Category: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

  • 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/

  • Finding Inspiration

    In my last post, I talked about the Baseball Scorecard app that never made it to launch.   That was in 2009, and ever since then, I’ve had it in the back of my mind that doing an iPhone app was going to happen — I just needed to find the right project.

    Maybe “in the back of my mind” isn’t quite right.   It was really a bucket list item for me … not something I thought about daily, but something that was more than just an idle thought.   I really did plan to act on it, but the ideas just weren’t coming.

    As a long-time Disney fan, doing something Disney related certainly had an appeal, so more than once I tried to think of a Disney-related app idea.  But there are already various tour guides, line estimating guides, etc. for all the parks — I didn’t really want to do a “me, too” app, I wanted to do something new — or at least something I felt like I could do better than anyone else was doing it.    Nothing came to me,  but I continued to believe it would eventually.

    During a WDW trip in September 2012 for the Tower of Terror race, I first played the game Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom (which had launched in February 2012).    It’s a neat little game and one which I was sure I’d play again on future visits to the park — but somehow the synapses didn’t fire, nothing connected telling me there was an app there waiting to be written.

    When I went back in January 2013 for the half marathon, I played again, and this time I did more than just play — I talked to other players, traded cards, and started to hear that there was more complexity to the game than first meets the eye.     The reason this is not readily apparent  is because if you play on the “Easy” difficulty (as I was doing), there is really no strategy required to win — it’s just a pleasant diversion and a chance to walk around the park and watch some entertaining videos, and follow along with the story line.   But if you play on medium and hard levels — then what you do matters.     You can’t just randomly play any cards and hope to defeat the villains trying to take over the Magic Kingdom.

    The game strategy has to be discovered, and it’s really something that one person is not likely to figure out on their own.   So online communities have developed, both for trading the SotMK (as the game is abbreviated) cards and for sharing strategy tips — what’s the best card combination to beat Cruella de Vil?   What cards should you absolutely avoid playing against Maleficient when she appears in dragon form?   How can you handle multiple cards at the portal without dropping your Dole Whip?

    After playing in the parks during each day of my trip, I was checking on the online forums at night for better strategies to use the next day.   Yep, they had hooked me and reeled me in — I needed to beat the game.

    It wasn’t until I was home from the trip that the light bulb went on.   There were too many card combinations for anyone to ever find the completely optimal strategy working alone.   What was needed was a crowdsourced solution.   And while this was happening online via blog postings and Facebook groups, the way to really kick that into high gear would be with an iPhone app.    I’d discovered the app that needed to be written.

    From this idea, I was quickly beginning to mock up what such an app might look like — drawing out the various screens on index cards and pinning them to a cork board to get the flow.    It really seemed to hit the sweet spot I was looking for — here was an app with enough to it that it wasn’t trivial or worthless, but not so large and complex that it was more than a one-person job.   The app could be compartmentalized nicely, meaning that it didn’t have to be done all at once — I could easily visual several versions of the app, each adding in a few new features.    (That was a big downside to the baseball app — you couldn’t do it in pieces.   You can’t release a version 1 that only does balls and strikes, and then a version 2 that handles other batter actions, and then a version 3 that handles baserunning — until you can do it all, you don’t have anything usable).

    Inspiration had finally come along; the idea was there.   Now it was just a mere matter of programming to take the idea and make it a reality.

    Index cards being used to mock up application screens
    Index cards being used to mock up application screens

  • 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.

  • A New App and a New Blog

    Yesterday my first-ever iPhone app launched in the App Store for Apple’s iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch).    The link to download the app is at right and also below.

    I have also created a new blog specifically for the app — I didn’t want to post a bunch of stuff here that would only be of interest to users of the app, so if you’re interested in the app, please follow The Sorcerer’s App blog to get the latest news about the app.

    But I thought it would be appropriate to post more of a personal story here of how the idea for the app came to me, and some of the fun and challenges along the way.   So stay tuned over the coming days and I’ll share some of the backstory of creating the app.    In the meantime, if you’re a player of Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom, please check out the app.    If you aren’t yet a player but are planning a visit to the Magic Kingdom in the future, take a look and see if it’s something you want to include as part of your next trip to Walt Disney World.

    Download the Sorcerer’s Apprentice