When something happens at ShrimpWare you'll read about it here - right after Boing Boing mentions it.
Shoofly is kaput.
With new updates to the Apple store, it is clear that Apple does not want small krill hanging around the shop cluttering things up. There have been several updates to XCode that require me to make significant changes to Shoofly. Rather than keep up, I'm getting out. It was fun to have a game app in the store, but I have done several demo apps for Audible Magic and that has satisfied my need to create apps. Maybe I'll come back to this again, but not anytime soon.
ShooFly version 2 is now in the Apple app store! It was a long haul.
I wrote the first version using the DragonfireSDK, I found some problems with Dragonfire that drove me nuts. For version 2 I decided to go native and bought a Mac Mini.
Now I had to learn Objective-C and Xcode. Wow, that was a lot of work for a guy spending his weekends on it. It took me about 6 full weekends before I felt like I knew what I was doing. Then I had to work on new features that would make version 2 feel like a big step up.
I started all this back in March and 4 months of weekends later, version 2 is in the app store. Yet there are still times I stare at Xcode and wonder, what the hell does that mean?
ShooFly is now on Android! My good friend Alan wanted to learn Android and needed a project. Why not port ShooFly? He did! Android is Java based so the entire app needed to be rewritten. He had to learn Eclipse, Android, and some complex Java APIs. But he did it.
By the time he started I had pulled the fly object code into it's own class. He used that and told me it ported easily and worked. That makes me feel good.
Now he's moving on to other projects. To avoid any support issues we made it a free app on Android. I'm not sure we'll ever do an update to it there.
The first app went live on Feb 22 - ShooFly lives! ShooFly has been described by my friends as a kind of whack-a-mole experience. The fly crawls creepily over food and your job is to flick it off or shake it off. I'm now working on a multiplayer version. It feels great to have an app in the store. It used to be itunes.app.com/us/app/shoofly/id420038017.
The holidays gave me several days to work on the app. So far, about 40 hours are into it, some of that learning the Dragonfire SDK.
We are almost read to release our game to a few friends to alpha test it. Oh boy!
A good friend turned us on to DragonfireSDK. It's an iPhone development platform that runs on Windows. How cool is that? It took a bit of learning, and it has a few quirks, but support from DSDK has been very good and now the development is moving along.