A Pun Generator

Back in the 1980s, my grandfather kept asking me when I was going to go for my PhD. I never did (and probably never will), but at the time I thought I might, and figured that my thesis would have something to do with puns. After all, lots of artificial intelligence research was involved with disambiguation. Why not turn that on its end, and revel in ambiguity!

It turns out that a team at the University of Aberdeen have created the Joking Computer. It basically creates puns: “Q: What kind of tree is nauseated? A: A sick-amore.”

So I’d probably need a new thesis…

iPhone Developer Booted Over Fishy Reviews

Looks like someone got caught cheating with App Store reviews, and Apple pulled their 1000 apps! Everyone tries to game the system, but most of us work within the rules (and not just the official rules, but also the rules of decency). I’m pleased to see Apple take this step (even if they didn’t do so proactively), which makes things more fair for the rest of us.

Game as Art

There’s a lot of art that’s powerful and moving and you really want to experience, but would never hang in our living room. Brenda Brathwaite’s Train is such a work, but it’s a board game. I haven’t played it, but it seems like it would be cathartic in the sense that Aristotle used in his Poetics.

Improved UK Plug

Clever folding design — looks a lot more appropriate to have in your laptop bag!

Jigami Is Available!

I had set release for 30 November, and figured that was local time (since this evening I could tell that the app was available in Australia but not here in Seattle). But as of about 20:00 PST, Jigami is available in the App Store! If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, check it out! Players of the original Newton version were asking for this, so you know it’s addictive.

App Store Approval

The Jigami approval process went pretty smoothly. I submitted my final binary on Monday night, 16 November. The following Monday morning, 23 November, it was “In Review.” And on Wednesday afternoon, 25 November, it was “Ready for Sale.”

I didn’t want to release it right before Thanksgiving (and before I had my marketing ready), so I’d set the availability for 30 November. In parts of the world, it’s already on sale!

Obviously I’d prefer it if it didn’t take 8 business days to approve a board game, but Apple did live up to the “within 14 days,” and didn’t come up with a reason to reject it.

So for me, the approval process is not ideal, but is working.

Jigami History

At long last, I wrapped up my first iPhone application, Jigami!

Looking at my notebook, the earliest record of it I can find is from 10 December 1991. I had apparently done a Mac prototype by February 1992, and continued to refine it (the next version I saved is from February 1993).

I took about 3 days to port it to NewtonScript in August 1993, and then Scott Shwarts and I polished it. As near as I can tell, we finished it in December 1993. Apple briefly published it as Jigsaw Strategy Game, but then decided they didn’t want to be in the game business, and we got the rights back and distributed it ourselves for a while.

The game was always intended for a handheld device, and in October 2008 I started an iPhone version. I got it working, but the UI wasn’t quite right. The original Newton version used a stylus, so you simply touched a piece and moved it directly. But doing the same thing with your finger meant you couldn’t see the piece you were moving. This is pretty important, since you need to see the shape and symbols. It took me a while to finally accept that the piece had to be moved out from under your finger. Suddenly the game became fun again.

I thought it would be cool to rotate with a gesture, and managed to get this working. But it nobody liked it, even though you could rotate by any amount (±270°). So I implemented a second tap. Everyone preferred this, even though rotating could now take up to 3 taps.

Autorotation was suggested by someone at the Casual Connect conference (sorry, I don’t remember who to credit).

The game was now better than the Newton version, but it still needed a lot more polish. I put in two more AI levels and a bunch of animation. Finally, I got Dalton Webb to do professional artwork. (You can see some of the art progress at the A Sharp Facebook page.)

The original game was available in English, French, German, and Japanese. Unfortunately, I couldn’t just use the original text, because minor things had changed. I didn’t get all of those in the first release, but Laurent Aillet gave me a French translation, and I hope to get more.

I actually submitted the game to the App Store last night, but one of my testers just sent me a crash log and I was able to figure out that it was not the crash I had fixed. Although it seemed to happen only on 2.2 devices (which are a definite minority), I thought it was worth getting right. So I rejected the binary, fixed the bug, and resubmitted it.

That puts me back at the end of the queue, but the silver lining is that I was able to submit French keywords (I had forgotten to get them localized). This is one piece of metadata that Apple doesn’t let you change at will.

Hopefully I’ll have the end of the story in a few days: release. Well, really it will be a new beginning, since I have a number of updates planned…