check-in”, to reward customers for visiting their premises a specific number of times.  After meeting the requirements set, the customer is instantly given an electronic coupon to redeem.

I have recently been browsing the Evil Shenanigans blog for recipes so thought I’d try out their Butter Cut Out Cookie Recipe. It wasn’t a great success to be honest… admittedly I replaced the milk with some double cream I had in the fridge which needed using up, but I don’t think that should have made it too runny? Perhaps my egg was too big? I ended up adding in a lot of extra flour (about another cup) before I got something I thought might roll after chilling. It didn’t! We ended up placing the cutters on the baking tray and smooshing the cookie dough into them to get the shapes! I was a little too frustrated during all of that process to take any photos… but once the cookies came out of the oven I was feeling a little happier with them…

Cooling Cookies

Once cooled I employed some helpers and set about creating some flags and country labels…

Cookie Decorating

I was actually rather impressed at our ability to recreate flags The writing of country names was a little harder, especially when the icing ran off and took the names with them. Cayden insisted on writing the names of his countries in their native languages just to make it more difficult!

Finished Flags

Once we were finished we cleaned up the icing (which might have gotten everywhere!) and set about recreating the game in tasty cookies…

Ready to Play	Completed!

So that’s how you can recreate a game in cookies! What game would you like to see recreated in an edible fashion?

Oh, and despite the difficulty in cookie creation, I’m pleased to report they were very tasty…

Tasty Cookies!

Speed of Prototyping & Development
Working with interface builder and the UIKit it is very easy to put together a quick prototype without too much time or effort. It all falls quickly into place, and I’m getting even faster as I become more adept with the various controls. This week I started doing more subclassing of the standard controls which gave lovely results without a huge amount of effort.  I also worked out how to control the auto-resizing/movement on rotate so my new iPad app can work in all orientations without argument… Mostly thanks to clicking a few carefully chosen buttons!

Xcode
To start with, xcode annoyed me. All the keyboard shortcuts were different to what I was used to in Visual Studio, I couldn’t find the debugging tools, and, me being me, I seemed to manage to crash it all the time.  As time has progressed things have changed – I’ve learnt the shortcuts, the IDE has been updated, and we’re finally getting along. It’s ability to autocomplete makes typing very fast.  All its various tools make debugging and leak hunting a lot easier.  Plus the simulator is very good, so long as you don’t want to test camera or phone functionality! Apple have really improved it over the time I’ve been using it and I actually quite enjoy using it now!

App Store
As much as I want my app to instantly appear as soon as I have finished it’s creation the app store is a wonderful thing.  Being a windows mobile user, I’m used to hunting the internet for new and interesting software. There has never been just one place to go looking which had such a large choice. When I did find an interesting app, there was no guarantee it would run well, or even run at all on my specific device.  I know there’s the new market place, but it’s offerings are sparse (or at least, they were thee last time I looked!) and the quality is often still lacking.
The app store gives people, general users who’d never dare download random content from the Internet, instant acces to hundreds of apps. Every app has been checked so they feel confident giving everything a try, even things they might not usually use/play.
So whilst I sit here anxiously waiting for Apple to look at my new game (oh yes, it is a new iPad game I’ve been making!) I can console myself that once it is reviewed, people will trust that it’s safe to play and hopefully some of them will buy it

Community
One thing I’ve not had before is use of the internet as a resource for programming. Instead of struggling away with problems on my own, or hassling other team members, I can now just ask the Internet. Any time I get stuck with a bizarre error message, a warning in the console, or just a ui element not behaving how I expect I can just ask Google and since Google knows all, the answer inevitably appears. Stack overflow has saved me from numerous head scratching problems, and various other forums helped when I was trying to do interesting things with multi-touch.

The Devices
I hated the iPhone when it came out. I hated the screen for being touch sensitive rather than pressure sensitive. I wanted a stylus (though I do now have one for my iPad!) and I wanted my accuracy back.  I also hated the need for iTunes, but that hasn’t changed!  The screen I have become used to, I can be accurate now I’ve learnt to use it, and I can even type! This was mostly written on my iPad!
Apple are putting new technology into the hands of many, those who would never have considered a smart phone before. I find myself recommending the iPhone to those looking to upgrade because of the array of apps out there, knowing that they’ll be happy with the interface (once used to the keyboard) and there’ll be much less tech support for me to do!

Writing this blog post on my iPad!

So there we go… five reasons why I’m really loving iPhone development.  What do you love/hate about iPhone development?  Are there similar experiences for other platforms which I’m missing out on?  I would love to hear your thoughts!

Almost one-third of smartphone users who search for local businesses via mobile end up visiting or calling the location.

Click on the link below to read the full story:
http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/research/6767.html