Speed

Another work-in-progress (gotta love a new platform, you keep thinking up new ideas!). No idea when it will be finished or hit the App Store, but it will be after the next major release of iPhone OS (think late September). So, it's dead simple, shows you how fast you're going according to the GPS sensor in iPhone 3G. Will test it on the road in a few days and see how accurate the sensor is.

Lights Off 2.0 Sneaky Peek!

Still a work in progress, more of Adam Betts' fine art. More to come - keep visiting =)

Lights Off 2.0 direction whiteboard

Yes, I realise it's black and not white =P Redesigned GUI not shown.

Shanghai Mahjong (BUY IT)

So, very simple, if you enjoy the odd game of Mahjong, and would love said game on your iPod touch/iPhone, definitely buy Shanghai Mahjong. Lickable graphics, subtle animation, hundreds of tile layouts to choose from, downloadable online content (backgrounds and tilesets), and "swoosh" sound effects! All for €3.99. It's a steal, don't even think twice.

Future (App Store!)

Right, so we have two games coming to the store at an undefined time in the near future. Lights Off will be the iPhoneOS 2.0 remake of Lucas Newman (currently an iPhone engineer @ Apple) and Adam Betts' insanely popular and addictive unofficial iPhone game. Adam and I are working on gameplay ideas and new artwork, and in general thinking up how to make this THE definitive Lights Off. Watch this space! The other game has yet to have its gameplay or name finalized, so I'll leave you on a scavenger hunt of my past blog posts to find more info about it. I am working on other confidential iPhone ventures too, and I hope to be able to show you the fruits of our labour soon. Shouts out to Lucas, Adam, Steve Demeter, Mike Lee and Wil Shipley. Onwards and upwards!

Twinkle (aka, GET THIS APP)

Twinkle. It's a Twitter client (with more services coming) and independent location-based messaging app. With stars. Another winner from the Tapulous team, kick-ass UI and ultra-friendly user interaction. It's free. If you have Twitter, GET THIS NOW (link).

iPhone 3G

Not bad - I ordered on O2's site last Friday before going to Oxegen, arrived today, when I'm just recovered from Oxegen. Beautiful device, like a polished pebble. Doesn't fit in the 1st gen iPhone dock, grr $$$. Gotta wait a few days for my SIM to be ported from Vodafone and activated.

Games!

Aha found a back door into some of the games. Log into American store, copy game URL, log back to Irish store, open URL in Safari. == instagame. Some sweet titles amongst all that other crap.

This is not a watered down version of Lights Off…

…or a mobile version of Lights Off, or the kinda-sorta-looks-like Lights Off, Lights Off. It's just Lights Off, on your phone. Based upon the original iPhone Lights Off idea created by Lucas Newman and Adam Betts, inspired by Tiger Electronic's Light's Out. Lucas has suggested I release it, so I'm working to clone (and improve upon) his original code in a clean-room fashion. Not all the animation and functionality is there yet, but I'm working on it. Includes all 212 levels from the original game. My thanks go to Lucas Newman (now at Apple), one of the people who originally inspired me to develop for iPhone!

So, why no Stacks?

People have been asking when Stack is gonna be coming to iPhone 2.0. The honest answer is, it can't with the SDK. Firstly, applications are sandboxed - you cannot access files or resources outside of your sandbox (i.e. can't grab the app icons). Secondly, Springboard doesn't allow you draw on top of it (from what I've seen). If and when a proper jailbreak is released that removes both of these limitations, then it's possible I can offer a download of MobileStack through Cydia. I will certainly try to write it, even as a proof of concept to myself. But as an official application through the App Store, it will never happen. That doesn't mean the code won't be put to good use! Stack provides a very capable pop-up fan or grid menu implementation; keep your eyes pealed for that showing up elsewhere ;-)

SameGame in action

Early build, not representative of final product. Sound is a work-in-progress, scoring method to be implemented, and other coolness that I can't talk about. =)

iPhone Apps

So, been bored and worked on a few apps with a good friend and mentor of mine. Who knows what will be released, gotta wait for Apple to clean up its act on the Irish App Store.

App Store Day (iPhone 3G Day-1)

Well, been quite pleased with the launch of the App Store; there are some great titles available. Just not in Ireland. FUCK. While the US gets to play with Super Monkey Ball, Enigmo and Cro Mag Rally, we Irish have "Mr. Shuffle" and "FingerPaint" as the sole Games category entries. Grrr. Nevertheless, there IS some great software available. Remote (Apple's iTunes/AppleTV remote), Twitterrific, Sketches, AIM, NYTimes, Exposure (digging the find-flickr-photos-near-me feature), Facebook (Facebook chat included! Just not working yet…) and iScopes (not that I care for horoscopes, but I simply love the Core Animation wheel rotation UI). (A deluge of screenshots below) So where are my apps? Mr. MobileStack developer, have you not got any apps for the App Store? Alas, no I do not =) I have a few ideas (mocked up in code) that I haven't seen replicated, so I might finish them up and submit. Regardless, there's a LOT of "shitware" in the store (Erica Sadun's, Glenda Adams' shame on you, to pick out a couple). And, yes, the Steven's Creek software is up. Seems like HIG-adherence isn't important to Apple anyway =) P.S. Apple, please get all those bloody eBook-in-an-app entries into somewhere self-contained.

Flare Kit : Learning Interface Builder's Plugin Model

Well I've been spending the past few days furiously trying to learn something new. Took me a long time to decide on 'what', but I've settled on the following idea:

• Moving my custom controls to Interface Builder, so I can drag and drop them into new apps, set all their properties, and use them like never before - all without having to write a line of code.

Why did I pick this? It allows me to learn something new, yet not have to stray out of my own code. Less headache! Play in my sandbox! Yay!

Fortunately, IB3 in Leopard makes this really easy, once you have a good grasp of Cocoa coding. I went back to my flagship demo app, the Flare browser, and chose the UI elements I wanted to rip out and make reusable:

• The Tab View - arguably my prettiest custom control
• The Zoom Slider - complete with floating value indicator
• The URL Field - essentially a clone of Safari's address field. Icon+text, doubles as progress bar.

A bit of mucking around later, and a bit of learning about NSCoder (for archiving class values to a nib), I had a working version! I went ahead and refactored everything to make it clearer too. I dub thee Flare Kit!

So now, with my palette, I can create the following UI without writing a single line of code! This will make a lot of things easier in the future, and I can continue to work on my palette and make its classes rock solid and usable anywhere. Who knows, maybe someday there'll be a public or source release =o) Thanks go to Len Case as usual, for helping me out and talking me through ideas.