I’m happy to introduce a version of Lines for iPhone/iPod Touch. Here are the product page and its App Store link.

The Game

In the coding course I happened to have a couple of bright ideas (too bad they don’t come every minute). First of all, it’s the game progress indicator. The blue fill shows your current score, the badge above displays its numerical value. The orange fill is the second-best result, the red one is the record. The orange badge below is the next high score for you to beat. In fact, it takes longer to explain than to understand.

The second trick was to visualize the number of points you get when you complete a line. The screen cast was made on a Mac with the simulator for better video quality, so you see the cursor instead of a finger, but you get the idea.

The rules of the game itself are conservatively traditional so you don’t have to learn anything. Just fire it up and play until the battery is low on power.

App Store And Me

App Store is very cool and it has some unique features I haven’t seen anywhere else. Apple has done a tremendous job to keep customers happy. I wish they did better for developer support, though. Yes, App Store is too young to be perfect and I guess the team lacks the necessary manpower to handle hundreds of both new and updated applications. The sooner Apple optimizes the system, the better software we’ll get.

What really shocked me was the time it took Apple to process payment for my iPhone Developer Program membership (July 12 to August 4, two faxes and a lot of angry e-mails) and to approve Mobile Lines for the store (about 2 weeks). It does look like they test every application rather than just read the informational text you supply. The supposed intention is to filter malware and crapware. In practice worthless apps easily make their way into App Store and whenever Apple tries to apply censorship it is Apple who gets blamed. The other big question is what benefits customers more, presumably thorough testing leading to painful update delays or quicker updates when it comes to such bad bugs as crashes and loss of data. I hope review times will improve as Apple adapts to the number of application submissions.

Another concern of mine is a bunch of technical aspects which I fail to understand.

• Mobile Lines has been on sale for three days, but its status in iTunes Connect is still “Ready for Sale”. Is it updated manually or what?
• What’s wrong with providing vendors with live sales data? Probably, I don’t see the data just because the only guy working on iTunes Connect does not have enough time to change the app status to “On Sale”. If so, I’m ready to take my words back.
• I fully support the decision to remove the download count from App Store, but I still see “Popularity: 0 downloads” on my fully updated iPod on every app’s page. It bugs the hell out of me. [UPDATE: fixed in iPhone OS 2.1]
• App Store has several regional versions, each with its own subset of applications. Why not make a global international App Store which sells all existing apps? Why would a vendor want to exclude a country from the map? Hardly for marketing reasons, maybe for political ones?
• Regional App Stores (at the very least, the Russian App Store) look surreal because apps’ description is obviously in the developers’ native language, say in Japanese, while iTunes’ tags, labels and categories are in English and customer reviews are in Russian. I don’t really know what to do with this mess, but it seems logical to localize all App Stores and require vendors to supply a description in English. It would be absolutely brilliant if Apple could assist in translating app descriptions into each App Store language, but that’s definitely not the highest priority.
• What’s wrong with iTunes Store billing system? When I try my VISA card iTunes says that debit cards are not supported in the Russian store, when I try a MasterCard issued by the same bank it says my payment method is not valid. Meanwhile, my bank claims there haven’t been any attempts to charge either card. I gave up after three or four interactions with iTunes Store support, because they seem clueless about the exact requirements of the billing system. [UPDATE: suddenly my MasterCard got working. Whom do I thank?]

Roadmap

I’m already working on an update and I plan to submit it next week. I can’t tell when it will hit App Store, though. Here is a quick list of changes.

• Unlimited undos have bitten me in the ass. I’ve managed to forget that there may actually be memory-hungry background applications like MobileMusicPlayer. In some rare occasions I may run out of memory, which leads to a crash with a loss of your current game. The quickest way to fix it is to limit the depth of the undo stack to a reasonably high level. I think the limit will be 50 undos. It means that you can go back only 50 moves, which is not too few after all. I could periodically save undos to a file, but that would greatly complicate the code base and delay the update. Sorry for the compromise. The upside is that the launch/quit times will improve a bit.
• If you quit Mobile Lines while the game-over sheet is up, bad things happen. The fix is ready.
• Sometimes when you are on a train or in another shaking environment the touch sensor can register two taps instead of one, which invokes a new game confirmation sheet. This is annoying, so I’m adding a special button to start a new game and the shortcut will be a two-finger tap on the board. Double taps will be ignored to avoid confusion.
• Some cosmetic issues with the high score list are fixed.
• A new piece type is added.
• The settings screen will get a separate About tab with some help added.

The online high score server is in progress, but won’t be ready for this update. 

Thanks to everybody who spent 3 bucks on Mobile Lines, I promise to improve it further for greater time-wasting satisfaction Please, let me know if you encounter a bug or have good feature suggestions.

Posted on Sunday, September 7th, 2008 at 15:06 under Announcements, iPhone.
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