Don’t laugh!
About 6 months ago my stinking, filthy, over-priced, motherless sack of worthless crap Alienware laptop fried its expensive and difficult to replace video cards. I was annoyed. I never like the damn thing from day one. It was heavy as heck, glowed cherry-red with heat when running, the fans on it sounded like a commuter turbo prop coming in for a landing and everytime I looked at it all I could think about is the stupid-tax I paid.
So I did what I generally do in a situation like that; I went out and spent more money. On a lark, I went out and got an iPad. My boss is a Mac fanatic and I’ve always given him so much crap about it and been such a MS bigot, that I thought it would be a funny experiment to see how long I could survive just having my iPad. Sorta like one of those “30 Days” experiments.
After a weekend it was like crap, I really like this thing. I added the Bluetooth keyboard and I could either use it as a little netbook when typing long emails, or as a tablet when lounging on the patio reading and surfing. Obviously it is limited somewhat. But I still have my work Win7 Laptop available if I need it.
Eventually I decided Hmmm, I’d really like to try programming for this thing. That started a whole ball of wax.
Programmer have what they call “Hello World” programs that are usually something very limited and simple just to get their feet wet with a new technology. That’s what my game is. Nothing fancy, I just wanted to go through the whole process with something simple to get some experience in this whole new world.
It was a strange experience. I had to get a Mac-Mini desktop, learn all the ins and outs of working on a Mac (strange enough) , the get the Apple development environment ( X-Code 4) and learn how to use that. Then I had to learn a new programming language (Objective-C), then I had to learn a graphical library (Cocos-2d), then all the digital signing, certificates, ad hoc deployment, provisioning, app approval process, iAd, Game Center integration. Yikes. My brain is about half melted, but I feel like it was a great learning process and I got a lot of good experience that doesn’t hurt the resume. ;o)
So, I know a few people here have IOS devices. I’d appreciate if anyone would like to try it out. It’s just a simple little arcade game to get my feet wet. It’s a free download (iAd supported). You might occasionally see an ad for HTC. Apple’s iAd don’t always return a real ad on every request. When they don’t, I have some custom ads I display. A couple on each device I reserved for promoting HTC. That might sound weird on an IOS app, but I suspect most IOS owners have at least one PC in their house.
If you put your device in Airplane mode so it can’t contact iAd, then you will see the custom ads immediately.
Its a universal app so it should run on anything running at least IOS 4.2. (Well, except for the iPad 3 yet
)
Note: If you happen to still be running IOS 4.2-4.3, there is a bug that crashes the app when switching background mode. I’ve submitted an update to Apple. The fix should be available soon.
Anyway, hope you find it amusing.
If you like it, please leave me a review on iTunes. If you hate it, use the private feedback mechanism in the app to let me know.
Download link:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/torpedo-away%20/id502320141?ls=1&mt=8
