Yesterday, Apple approved the lite version of WordMind. You can check it out on the App Store. There is only one available mode and the potential number of words to guess has been reduced to about 100.

Here’s a great article on spatial thinking as it applies to software usability. Now I wonder about where I can use this to improve things in my own software, which is a sign of a good article.

I’m happy to announce that WordMind appeared on the App Store some time last night. You can check out the website or check it out in iTunes.

Craig Hockenberry has written a great article about how to get started developing for the iPhone. He mentions some very helpful links and resources.

As of yesterday, my first iPhone game has been submitted to Apple. The game is called WordMind and is a word guessing game. The process has been fun, though making the self imposed deadline made things a bit tougher. I learned from experience some of the things I had read about releasing software. e.g. You can’t put everything into your first release. There are so many more features I could have included, but in order to get it out the door I had to pare it down to the essentials.

When Apple has approved the app, I will post an announcement here. In the meantime, you can check out the website I made for it at http://www.fanfoot.ca/wordmind.

When doing an Ad Hoc build, do NOT release a build created with the device set to the simulator. It will not work. The resulting app will be empty for all intents and purposes because the simulator does not use normal builds.

Lesson learned: Try every build before releasing it, even if you think nothing has changed.

Over the last few months I’ve been digging into devloping an iPhone/iPod Touch game. While I am not ready to announce it, I thought I’d give a few thoughts.

First, I love Objective-C and Cocoa. Right now these are my preferred tools for development. I’ve been toying with Mac development for a couple years, but diving into it for the iPhone has been fun. I am of the opinion that C is the wrong way to add objects to C, and Objective-C has proven that for me. The language is simple and powerful. And Apple has done a great job porting Cocoa to a mobile device.

As for the App Store, I view it mainly as a mechanism for sale and not a marketing tool as some people seem to believe. Viewed in this context, it is a great thing. We all have out hopes for how Apple could improve it, but I just want to applaud them right now. There’s nothing else like it, and it seems to be a resounding success.

More thoughts coming later…

Looking through console sales figures for May I was struck by the fact that 4 of 5 Wii games listed for top sales were bundled with hardware. Mario Kart Wii, Wii Fit, Wii Play and Guitar Hero III all come bundled with various pieces of hardware. Three of those are hardware specific to that game or a subset of games.

This is a departure from previous systems, where games requiring non-standard hardware were mostly fringe games. The only parallel I can think of through history with such wide appeal is the original Nintendo Zapper. Even in my own perception, it was only recently that I found myself more accepting of additional hardware. The most probable cause is that the unique controllers enable unique gameplay that’s actually fun to play, better human interaction.

SWT is the best widget toolkit for Java development. It uses native widgets for each platform in an attempt to match the platform aesthetically. Ars Techinca has news that Adobe is leading a project to port the SWT from carbon to cocoa on the Mac platform.

I find this interesting mostly because I wonder how this will improve Java’s abilities to blend in with other Mac apps.

After disabling all comments because of spam, I was a little frustrated. I wanted commenting enabled, but didn’t want to fight spam and didn’t have time to research anti-spam measures. So I’ve decided to use a commenting service called Disqus. At very least it’s a smaller target than Wordpress, but it also has lots of cool features.

[EDIT: I have since moved the blog to Tumblr, and did not add Disqus.]