Meet Agent Dash, full time spy

I’m a huge fan of Agent Dash. It’s a “Temple Run” type game in which all you ever do is swipe left, right, up or down. The graphics are insanely good and it’s a very addictive little time killer.

As Agent Dash (or any of the other characters) you run through tricky levels, collect diamonds, shoot at enemy technology and avoid obstacles. That’s it.

When the new update came along a couple of weeks ago it promised many good things. But what I’ve found is that many of the changes have an impact on the game dynamic that we have come to love.
Currently players are heavily coerced into upgrading – but before you do, let me tell you what has changed in Agent Dash. If you don’t like it, you can always restore your game from a backup and wait until these little niggles have been fixed (if they ever will).

Agent Dash 1.0: The Previous Version

What makes this game so addictive are all those little bits that make up the Agent Dash Dynamic: jet packs, slow-mo tokens, air drop, golden gun, silenced gun, a diamond attraction magnet, several funky characters in funky outfits – elements that feed into a greater story. The Dash Universe.

The new version has changed how these things can be obtained and how they can be used.

In Agent Dash you collect diamonds on your runs – these were previously the main currency in the game. With those you could upgrade your gadgets to become better and more powerful. Before the upgrade these would randomly appear in the game and could be used if you grabbed them.

Let me give you an example: You’d run along the jungle, there appears a jet pack, you jump up to get it and fly off for several seconds, collecting every diamond on your way while avoiding obstacles. The more you had upgraded the jet pack, the longer it would let you fly. Magic!

Most gadgets were upgradable in stages. As you collected diamonds, you could pay with those for an upgrade and make your gadget better or last longer (like the jet pack). After 4 upgrades you’re maxed out, and as you can image those upgrades were expensive – which in turn enticed you to play more.

That was all there was to it really. If you’re an avid gamer, there was never a need to pay real cash for any in-game element, unless you wanted to. For example, if you didn’t have the patience to collect 80.000 diamonds to buy Jawbone you could just purchase diamonds in-app for real cash.

Until now this was the only source of income for the developers.
But when you’ve played the game like a lunatic for several months I guess there came the point where you had collected so many diamonds that you owned all the purchasable characters and all your gadgets were maxed out.

For me that was the time when I stopped playing Agent Dash as regularly as before, because other than the factor of “a couple of minutes of fun” there was nothing else to obtain.

Gold Members

Golden Goodtug used to be 69p… now you have to pay for her in microfilms

Undoubtedly I wasn’t alone when the Dash Addiction left me, which was probably showing up on some usage statistic at Full Fat in Warwick, where the game is made.

I’m a developer myself so I do understand that you have to make money with your creations – so I guess if not enough people are buying your in-app diamonds, you’ll have to look into other streams of revenue from the game.

Full Fat did just that with a small upgrade a while back: they introduced “Gold Versions” of the two main protagonists Agent Dash and Agent Goodtug. Each shiny new character could no longer be obtained with diamonds, but instead had to be bought with real cash – 99c or 69p, Apple’s Level 1 price tier.

This was of course a completely voluntary expense for gamers, so if you didn’t want to you didn’t have to buy them. You still had 10 other characters to play with. It had however changed a completely free game, in which you could obtain every available item by sheer persistence, to something that – if you wanted everything – you now had to pay for, albeit a nominal amount. It wasn’t like this before.

I remember feeling just a tiny bit cheated by this subtle introduction.

Agent Dash – Pure Gold!

With the upgrade also came a “nag screen”: before each run you were reminded that you should really be spending diamonds on “disposable stuff” (it’s a bit like what a bank does when you have too much cash sitting in your current account).

So the goldies were hanging in there, and we kept playing every so often, slightly annoyed by the nag screen, but really with no intention to ever spend some money. It just wasn’t necessary to enjoy the game.

This must have also shown up on some usage statistic in Warwick, and upon this being “not profitable enough”, Full Fat changed the game again – this time a bit more drastically to the version we now call 2.0.

Agent Dash 2.0: The Upgrade

If you haven’t yet upgraded, you’ll see some fierce marketing telling you how amazing the 2.0 upgrade really is:

• faster load times
• new snow level
• new characters
• no more nag screen

While all these things are true, what they didn’t advertise is things that are now GONE from the app, many of which we have come to like and rely upon. Here are some of the major changes:

Diamonds aren’t forever anymore

The biggest change is that diamonds are no longer the main currency in Agent Dash. It’s a bit like what happened to the US Dollar when it was downgraded. It hurts!

You can still collect diamonds as you did before, but what you can buy with them is now restricted to the use of disposable items such as jet packs and magnets.

