Word Buzz Lite

When we first planned Word Buzz, we didn't want to release a free version. It has a more exclusive feeling to it, if you can't test before you try. However, to boost your user base, there's nothing better than a free version. So here it is: Word Buzz Lite.

It's a universal App with no limitation except for one: no Game Center! It's not our decision, but more of Apple's technical limitation to only allow one App (bundle id) per Game Center instance. Another difference is the number of free built-in themes. The free version comes with only one free theme and more available through in-app purchases.

When developing Doublemill, which is a separate App for iPhone and iPad, I decided to use different XCode projects for the lite, premium and iPad version, hence different source bases for the three Apps. For Word Buzz, we decided to use a different strategy. A multi-target project for full and lite version, which are both universal Apps.

Having different source bases has a couple of drawbacks, which I experienced the hard way. One of it is fixing bugs! It's is a copy-paste task, with all its pitfalls and pain in testing. In addition to that, XCode's support for handling multiple projects isn't exactly supporting you. However, evolving the 3 different Apps, was easy and didn't affect the others in any way.

Developing a multi-target project comes with its own set of challenges. You are basically programming based on a preprocessor conditional inclusion or exclusion, which I've explained in an earlier blog post. For Word Buzz is was quite easy to cut out the additional themes and the Game Center support. However, I can imagine it can become quite complicated if you want to exclude sophisticated features. XCode comes with awesome support for multiple targets and its Organizer can still handle releases for two different versions, although it's one source base. In order to get me started, I used Chris Fletcher's blog post on building a lite version for your iPhone App. It covers the basics and brings you up to speed.

When it comes to evolving Word Buzz, we needed to shift our minds from the source-based to a SCM-based evolution model. We needed to maintain different branches, which would get quite complicated from time to time. Thanks to Git and github, we never experienced any problems bringing the various versions (branches) back together. Once you've changed your mental model to a DSCM system, it's hard to switch back, at least for me.

We are quite happy to have used multiple targets. Everything is covered under the hood of one XCode project and fixes go right into both versions. Check out Word Buzz Lite and let us know what you think!

Why Word Buzz doesn't support iOS 3.1

Word Buzz supports 3.2+, which means it doesn't support iOS 3 on iPhone. Although, my software developer ego doesn't like the fact, that we don't support the older versions of iOS, it was the right decision to do so.

It was a business decision to not support iOS 3.1, that's the short story. Rumors have it, that there are less than 10% of iOS 3.x devices out there - including iPads. That's a small enough number, to justify locking out the folks, which haven't upgraded yet.

The long story is, that we simply didn't develop with iOS 3.1 in mind. The are so many new features in iOS 3.2, which we wanted to use, that we couldn't just port it back. Let me give you a few examples:

Since iOS 3.2 you can use custom fonts in an easy and simple fashion. You add an array to your Info.plist called UIAppFonts and each item contains the filename of the font you put into your App bundle. There has been no easy way of accomplishing this before iOS 3.2, so we didn't want to sacrifice design and roll-out the 3.1 version with a system font.

Another great new feature in iOS 3.2 are Gesture Recognizers. If you don't know what I'm talking about stop right here and go read up on it - you are missing out! Although, Word Buzz doesn't use Gesture Recognizers extensively, we didn't wanna g back to the 19th century and use those old UITouch event handling stuff.

Those were just the two most obvious examples out of many! We sat down and tried to make Word Buzz run on our iPhone 3G, which still runs 3.1.3, but after a day worth of coding, we gave up. We'd love to make it run, but we'll rather invest in future proofing Word Buzz, using Blocks and GCD! We can't wait to drop iOS 3.2 support!