This is only the latest in a series of disappointments from the iPhone developer community. A brief timeline:

• We have an SDK, it’s html and javascript (boo!)
• OK, just kidding we have a real SDK (yay!)
• But you’ll only be able to distribute your apps through our store (boo!)
• But all the tools will be free (yay!)
• And it’ll be $99 per year to become a developer (yee… meh)
• Oh and you’ll need to be an authorized iPhone developer to post apps on the App Store and you’ll go through a potentially long drawn out process where you’ll receive no feedback from Apple and in the end probably get chosen or denied at random (boo!)
• OK you can submit your apps now (yay!)
• But it’ll take days or weeks before they’ll be approved… or denied. And again you won’t know the progress of your submission until the point we reach our decision. (boo!)
• Oh and by the way this is still all under NDA (BOO!)
• NullRiver’s NetShare is available. At last we can tether with the iPhone! (yay!)
• No you can’t (boo!)
• Yes you can (yay!)
• No you can’t (boo!)

There have been plenty of suggested remedies to deal with these issues, but everything in Apple’s history leads me to think that Apple will tighten, rather than loosen, their control of, well pretty much everything they do. We love Apple because they create great hardware and software. They devote resources to the little details that another company might gloss over, but these details are what sets them apart from their competitors. But let’s be honest, the man running Apple would like very much if it were possible to sell you a product in which everything that you need (and don’t) has been decided upon based on aesthetics and function. The degree of openness for each of the three platforms: the Mac, iPhone, and iPod, is directly proportionally to the amount of competition Apple has in each category.

For example look back at the original Mac 128k: it will have no fan, by God, or hard drive, or ability to expand it in any way. And to make sure people didn’t try and fiddle around in it’s perfect innards the case was held together with screws that could only be removed with a special screwdriver. (Later Apple would learn their lesson and remove screws altogether from the iPod and iPhone. Can anyone, anyone at all provide a valid reason, other than aesthetics, for not providing a user replaceable battery on these devices?) The Macintosh did make a dent in the universe, but not in the way that Apple originally hoped. It brought the graphical user interface indirectly to the masses. Indirectly since sadly it was Windows based machines, which were much more open to user customization, that came to dominate the desktop computer market.

This control applies not only to hardware and software, but perhaps most importantly to the image that Apple projects. They make products for the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, and the round pegs in square holes. You’re cool if you buy an Apple product. Not a lemming like some Windows user. Ironic, since some Apple devotees happily camp out for new iPhones, iPods, OS updates, new Apple Store openings and frantically refresh their browsers windows during live blogs of any Steve Jobs presentation. This is all cultivated by Apple. All of the information that comes from Apple is carefully crafted to try and insure that they are on message. I’m not sure I’ve ever read any news articles about them that didn’t end with “Apple declined to comment”. They sued and then shut down Think Secret. Radar, Apple’s bug reporting service, is of little use to developers since they’re not allowed to see bug others have submitted. Recently I heard of a situation with a developer that had appended an iPhone application description to say that an update was ready, but Apple was working through a backlog and had not yet approved it. The developer was contacted and asked to change the description so it did not appear that the delay was Apple’s.

OK, so I’m kinda of going off in the weeds here. I didn’t really intend to just bash Apple. I only wanted to illustrate that the company has its faults and we should try and view things objectively. Apple is trying to make money. Period. They’re not trying to make the world a happy shiny place. So, while I appreciate Fraser Speirs gesture, their are thousands of developers lined up waiting to develop for the iPhone that will step in to take his place. So what incentive does Apple have to loosen the restrictions they’ve placed on development? Civil disobedience could be fun. All the developers could simultaneously change the price of their apps to $9999.99 for a day in protest. That would make news and we’d all lose our App Store privileges and likely enrage our customers, so maybe not. Or, we could hope that the outcry becomes such that it becomes felt in wider circles than just the developer community. If Apple’s image starts taking a hit they might change their minds. Although there is a slow undercurrent of dissatisfaction forming based on the cumulative effects of the recent negative actions, by and large people are willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt in most situations. Certainly Apple is given far, far wider latitude than a company like Microsoft.

So what if the iPhone comes to dominate the cell phone market the way the iPod has dominated the mp3 player market? Will we end up with the same diversity of development that we see on the iPod? Perhaps not to the same degree, but it’s reasonable to expect that the smaller players would be slowly squeezed out. What the iPhone needs is legitimate competition. Yes, there are plenty of smartphones out there, but Apple needs someone to deliver a device as elegant, or nearly so, as the iPhone. Perhaps Google’s Android or RIM is up to the challenge?

