I am very happy to announce that v1.3 fixes the Savegame Bug. It is recommended for all users to update to this version.
If your Eternal Score does not advance or is not saved properly, just follow these three steps:
This should fix the issue. Thank you for your patience!
MatchBalls! has been approved by Apple! Finally 
Right now I can’t really come up with more than “It’s free, go get it!!!”. Maybe “It has full retina support” will get your motor running…
If you want some more info go to the details page for MatchBalls! Otherwise head straight to the App store and download that sucker. 
As I already posted earlier, I have just gone through the process of updating an app to the iPad retina display (hoping that it will actually come). Now I would like to share some of the things I have learned so you can avoid the problems I have run into.
Whoa, just heard about a hack that enables developers to run the iPhone/iPad Simulator in Retina mode for the iPad. For details on the hack just take a look at this tweet by Ryan Petrich, the original author of the hack. At first it didn’t work and I thought it had to do with iTerm2, but after running it directly from finder via doubleclick – and not via Terminal/iTerm2 – it worked.
MatchBalls! was already submitted to Apple for review but now that I am able to test-drive it in retina my designer and myself are working hard to have retina support live ASAP. It would be awesome to be able to have a fully retina-ready app in the store at launch time for a retina iPad.
Here is the first screen with full retina support. The others are taking a bit longer… there are lots of graphics to produce and I can’t help all that much. Graphics still aren’t my strong suit.
Funny that a retina iPad app can’t even be displayed entirely on a 27″ iMac. On my 15″MBP it displays like a fifth of the screen – must be fun for developers with an 11″ MBA
I have run into this problem a couple of times before. My friend and designer creates a beautiful image of an interface for me and I take a look at it and immediately realize that there is text with an outline and/or gradient.
I sigh on the inside because I know it can’t be inserted in the app as an image. The text needs to be localized and IMHO it’s not nice to localize images. I know that text outlines are the most basic thing for someone who is used to Photoshop and the like, but creating those for an iOS app can be a pain.
I proudly present… *drumroll* … my first ever merchandise for my business! It was not at all planned, more of a spontaneous idea we had a few days ago. Today the writing pads arrived. I really like to sketch my ideas before I take them anywhere digital. Now that’s easy as π for me and my clients. But take a look and see for yourself.
Just a quick tip I found out to make better use of space in my iPhone app. Consider the following situation: You have a Highscore View with a couple of stats of the game you just finished. Naturally you would like the user to be able to enter his nickname.
The input box is so far down in the view that it gets covered by the keyboard as soon as its activated. Now the user can enter his nickname but he can not see what he is typing. That is just not acceptable.
If you ever want to create an app with IAPs take my adivce: “Be patient.” You can bootstrap your programming by using the brilliant IAP framework MKStoreKit. Mugunth Kumar was kind enough to release his creation for everyone to use, so you do not really need to dive too deep into Apple’s StoreKit framework. His framework is a bliss to incorporate into your app and configuring it is quite easy as well (see his blog post).
When I started developing MatchBalls! I created four In-App Purchases in iTunes Connect and started testing after a while. Yesterday I added an additional IAP to iTunes Connect and suddenly started getting errors with all of my IAPs. I started debugging right away and hit a brick wall. I searched the web for possible reasons of IAPs not working and found lots of checklists (see here, here, here and here) and one superb tutorial. One tip was the golden one. “Just wait”. After 20 hours some magic happened on Apple’s servers and everything works like a charm again.
A simple warning “This action renders your IAPs unusable for 12-24 hours” would suffice to let people know about this. Apple is so brilliant when it comes to guiding users and letting them know about important stuff, but sometimes it seems like they do not really care about their developers (does anyone else play the game “Guess in which corner the action button appears in iTunes Connect”).
This review is long overdue. I read the book a while ago and gave it some time to let the information sink in – and it was a lot of information.
It seemed like an odd choice for me to read because I am not a designer. I am a programmer and I wouldn’t be able to produce something beautiful if my life depended on it. Before reading this book, thats what I thought design is all about, beauty. Now I know that there are more aspects to design and the book also helped me to think more abstractly and (try to) derive interaction patterns from hardware devices and translate them to well designed user interfaces.
If you are interested in design – be it industrial, software or any other kind of design – you probably already read it. If not, you should probably read it.
For a little side-project I wanted buttons to look like they’re being pushed ‘inside’ the interface when active. To match the overall look of the project the first step was to create two embossed images in Photoshop. One with emboss direction ‘up’ and one with emboss direction ‘down’. Then assign these images to the relevant control states of the button. Simple enough – and already looking the way I want it to. (Hover over the image to see what I mean.)
