Being Rejected

Last year I was working on a Nine Men's Morris mobile game called Doublemill. My job was to implement a REST-based server back-end on the Google App Engine. You might remember a couple of posts on that. My colleagues were responsible for coding the Android client. Since I'm an iPhone user and I'm not going to switch to Android anytime soon, I decided to port the game to the iPhone/iPod touch platform.

Tonight I got an email from Apple telling me that they have rejected Doublemill Lite! Although it is kind of annoying, the email was somewhat clear on what I need to to do to fix the problem. It even had a screenshot attached, pointing out what my mistake was - if it really was one.

This is the screenshot apple sent back to me:

What's wrong here, you might think? At least that's what I thought! It turns out that you cannot tease your users with features they can never get with that particular version of your application.

Doublemill Lite features a Player vs. Player and Player vs. iPhone mode. You can challenge your friend by using the same device or play against your iPhone. The upcoming Doublemill Premium version will feature a Player vs. World mode, where you can challenge the world over any kind of internet connection.

My idea was to point out that this is a Lite version by putting the Premium features in the menu. People could immediately see, what's to come or what they are missing out on. However, Apple doesn't think that it's a good idea. And they might even be right. Doublemill Lite is not going to be updated with those features, because we will release a dedicated Premium version soon. People only using the Lite version will always see the disabled menu items and that's kind of messy.

I took the liberty to fix two other things in addition to addressing Apple's issues to remove the two menu items. Now we are back on track and hopefully in the App Store early next week.

Doublemill Lite submitted to the App Store

Last year I was working on a Nine Men's Morris mobile game called Doublemill. My job was to implement a REST-based server back-end on the Google App Engine. You might remember a couple of posts on that. My colleagues were responsible for coding the Android client. Since I'm an iPhone user and I'm not going to switch to Android anytime soon, I decided to port the game to the iPhone/iPod touch platform.

It's done! Doublemill Lite is on Apple's table for review!

I started working on the iPhone port of Doublemill almost 6 weeks ago. I decided early on to release a free version of the game. Actually, I wanted to release it after only 2 weeks of intensive hacking. By that time I had implemented a full Player vs. Player feature.

However, my colleagues convinced me to first implement a Player vs. iPhone feature before releasing the free version and I'm glad they did. Although it meant a lot of additional hours of work, it cleared the way to the full version, because I completely finished implementing the foundation of the game. After just two weeks I got the Player vs. iPhone feature fully working.

The last two weeks I spent in beta testing. The funny things is, I almost caught all the major bugs myself. The feedback I got was positive without exception and I was confident enough to release Doublemill Lite today.

It's going to be the third free Nine Men's Morris game on the App Store, but with all due respect, I think our game can easily beat the competition in terms of UI design and iPhone compliance. If you don't believe me, I'll post a full featured marketing post on Doublemill as soon as it's available on the App Store. Stay tuned and follow us on Twitter @doublemill!

Is the Future of Mobile Apps the Web?

The Mobile Times 2010 conference in Dusseldorf, which took place last Thursday, featured a lot of talks on how to do approach cross platform development. A lot of them suggested web development technics as a way to escape native vendor lock-in, such as Apple's iPhone OS.

There are mainly two approaches:

1. You develop a web site using HTML, JavaScript and CSS zip it and deploy it together with a Player

2. Or you develop a custom website which is served from your servers

The first approach is usually tackled using a framework such as PhoneGap. It event provides an API to include platform specific functionality such as GPS in your application.

The second approach either uses traditional web development technics or targets a specific browser, such as WebKit. One example is jQTouch, a jQuery plugin with cross platform support - unfortunately only WebKit.

The presentations, advocating those two approaches, mentioned mainly two advantages:

1. No need to comply with platform policies (think of Apple's App Store)

2. And you can leverage cheap web coding skills

Those are the facts, I collected during Mobile Times 2010. Unfortunately, the benefits using the web development approaches were not really balanced by any downsides.

I really doubt that the web development approach is the way to go in terms of cross platform mobile app development. I think frameworks like PhoneGap are doing an awesome job, putting an abstraction around the native platform.

Unfortunately you get the least denominator of your platform is capable of and that's a real downside to me. If I put on "average Joe head", I want an app that is using the full potential of my phone. I don't care that it was cheaper to develop a web-based solution and I definitely don't care that the framework I'm using is only offering partial support for my phone features.

Another problem is platform defragmentation! I won't go into it - don't worry - I simply want to point out one downside: In my humble opinion, it is not possible with web development technics to "write once, run anywhere"! You will have to tweak the CSS and work around the abstractions of the framework your are using! It might be cheaper, because we all know that the average web development frickler (amateur craftsman), only charges what he deserves. However, I don't think it gets you anywhere in the long run.

I think we shouldn't approach mobile application development with only the engineering side in mind. Instead we should rather focus on the customer and what he asks from a mobile app. I think the success of the App Store has proven that native apps are the way to go, even if they mean more effort on the development side.

Doublemill Private Beta

Last year I was working on a Nine Men's Morris mobile game called Doublemill. My job was to implement a REST-based server back-end on the Google App Engine. You might remember a couple of posts on that. My colleagues were responsible for coding the Android client. Since I'm an iPhone user and I'm not going to switch to Android anytime soon, I decided to port the game to the iPhone/iPod touch platform.

If you own a iPod touch or an iPhone and have some time at hand, sign up at iBetaTest.com for the private beta of Doublemill Lite. Don't want to sign up? No problem, just drop me a line and I'll hook you up.

I appreciate your feedback and opinion on my first Objective-C endeavor.

Mobile Times 2010

On Thursday, I'll be attending the mobile times 2010 conference in Düsseldorf, Germany. It's a rather small one day event and as the name suggests, all about mobile development.

There's only a two or three sessions, I'm really interested in, since my focus is iPhone and Android. However, there's one session which I'm really looking forward to: "Cross-compiling Android Apps for iPhone with XMLVM". The reason why I'm interested in this is that I just went through a rather unpleasant experience of porting our Android game Doublemill to the iPhone OS. If there was a faster and more efficient solution, I'd be happy - frankly, I don't think it works!

I'll blog more about my roller-coaster ride from Android to iPhone in a future post, but for now I'm looking forward to Mobile Times 2010.