Cogitu

iPad Dev

For the last week or so, I've been working as much as I could on the iPad finance app. Unfortunately, it wasn't ready in time for the launch submission deadline on Saturday, but it feels good to have a large portion of the code already written. I learned a ton about the new iPad controls and realized how big of a change the resolution increase is from iPhone to iPad. I'm really interested in seeing what other business apps do UI-wise - almost everything I've seen so far looks like a book...so I'm curious if *everyone* is going to be making a book/binder UI. In any case, it seems quite a bit harder to design a good UI for the iPad...having so many pixels available is just a bit overwhelming.

Pinball Mini 2.0 Update Live

Pinball Mini 2.0 was finally approved by Apple late in the evening on Friday. Starting on Saturday, I tried to do a little promotion for it. I'm still working on a trailer type video, but once I have that I'll be sending out some promo codes to review sites to see if we can get a few reviews. I did post on Touch Arcade Saturday and got a really good response from the community there. I really wish there were more games I could build right now so I would have more reason to interact with the community there - it seems like a really great place. I've been reading the site for a long time, I just haven't been venturing into the forums until now. I ended up giving away 15 promo codes...the first 10 were used up in 10 minutes and then the 5 extra I put up a little later were gone within 5 minutes. Since Friday, Pinball Mini has had a few more sales, but it's still selling less than 5 copies a day. I'm hopeful that a few review sites will pick it up once I send out the promo codes and hopefully that'll give it a little more visibility. If that doesn't work, then getting featured by Apple is about our only hope for Pinball Mini...but of course, that's not something under our control. I know we aren't the first to be disappointed with indie game sales on the App Store, but that doesn't make it any less disappointing.

This Week

The plan for this week is to get the Pinball Mini trailer video finished up and the review promo codes mailed out. After that, it's back to focusing on the iPad app...a little slower though. I stayed up way too late (and way too many times) last week, so I've got to get back to a manageable sleep schedule. I received my iPad shipment notification just a few hours ago, so hopefully I'll be here this weekend and I'll have a bit of code to test on it. I'm tentatively targeting April 30th as the submit date for v1.0 of the finance app. I really want to make sure everything in 1.0 is as solid as possible and the app is ready to grow with all of the functionality it needs to have.