At the very least Google / RIM should try and capitalize on some of Apple’s missteps, especially with the developer community. What if RIM tried to woo away developers of applications like Podcaster with an offer to assist in bringing the application to Blackberry? Hey we’ll give you a phone, a system to develop on, the tools, and a nice chunk of cash and no NDA, if you’ll bring your application to our platform, whadaya say? It might be harder to lure away deeply loyal developers that cut their teeth on the desktop platform, but plenty of developers have no such history and would be perfectly happy to learn another SDK if the opportunity looked promising. RIM could then turn that into a great little PR campaign while their at it. Maybe even make their own 1984 type commercial with Apple playing the part of Big Brother this time.

Does all this mean, am I rooting for Blackberry, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile?! No of course not, I’m rooting for the consumer. Technology. Innovation. Apple’s recent tactics will stifle innovation and the only real remedy is healthy competition. This is exactly what the iPhone brought to the creaking cell phone industry. Now we need to the competition to respond to insure innovation continues with mobile software development.

While I was finishing up 5 Card Touch I started casting about for ideas for my next iPhone app. I got plenty of suggestions, but the most popular, and perhaps more convincingly, the app my wife wanted to see most was a slot machine. While I do gamble from time to time, slot machines have never really been my thing, but I went ahead and started planning one. The result was Lucky 7 Slots and the response has been way way beyond my expectations. It’s been a week since it was released and has steadily climbed the charts on the App Store reaching, at the time of this writing, #23 overall! I can’t describe how happy it has made me that so many people are enjoying my application and you have my sincere thanks. Excuse me, having a bit of a Sally Field moment.

OK

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised at the popularity of Lucky 7 Slots. Slot machines are obviously a huge draw in casinos. When I set about to make my own, I wanted to try and capture a little bit of the excitement and suspense of the classic three reel slot machine. The newer slot machine with twenty payout lines have their followers, but every time I’ve tried to play one I just have to let the machine tell me if I won. I have no idea how people can track all of those lines quick enough to have any suspense while waiting for that last reel to stop spinning. And sometimes even after I’ve won I’m not sure how. So, anyway a three reel machine was what I wanted to make, and I assumed might have a broader appeal than some of the newer varients.

In order to make Lucky 7 a faithful recreation of the types of machines you’d find in Vegas, I had to learn a bit more about what makes them tick. The Wizard of Odds came through again with a excellent description of how slot machines work internally. This was a nice reference, but the payout described in that article is a miserable. 87.47%.

I wanted a slot machine that paid close to, but not quite 100%. After all I don’t want people playing my game and thinking: “Hey this is easy, I’ll just take the rent, head to Vegas and double it!”. You’ll fare much better on my slot machine than you will in Vegas, but eventually your luck will probably run out. This was possibly the trickiest part of the app. I tried very hard to create a table with a nice balance of small payouts and enough large ones to keep things interesting. I wanted it to pay regularly, but not at the cost of never hitting the big payouts. But I couldn’t put in too many big payouts and sacrifice the frequency that the smaller ones would hit. As I was creating the tables I found that a change to the probability on a single symbol on a single reel would ripple through the payout table and upset this balance. Oh, and I also hated seeing a blank on the first reel. It’s depressing when you know you’ve lost before while the last two reels are still spinning. So you’re less likely to hit a blank on the first reel than the other two. Long story short it was a pain in the ass But I think I hit upon a fair balance. Lucky 7 has a 99.5% return and, on average, every 1 in 4.8 spins will be a winner.

There were a couple of ideas for the game that didn’t make the cut. The first was a pull handle on the side of the screen that the user could grab and “pull” to set the reels spinning. I don’t think I’m breaking the NDA when I say that the iPhone has a resolution of 480 by 320 pixels. Even less if you subtract the status bar which I really like to keep visible if possible. A handle would consume about 10% of the screen at a minimum running vertically along the side. Did I really want to give up all those pixels for a feature that would probably be used a couple times as a novelty? No, I did not.

The other idea was to use the accelerometer and some sort of gesturing motion to set the reels in motion. The excellent MotionX Poker Dice makes use of the accelerometer to roll dice and it is very good, but the novelty wears off fairly soon and I’ve found myself wishing for a button (a side note about MotionX if you have it, watch the shadows cast by the dice while tilting the phone about. Excellent touch). So again, a novelty feature. What’s more, how do you make sure you don’t inadvertently trigger a spin when you didn’t intend to. What if I win a big payout and in the excitement, my victory dance triggers another spin? And finally, monitoring the accelerometer uses extra cycles even if the app is just sitting there. I try to pay attention to battery usage in my apps and conserve where possible. As a matter of fact, muting the sound in my apps doesn’t just set the volume to a lower level, but bypasses the audio methods altogether. In the end, using the accelerometer to trigger a spin just didn’t seem worth it.

So there you have it. Lucky 7 Slots. Once again a huge thank you to everyone that has tried it and if you haven’t I hope you will and let me me know what you think.

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.