Android release!

BarNiteBingo has been released to the Android Market! We've also submitted for approval to the App Store. Exciting times. Time to kick the marketing into full gear.

The Android Market submission process is immediate. You push "Publish" and it's on the market in seconds. Pretty cool, but a little scary :)

porting BarNiteBingo to Android

After we got BarNiteBingo for the iPhone done, and into beta testing, I sat down to see what it would take to port the game to Android. Being a java developer for over ten years, and having written one simple Android app before (to read exchange email) I didn't think this would be too difficult.

BarNiteBingo is certainly not the most complicated game, and it has primarily one screen that takes most of the work, with the other screens being settings and help screens, along with a splash screen. Converting the actual game play code was very easy, I could literally copy and paste the methods in Objective C into the java classes, and translate the code. Most of the data structures and all of the code was pretty easy to translate between two object oriented languages.

Having all the graphic and sound assets already done, and the screen layout already decided made it pretty easy to handle that in Android as well. I did use the AbsoluteLayout, which is now deprecated, and if we get any traction on Android, I'll probably go back and do a RelativeLayout for the app, and make sure it will layout properly on multiple screen sizes as well. But for now, we've got a pretty much identical version on the android supporting the 480x640 layout that the G1 and myTouch have, which currently represent most of the handsets (even though there are MANY new handsets coming out by the end of year).

The biggest task in porting to Android turned out to be embracing the Android way, and using it's idioms instead of the iPhone idioms. One of the major changes that I ended up having to deal with was supporting the back button on the Android devices. On the iPhone when we went to the settings or help screens (or even the Win screen) we always needed to provide a button to get back to the game screen.

With Android you certainly can provide a button, but it's not common. Android keeps a stack of views, across applications. So if you want to get to the view you came from, you just hit the back button. The beauty of this system is you can send the user to a web page, or an email compose activity and when they're done and that view pops off the stack (or they use their back button) they come back to your app, there isn't anything you have to do in code to make that happen. This keeps you from re-inventing system tasks all the time to keep the user from leaving you application.

I really like both platforms, and I think we'll continue to support both as long as it's easy to do, and there is some amount of sales on the Android side. As the number of devices and carriers increase, it seems logical that the Android Market will pick up some steam. The iPhone App Store does have an incredible head start though, so only time will tell.

Getting Close

We're very close to putting the finishing touches on our first app. As we're going over our list of remaining tasks, we've come to focus our efforts on marketing. From many of the posts and blog entries we have read on this subject, there is no one correct way to market your app. There are many great suggestions along with information on what has and what hasn't worked. We've got a few of our own ideas but will be flushing things out over the next few weeks while we wait for approval once we submit. There is a good amount of work left to be done, but with the app in it's final stages we can re-focus our efforts. We'll share what we learn as we navigate our way through another new phase in our efforts to bring some truly great apps to the iPhone.

Writing out first iphone game

Once we decided to try out iphone development, the first obvious question was, what are we going to write? We didn't want to start out with what we thought was our best idea, as there was a lot to learn.

We had to learn objective c for starters, and how to develop in XCode. I've never owned a mac (spending most of my time in Windows and Linux), so just getting around and getting used to OSX was a little uncomfortable. But, as a long time developer, I love to learn new languages and environments, so I welcomed the challenge. As I suspected OSX was a dream, and learning objective c wasn't too bad either. The biggest challenge coming from Java and C# was memory management, something I thought was firmly in my past.

With the fairly simple rules, and naming conventions present in the iphone development world, it wasn't nearly as bad as my memories of malloc() and free(). It still takes some thought though, and I welcome the time when GC is available on all platforms.

We're putting the finishing touches on our first game, and so far it's come out pretty good. We picked something fairly simple to start with. Coding the game itself, and working with a graphics artist to get us all the graphics needed might be the easy part. We are now in a private beta soliciting feedback from friends and family. After that it's time to rev up the marketing machine and get it submitted to Apple for approval.

Check back for more updates as we work through our first iphone application.