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!

Word Buzz to support Game Center

Today furryfishApps is proud to announce, that Word Buzz now supports Game Center. A lot of work went into making this happen and we learned quite a bit on the way. I won't go into technical detail here, but rather cover what we've implemented.

Word Buzz lets you share your highscore and achievements on Game Center. It comes with over 16 different themes (set of words) and a lot more available for download. Each of those themes gets its own score, which will be added to your overall highscore. The sum of all highscores is shared on Game Center.

Why didn't we just share the highscore of each theme? We couldn't! Game Center lets you only share up to 20 different highscores, which is probably reasonable. It might be a bit confusing to have 40 different highscore lists.

Word Buzz is available on all iOS devices. You can play on your iPhone as well as on your iPad or iPod touch. Unfortunately, there is no way with Game Center to sync more than 20 highscores between devices. That means, you cannot just pick up with your iPad, where you left off with your iPhone. We are working on a homegrown solution, but until that happens, it's best to stick on one device.

When playing Word Buzz, you can unlock over 10 different achievements. All of them are shared on Game Center automatically, as soon as you unlock them.

What happens if you are offline? Don't worry! Your achievements and highscores are safely stored on the device and uploaded to Game Center as soon as you sign in!

Go challenge your friends and enjoy Word Buzz with Game Center.

Game Center Presentation at Cocoa Heads Karlsruhe

On Wednesday, I'll be giving a presentation on Apple's Game Center at the local CocoaHeads Group, here in Karlsruhe.

Game Center is Apple's social gaming network, that lets you invite friends to play, share your highscore and achievements through leaderboards and it even auto-matches you with other players for online-multiplayer games.

If you are interested in Game Center, drop by RetroGames on Wednesday 24th of November at 19:00.

Universal App - Word Buzz goes iPhone/iPod touch

We have been working on bringing Word Buzz to iPhone and iPod touch for more than a month now. We started out with an iPad only version, because in the beginning we thought the concept of Word Buzz wouldn't work on a smaller device. After a none-stop coding weekend and a heavy testing session, we knew it would work and started hacking on iPhone and iPod touch support.

We decided to build a universal App, because of pervasive Game Center support and a unique selling point! The latter is a no brainer: you are willing to spend a couple more bugs, if you get an iPad version for free. The former is a technical limitation of Game Center. You can only hook up your leaderboards and achievements with one App Id.

Although it was easy enough to port Word Buzz to iPhone and iPod touch, we ran into a couple of pitfalls and one of them is worth sharing with you: the default device of your universal App! What does that mean? Well, if you want to have different xib files in your App for iPhone and iPad, you need to qualify them with a suffix -iPhone / -iPad. In your Info.plist, you configure your alternate main xib with NSMainNibFile~iphone / NSMainNibFile~ipad. Since we started out with an iPad App, we decided to make iPad the default, meaning my alternate main xib configuration in Info.plist was NSMainNibFile~iphone and point to MainWindow-iPhone.xib.

This works great for iPhone and iPads, but it doesn't work for iPod touches and it also doesn't work with iOS 3.x. Somehow iPod touches (even with iOS 4) and iPhones with iOS 3.x don't respect the NSMainNibFile~iphone configuration in Info.plist. They always use the NSMainNibFile config without any suffix.

We only found out about this after testing on an actual device, which shows how important testing on each and every device is. We decided to make iPhone / iPod touch devices the default and qualify every iPad resource with -iPad, just like Apple actually intended it to be done.

Word Buzz for iPad is available on the App Store, the iPhone / iPod touch version is coming in a couple of days as a free update. Let us know what you think about it in the comments or on Twitter.

Word Buzz getting a better Twitter integration!

If you follow our tweets, which you should, you might have seen that we have been working hard on a better Twitter integration for Word Buzz. When looking around on github, I found a lot of frameworks for Twitter and iOS, but only Stefan's was lightweight and easy enough to integrate it into Word Buzz.

Most of the frameworks are full blown Twitter engines, which is not what we need for Word Buzz. Our requirements are simple: share your achievements (maybe your highscore in the future) with your followers. In addition to that, Twitter is our support channel. We wanted to allow posting public messages to @WordBuzzApp from within the App. Sounds easy, right? No need to pull in a full fledged Twitter engine for that!

Stefan's provides an API, which is really easy to use and integrate. There are no 3rd party dependencies, no need to fiddle with your linker flags - just an API to use! It even comes with a reasonable UI in Twitter style colors. Unfortunately, there was no iPad UI, which we had to implement myself. However, it was easy enough to come up with a Xib for iPad. Stefan's API provides delegate protocols, which you can implement to handle events such as "authentication succeeded". This way it's easy to separate the Twitter logic from your own code. The UIViewControllers provided, handle the most basic tasks like checking if you entered enough information to process with authentication.

We are using xAuth for authentication, which Twitter has to enable for your App. It took a couple of days until they came around to let us in, but it was the best solutions. Stefan's API provides xAuth out of the box and it works seamlessly. We added a Keychain integration to save your credentials and a flag in Settings.app to reset them.

Overall, it took us about 1 days to natively integrate Twitter into Word Buzz - thanks to Stefan's API! If anybody is interested, we are happy to provide the iPad UI and the Keychain integration.

What's new?

For the past couple of weeks it has been rather quiet here on my blog and there's a reason for that, as you can imagine.

First of all, I'd like to announce our new company furryfishApps, which I've co-founded with my wife Sutini. My future private endeavors in terms of iOS development will all take place under the hood of furryfishApps. Sutini is in charge of all the marketing, social media and publicity tasks, which are so important, but we developers never have time for. I'm glad to have her on board!

We are still in the midst of figuring out what to put on our website, but we already have an awesome logo and you can follow us on Twitter.


Our first App is a fast and engaging spelling game called Word Buzz! It's your job to spell a bunch of words as fast as possible, without making any mistake. You'll be scored on how fast you can spell and there are a whole lot of achievements for you to unlock. Go grab it here on the App Store. We welcome any feedback on Twitter or Email.

Word Buzz is iPad only at the moment, but an iPod/iPhone version with Game Center support is underway. I'll have some posts coming up soon on how the development of Word Buzz came along. It was a pretty exciting ride, as you can imagine.