Characters for example can no longer be obtained by saving up diamonds. Instead, you must buy them with a new scary currency called “microfilms”.

Microfilms are the new cash

The Daily Play bonus may show up and give you free films

Even though from a spy point of view microfilms are a funny addition, they cannot be collected for free. The only way to get microfilms is to purchase them in-app with real cash.

Let me give you an idea of prices here: you can buy The Queen character for 150 microfilms. But buying 100 microfilms will cost you £4.99, or 350 microfilms will cost you £13.99 (read: expensive).

When the upgrade first came out there was a “daily play” bonus which would give you some microfilms for free if you played every day. I got my count up to 30, but these bonuses have since stopped. It is at the discretion of Full Fat if and when these bonuses come along, and you cannot rely on them.

I haven’t found any other way yet to collect microfilms in the game. As it stands, your own hard cash is the only reliable way to obtain them.

Characters cost Microfilms

Meet Viscount Voodoo, a new addition to the roster

The implication of this new scheme is that characters ultimately cost you hard cash, because you have to buy them with microfilms now.

Note that if you haven’t yet bought characters like Bobajob, Jawbone, or any of the Dash/Goodtug outfit variations, after the upgrade you can no longer buy them with diamonds! You will now have to fork out microfilms instead.

The same goes for the Gold Characters and Dr Quantumfinger: you can still  buy them for 69p/99c in the old version, but with the upgrade they will cost you microfilms too – which is considerably more expensive than a tier 1 price tag.

Bottom line: if you want any of those characters, buy them BEFORE you upgrade. There is no going back!

Re-runs cost you microfilms too

At the end of each run, after you’ve run into that sign or fallen off the bridge, you were previously presented with the option to “continue” for a sum of diamonds. You could do this as long as you had diamonds, even though the price tag got steeper the more you continued.

With the upgrade, this procedure has been replaced with microfilms too: You want to continue? Pay with one microfilm.
If you’re relying on this feature you’re in for a nasty surprise.

Buy Before You Try

Her Majesty Herself is up for the challenge (not sure if we’ll meet the corgies though)

Jet Packs, magnets, slow-mo, cloak and all the other funky gadgets need to be bought before a run, for a sum of diamonds. They no longer randomly appear several times throughout a run. If you don’t buy any of these, they won’t appear – and all the upgrades you’ve been purchasing in the past won’t matter anymore.

A magnet will now cost you 500 diamonds per run. When you’re done, you have to buy another one – unless you stock pile them. Every so often you will end up running with no magnets appearing because you didn’t buy them or have run out.

The same goes for the slow-mo and the new cloak option for 750 diamonds per pop, but those have always been upfront purchases.

New Jet Pack Usage

Previously the jet pack would show up several times throughout a run to give you a breather from all that running. It’s still around, but it’s usage has changed.

In the upgrade you have to purchase a jetpack upfront for 500 diamonds. But instead of appearing randomly while you’re on a run, you can now double-tap the screen to use it at any time you like. You can even buy more than one and stock pile them for as many diamonds as you have. This is a great feature that puts you in charge of when you want to use a jet pack.

The downside of course is that it is now possible to accidentally use the jet pack when you really don’t need it. For example, if you’re tapping away while shooting that enemy base to pieces, the app often interprets your taps as “doubles” just before the bridge appears, activating the jet pack.

Annoying probably best describers this feature.

Yellow Diamond: Gonski

This little puppy appeared randomly on your runs, and when you grabbed it you got a whopping 250 diamonds when fully upgraded (something which has cost gamers a LOT of diamonds beforehand).
Say goodbye to your little yellow gem friend – it no longer exists. Really what FullFat are saying is “we don’t want you to have that many diamonds anymore”. Which ties in nicely with the next omission.

Diamond Rush: Gonski

Remember that very expensive diamond rush option? It would replace your white diamonds with red and blue gems from the very first level, giving you a score and diamond boost when you collect them. Without this upgrade, red coloured gems would show up from level 3 onwards (the town) and would be joined by blue gems from the second jungle (level 5).

For a whopping 10.000 diamonds however you could have those bonuses right from the start.

Well, that entire “diamond rush” thing is gone for good in the new version. You still encounter red gems starting in the town level (that’s the new level 5), and probably blue ones at a later stage – but I never got that far in the new version.

We have a total of 6 Kindles in our household, that’s between two people. I know this sounds excessive, but believe me every single one of them has their specific purpose.

Recently I added a lightly used Kindle DX to my arsenal, making up the 6th one. I’ve had a few weeks to play with it now so let me tell you what I think of it – and why I think it’s extremely sad that Amazon aren’t making the Kindle DX anymore.

