Happy App Store Day

This morning I woke up to the news that the iPhone App Store had gone live. So of course I quickly fired up iTunes to make sure my app was listed and there it was in all it’s video poker glory. So happy! But had I not gone to WWDC this year it probably would never had existed as anything more than my own personal animation playground.

A little over a month ago I was assigned a project to be developed for the iPhone. This project got a little bogged down waiting on some outside resources, so I decided to spend some time familiarizing myself with iPhone development in general. To me a real app is the best way to familiarize myself with how I might employ certain APIs in a real world situations and one of the first things to pop into my head was video poker. It would lend itself really well to animating images, sliding around cards, flipping them over, credits increasing / decreasing. I got far enough along that it would deal / draw cards, evaluate a hand, update your credit total and such in time for the flight to San Francisco for WWDC. So maybe I also wanted something to do on the flight too.

So like I said, I hadn’t planned on really doing anything with my app, but after encouragement from several developer friends at WWDC (thanks so much guys), I decided I’d at least talk to some higher ups at Griffin and see what kind of response I got. They thought it was worth a shot and so I set about making it fit for human consumption and sprinkling in a few additional features while I was at it. The result is 5 Card Touch (side note: the name game we had before settling on 5 Card Touch was great. Names such as iPoker, RedHotPoker, Poker in the… you know. These failed to make the cut), and you can get it at the App Store on iTunes or your iPhone / iPod Touch for a measly $1.99. A bargain! There is a screenshot on the App Store, but it’s kind of hard to get a feel for how it plays from a static screenshot and so I leave you with a 30 second video clip which for some reason doesn’t have audio. Enjoy.