New Site Design

In September, the site was given a much needed face-lift.  Everything should be much easier to find and it is certainly easier to manage (everything was moved into a central WordPress installation).

New Product Launch - Pinball Mini

A few weeks ago, we launched our second app (and first game) - Pinball Mini.  Its been a fun app to work on and we've had positive feedback from pretty much everyone that has played it.  It isn't a world changing app or anything - just a fun little diversion for a few minutes here and there.  Going forward, we'll be adding more boards just to keep things interesting, but we're in a bit of a holding pattern as far as new features go.  Part of the problem is that we didn't really do any marketing for the app and our sales reflect that...so before we invest any large blocks of time into new features, we're going to try some different marketing possibilities.

In the not too distant future, I'm hoping to have some posts about how we built Pinball Mini.  It was quite surprising just how different game programming was from "regular" app development.  Pinball Mini also had a real graphic designer (my good friend Chris Echols from oneredtwo.com) and that presented some interesting challenges too as far as the development work flow.

If you're interested in checking Pinball Mini out, here's the link:

http://www.cogitu.com/products/pinballmini/

Budgee 2.0 Progress

You may have noticed a lack of Budgee updates recently.  Rest assured, it hasn't been abandoned.  The whole app went back to the drawing board (architecture wise) and it's taking a lot of time to build things the way we want them built.  The feature set is largely the same as the current version of Budgee with the addition of quite a few more useful features.  The good news is that Budgee 2 will still be a free update for all current Budgee users.  A couple of features are require significant backend server support - for those features, we may have to make them an optional in-app purchase.  We're trying to avoid doing that though because we really want all features to be available to everyone right from the start - we just have to figure out a way to make the numbers work.

That's about it for this update.  More to come soon.

Pinball Mini - Dino Board

In the coming weeks, we'll be adding many, many new boards (in fact, the first one will be submitted in just a day or two).  We're also working on some additional features/refinements (e.g. online leader boards, brag about your score on twitter, etc) for future releases.

More information (screenshots/support/etc) here: http://www.cogitu.com/products/pinballmini/

The changes aren't purely cosmetic though. Behind the scenes, we're now using the fantastic FogBugz bug/feature tracking software. This should help us address your questions, comments, and issues even more efficiently.

On a related note, there may be some "oddness" with the site for just a little bit while we get everything playing nice with the new template.  So if you run into a blank page or something that looks strange, don't worry, we're working on it.