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curling

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AppStore front page!

This is amazing -- within days of the Olympic curling event starting, Cool Curlings LITE has skyrocketed up to the top 10 free apps (currently at #6 as I write this), and has appeared on the front page of the App Store.  It's #4 in free games, and has been #1 in both of its subcategories (puzzle and sports, both under games) for about a day.  Its paid sibling isn't doing too shabby, either, currently sitting at #82 (it did reach #80 at one point).  Combined, we have had over 250,000 downloads - it's crazy to think that something we created is being used by quarter of a million people worldwide, and without any kind of a marketing budget!

Never in our wildest imagination did we think our first app will make it this far this fast - thanks to all those who have helped out and downloaded the app!

** EDIT: As of 2/25 at 3pm, we are now the #3 free app overall (#59 among paid apps)! **

 

(download)

 

Filed under  //  app store   cool curlings   curling   itunes   olympics  
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Cool Curlings now available!

Icon-128

Cool Curlings full version is now available in the App Store! http://is.gd/6KYFF Try the free one first: http://is.gd/6DxZi

Filed under  //  app store   cool curlings   curling  
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LITE version approved in the App Store!

Cool Curlings LITE was approved in the App Store! itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cool-curlings-lite/id350523538?mt=8. This is our first app, exciting stuff!

Filed under  //  app store   cool curlings   curling  
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more sneak peek

Vatican

Jamaica vs the perennial Curling powerhouse, Vatican City!

Filed under  //  curling   jamaica   vatican city  
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Weird Xcode bug

I'm not even sure if this is an Xcode (well, Interface Builder, really) bug or something in our code, but one of our images titled "menu.png" was showing up weird in Interface Builder.  When you run it in the iPhone simulator, everything looks fine, but whenever we opened up our HighScoresView.xib, it would show some weird menu image instead of menu.png, and in the attributes it would show "menu" (without the file extension).  This would go away once we added the ".png" but if you save and reload, the same thing would happen.  Upon inspection of the xib file, it would appear the file is saving correctly:

<string key="NSResourceName">menu.png</string>

but I guess Interface Builder opens it up wrong.  Although this doesn't affect our end product in anyway, we ended up just renaming the file menuu.png and this problem went away.  Strange!

(download)

Filed under  //  bug   curling   interface builder   iphone   xcode  
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Running interpreted code in an iPhone app

3.3.2 An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).

An iPhone app we are developing will at some point have downloadable content, where a user can download levels.  In order to implement the grading algorithm, we were looking into dumping some Lua script with each level and having an interpreter.  The quoted statement above disallows this, but we've found an alternate solution.  This is nothing new by any means, but it's not always the most obvious.  UIWebView#stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString can parse JavaScript, and therefore is exempted by the "built-in interpreter" clause.

in Utils.m
... // in initialization
webView = [[UIWebView alloc] init];
...

-(CGFloat) evaluate:(NSString*)script{
    NSString *eval = [webView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:script];
    return [eval floatValue];
}

in GameScreen.m
... // in grading method
NSString* script = [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:
  @"var xi=%f, yi=%f, xf=%f, yf=%f, dx=xf-xi, dy=yf-yi; Math.sqrt(dx*dx + dy*dy)",
  xi, yi, xf, yf];
CGFloat eval = [[Utils instance] evaluate:[script autorelease]];
...

This returns the distance between (xi, yi) and (xf, yf), and if we wanted another level to calculate the Manhattan distance or ignore the y axis altogether, we can simply load a different script with the level and we're set. All without getting flogged by the Apple gestapo, whew!

Filed under  //  apple   curling   dev   iphone   javascript  
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Cool Curlings site up

Cc_new_site

A little more update to the Cool Curlings site! We've added some users/scores interface to it, but we're not quite ready to show it off yet.  We'll open it up once the game becomes active in the AppStore.

Filed under  //  curling  
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Cool Curlings has a homepage

Wow has it really been two months since the last blog post?  CoolCurlings.com is up and running on Heroku for the time being

Filed under  //  curling  
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Cool Curlings Sneak-peek Video

(download)

It's a work in progress, but here's a preview of what we're cooking up!

Filed under  //  art   curling   game   video  
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Hello World

Coolcurlingsnapshot

We are now on Posterous, too. How very web2.0 of us! Here's a snapshot of Cool Curlings artwork Ryan made.

Filed under  //  art   curling   game  
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