Category: iPhone Development

  • An app is born

    In previous posts I’ve described my desire to do an iPhone app, and finally finding what seemed to be a worthwhile project.   All that was left was to take the idea and see how well I could translate it into an app.

    I started writing code in mid-January.   Sometime in late February the name came to me — The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.    It’s Mickey Mouse’s most famous role.   The ‘Sorcerer’ obviously also ties to the game’s name, Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom.   And it can be shortened to The Sorcerer’s App —  “app” works as a shortened form of Apprentice or of Application, and I liked the duality of that.   Even though I was a ways off from having an app ready, I went into iTunes Connect (the software that developers use to publish to the App Store) to see if I could reserve the name.   It was not yet in use by any other app, so I grabbed it, as well as reserving thesorcerersapp.wordpress.com as a blog name where I would start writing about the app.

    Work on the app progressed, and functionality seemed to be falling into some well-defined “buckets”.    There is obviously the collecting of the cards used to play the game, and early on it was decided that this would be the focus of the first version of the app.    So I put together screens that would track cards the user had and the cards still needed.   I designed the database to hold all the card information.  Trading was originally going to wait until Version 2, but ultimately I decided there needed to be something in Version 1 — not a full-blown trading system where users can electronically trade with other app users, but at least something where a user standing in line at a game portal can show a list of cards needed and cards to trade to someone and check off the cards to make a trade.

    Being able to break down the app into smaller chunks felt crucial to me.   For one thing, remembering the experience of seeing other apps beat me to the app store before, I didn’t want to be working on an app for many months, only to have something else appear before I finished.    I felt it was important to get a release out there, and then build on it, rather than wait until I had an app with every feature I could think of.

    As I read more and more of the blogs online, the crowd-sourcing aspect became less important, and eventually disappeared.   It may reappear in a later release (or it may not), but it seems like basic game strategy is understood well enough to encapsulate it in a relatively small set of rules that will be built into the app.   (These game play features will be introduced in Version 2 of the app).

    Version 1 of the app, the digital checklist for card collectors and the trading manager for casual trading face-to-face, was completed early in March.   I recruited some beta testers to try things out, and went through a series of minor revisions.   I submitted the app to the app store.    The first submittal was rejected — not entirely unexpectedly — because it included pictures of all the cards, which are images copyrighted by Disney.    (I rationalized that the card images can be easily found on the web, so Disney appears not to have ordered them taken down — perhaps they wouldn’t object to their use in the app.   I never got to find out as Apple red-flagged that and made me pull the images out of the app.)

    Original "Card Detail" screen, when card images were included
    Original “Card Detail” screen, when card images were included

    After pulling the images, I resubmitted the app and then on April 1st, I got notice that the app had been approved for sale.   I decided that April Fool’s day was not the day I was going to announce the release — too easy to either be taken as a joke, or simply lost in the flood of bogus announcements coming from various sources.    So I waited until April 2nd to start posting updates on Facebook, Twitter, and other sources announcing the app.

    An interesting thing about this whole experience, to me, is that I kind of feel I almost missed it.  Since I abandoned my first app effort in 2009, it’s always been a goal to find another project and build an app.    It’s not something I obsessed over or thought about daily — but it is something that I came back to again and again, considering and rejecting a number of ideas that I either couldn’t come up with a good approach for, or thought were over-done, or required skills I didn’t have.   Yet for some reason it took several exposures to the SotMK game for me to make the connection — it seems very obvious in retrospect, but it did not come to me when I played the game in September, or even in January.   Only after the trip, reflecting back on it, did I make the connection.

    If you have a project you’ve wanted to kick off and are just waiting to find the right inspiration — make sure you haven’t missed it!    Do a mental review of  things that have recently caught your interest for more than just a passing moment.    Is there a connection that needs to be made?

    Download the app:  https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=607155560

    Read the blog:  http://thesorcerersapp.wordpress.com/

  • If at first you don’t succeed

    In my previous post I mentioned that I wanted to give a bit of the story of developing The Sorcerer’s Apprentice iPhone application.    But The Sorcerer’s App was not my first crack at writing an iPhone app.    Before we get to the new app, let’s turn the wayback machine to 2009.   The App Store was only about a year old  (it’s easy to forget that at the initial release, third party developers could not write applications for the iPhone).   And I had an idea for what I felt would be a great iPhone application.

    The idea of the app was a baseball scoring application.   This wasn’t a new idea for me — I had originally thought of it as an application I thought would do well for the Apple Newton.   I had even drawn up some screen mock-ups of the Newton app (I still have them in a file around here somewhere).  But the Newton wasn’t a long-lived platform and was gone before I ever got a chance to make any serious attempt at developing an application for it.

    But the idea didn’t die, so when the iPhone opened up for third party developers, I started thinking about it again, and then working on it.   I bought a couple of developer’s guides, and even attended an iOS developers conference in San Jose.   Soon pieces of the app were beginning to take shape … a display across the top of the screen for the line score (inning-by-inning runs scored), a lineup on the left, an area for scoring the current play on the right.

    Background image for the play scoring area
    Background image for the play scoring area

    As it turns out, this was an incredibly complex application, and in hindsight was really too ambitious for a first project — especially for a single developer, working part time.    Things that were uninteresting, but vitally necessary — like handling the roster, lineup, substitutions, etc. — were very time consuming to get right.    The interesting part — scoring the plays — really required skills with graphics that I didn’t possess if I was to give the app the polished look I was looking for.

    I worked on the app pretty steadily for a number of months.    At some point while I was doing this, another baseball scoring app showed up in the app store — but I wasn’t too discouraged, because I looked at it and decided I could do better.    Not too long after that, a second scoring app showed up — much more complete, better thought out.    Well, I thought, I may have lost the first mover advantage, but  I could catch up.    Then the newer, better app was re-branded –it became the ESPN scorecard app.    At that point it really seemed like Game Over.    If I was confident that I was going to turn out an app that was everything I envisioned, perhaps I would have continued at that point — but I was daunted by how long I’d worked on this and how much was still left to do.   I knew it would be several more months before I could possibly have anything to market, and then it might very well be second-best.

    So, my first iPhone development project was shelved.   But I’d learned a lot, and I felt I would return to iPhone development when the right project came along.   I really thought that would be in a matter of months, rather than years — but in the intervening time, there has been nothing that struck me as something I wanted to do badly enough that I’d invest the hours required.    So time marched on, while millions of new apps were developed and shipped.   There had to be an idea that was still out there somewhere, waiting for me to find it.

    That’s where the story will pick up in the next post.