It feels weird to write a review of technology that has just been taken off the market – but looking at several message boards this device has a cult following – myself included. I can understand why people love it so much.

The Situation

Currently I have a lot of reading to do: not your ordinary bedtime reading, but more like 200 page strong Apple Developer Manuals. These bear exciting titles such as “Predicates Programming Guide”, “UIViewController Class Reference” and “Core Data Versioning and Migration”. They can be a bit tough on the brain, but some of them are very well written and informative. Most importantly: they’re free.

All of them are available online to registered Apple Developers, either as part of Xcode, a website or in PDF form for easy offline reading. They look great on the iPad in iBooks and other PDF apps, but as every iPad owner will tell you this magical device has one slight flaw: you can see fuck all when you take it outside.

The Problem

Even in overcast conditions it’s a struggle to read on the iPad outdoors. My work gets done somewhere between an outside table at Starbucks, dangling my legs over Biscayne Bay, catching some rays at South Pointe or sitting on a bench in Flamingo Park – which means I need equipment that can cope with such conditions. Even more so when you have over 300 days of strong sunshine to enjoy every year.

And as much as I love my iPad in indoor conditions, it’s just not cutting it outdoors until after sunset. I don’t quite understand this, because even my Mac Book is relatively capable of displaying its screen OK-ish when I’m outside. Be that as it may: my point is that I can’t use the iPad to read outdoors, which is something I currently need to do a lot.

Naturally I’ve tried using my Kindle Keyboard: the display is fantastic, text displays crisp and clear even in the strongest sunlight. But because these documents are PDFs, the font is extremely small and not very easy to decipher without looking like you need some serious reading glasses:

This is a PDF displayed on my Kindle Keyboard. Trust me, not a nice experience on the old eyes.

Sure, there’s the very helpful Amazon Conversion option which turns pretty much any personal document into a proprietary Kindle format so you can adjust the font size and everything – but the converter really gets confused with code snippets and somesentenceslookliketheydon’thaveanyspace in between the words.

Obviously this sucks. So reading like that isn’t really an option in the long run – not if you actually need to understand what these manuals want to convey (which isn’t always the easiest thing to understand).

Alternatively you can convert a PDF and end up with something like this. The subject matter is difficult enough to play “add your own spaces”

The Solution

I have often looked a Amazon’s other e-ink devices and have always had the Kindle DX on my radar. It’s much like the Kindle Keyboard, just twice as large. The DX has a very similar form factor as the iPad, perhaps a bit taller and thinner, and about half as thick, weighing about a third.

This should display all my developer PDFs beautifully – so what was I waiting for?

There was always one rather significant downside about the Kinlde DX: it’s ridiculous price tag. $379 when I last checked Amazon – you can get a new iPad 2 for less! Alas, when the Kindle DX came out back in 2009 the iPad didn’t even exist, and by the time iPad 3 was released Amazon were already working on their larger Kindle Fire devices.

To cut a long story short: the DX wasn’t as big a seller as the smaller Kindles. It hasn’t seen a software update in years, and I guess it wasn’t a massive surprise when in October 2012 Amazon have taken the Kindle DX off the market. According to The Verge, Amazon’s Jay Marine made the famous statement “We’re pretty much done with the Kindle DX” which speaks for itself.

This was a bit of a shock to me: I had seen a DX in Best Buy on display once and really liked it. What I didn’t like was that steep price tag. Had it been around $200-$250 I would have bought one right away – but it wasn’t and I didn’t. Now that I was ready to seriously look at it again the opportunity was seemingly gone.

Well not quite: Best Buy were still selling it online for $350 when I looked into it, but by the time you add tax and shipping you’re spending well over $400. This was about a month ago, and those units have gone out of stock now too.

Next stop: eBay, where a used Kindle DX is going for about $200, perhaps a bit more. Apart from this one guy who had a new model for sale at $2500… not sure if there were any takers at that price.

The Purchase

After looking at a few models I found a listing I liked by “countrybobforpresident” which stated: “Gently used Kindle DX, with box, charger and cable, comes with original Amazon leather cover”.

I bought it there and then for just over $200 and couldn’t be happier with the service I’ve received. A few days later it arrived at the Miami Beach Post Office where I collected it just before closing time. I was thrilled!

Spot the difference: Kindle DX (left) and my trusty Kindle Keyboard (right)

Very First Impressions

We grabbed a Trenta Cool Lime Refresher from Starbuck’s, borrowed one of their plastic knives and made our way back through the park. We sat down on one of those green metal tables to open the new arrival – it would have been rude not to do so. And just like the man said: there was the like-new condition Kindle DX.

