Just a brief update from App land here in Calgary. iOS 6 lands today for the public, so I can give you my impressions as a developer.
Now it’s important to note that I’m not a full time developer as regular readers well know. We have a stable set of games out there for iOS, and we quickly tested our most popular ones last week to make sure they worked. Since everything was hunky-dorey in the simulators I turned our time to other interests, like the web development textbook I’m co-authoring.
What we we weren’t prepared for was the slow dictionary performance in Word Slide 🙁 The game is now a little less responsive due to dictionary lookup issues. How do I know this? Well A Word Theme, is essentially the same code base, except for the dictionary usage. Holding a word in Word Theme is lightening fast as it should be while Word Slide’s performance has degraded.
Next we come to our other games. Thankfully most of them work on the new iOS6 as is, so we can relax for the most part. Rafter’s Loot though is another issue. It’s whitescreening right now, and that forces me to choose: Do I stop supporting the game altogether, or do I invest x hours into fixing it, to continue earning a trickle of cash that will work out to less than minimum wage for my efforts?
The deciding factor was that we are currently advertising Rafter’s Loot it in our other games. I’d have to patch the existing (perfectly fine) games to remove the ad as well as not support it. The efforts to do that would undoubtedly take as long, and the end result would be 1 less sku.
So, with the rest of Calgary drifting off to bed with dreams of Kofi Annan in their head, I am looking down the barrel of a long night, all to squeeze out a little more money for my family, until some better way support them comes along (maybe Blackberry 10?, Maybe my upcoming textbook?, maybe a rich benefactor?)
More “features” and form factors for you means less sleep for me 🙂