The first thing you’ll think when you see a DX for the first time is: this thing is MASSIVE – probably because you’re so used to the smaller standard sized Kindle devices.

The second thing we both noticed was the build quality: rather than the usual plastic, the DX has a graphite metal back. The buttons are not round like on the Kindle Keyboard, but elongated instead. Pressing them tells you that they’re made to last. That’s got to be a good thing!

Hardware

Besides the back looking and feeling a lot more expensive, the entire outfit reminds me of the Kindle Keyboard – just a lot bigger. We still find the on/off slider (at the top, not the bottom), a headphone jack at the top, stereo speakers at the bottom, volume rocker on the side and a micro USB connector for charging and transferring data. And of course the “old” Amazon Kindle Logo at the top of the device which has since been changed.

The buttons for turning pages are found on the right hand side in a very comfortable position for my hands, together with Home, Menu and Back buttons, plus a little elevated joystick called The Five Way. It’s easy to operate, but since it’s elevated it does get moved by the cover when it’s closed. That’s not a problem if you put the device to sleep first, but if you don’t it sometimes selects things…

Just like on 3G versions of the iPad, the top inch of the back is made of plastic rather than metal to let the radio signals pass through undisturbed. Speaking of wireless connectivity, one thing is slightly odd about the Kindle DX: it doesn’t have WiFi… it only has 3G. While it’s great to have 3G, this has small usage implications of which I’ll tell you more later.

Once last thing of note is the built-in auto rotation sensor: spin the DX from portrait to landscape, and it will adjust within a few seconds. This is new, all other e-ink Kindles need to be tilted manually. If it’s annoying (which I find it is) you can switch it off too.

Software

I had already read that the DX is a mixture of second and third generation Kindle hardware, with half the RAM of the Kindle Keyboard (128MB) even though it has the same processor. Due to this limitation it can’t quite run the Kindle Keyboard software, and instead runs that of the older Kindle 2. Hence what I’m used to from my trusty Kindle Keyboard doesn’t quite match what the DX does.

The DX still has all that we’ve come to love from Kindles: text-to-speech with a Stephen Hawking like voice (I love that), MP3 and Audible Audio Book playback, experimental web browser with free international data usage, wireless shopping in the Kindle store, bookmarks, notes and syncing with other Kindles.

You can build collections to file away books and PDF files, but unlike the Kindle Keyboard those items do not disappear from the home screen – which means it always looks a bit cluttered, no matter how good you are at housekeeping. There is an option to synchronise collections from my Kindle Keyboard, but not my other Kindles (Fire and Fire HD).

PDFs display beautifully, and I couldn’t be happier with the way it works. It does exactly what I wanted it for, and it does it extremely well.

Performance is just like on the Kindle Keyboard, so the missing 128MB of RAM doesn’t make a difference. Battery life is slightly less, with just over a week (I’d say 10 days) on a full charge with moderate to heavy use. I’ll probably get a bit more out of it once I stop playing with it every 30 seconds.

Here’s how one of my earlier PDF’s displays on the DX. Exactly what the doctor ordered!

The “No WiFi” Implications

One thing that all my other Kindles can access at any time is my collection of what Amazon call “personal documents”. Those are PDFs or Word/EPUB/Whatever documents that you can email to a dedicated address, convert to Kindle format on request, and then they’re stored in the Amazon Cloud. If you need one you just pick it and the device downloads it for you, no which device you’ve sent it to originally. This service is free when you’re connected to a WiFi network, but if you’re on 3G then they charge you 15c per MB of data. Such a charge does not apply to content bought on Amazon.

I have quite a collection of techie documents sitting in the cloud and I was looking forward to accessing those with my DX – but sadly that’s not possible. I can see all the Amazon content I have purchased over the years, but not my personal documents.

I can however email a dedicated address and receive content for 15c per MB on my DX. This content is then stored and available on my other Kindles, but once the DX receives it there’s no way I can re-download it on demand from the device. If I accidentally delete one, I’d have to re-send it (and get re-charged for it). It’s an odd little peculiarity that’s unlike my other Kindles. Nothing major, but odd.

My PDF library consists of several hundred megabytes so I opted to use the USB cable instead – works just as expected.

The Reading Experience

Obviously the reason I bought this device was to have a better reading experience with my small print PDF files. And just as I had hoped: every Apple Developer PDF now reads extremely well, no scrolling required as it was with my smaller Kindle (I had the option to zoom or hold the device in landscape and split a page across two halves). I’m thrilled that I made this purchase!

It gets better: opening up my favourite Poirot novel makes written content shine like never before. It’s like reading a proper hard back, with large long lines of text, printed on expensive paper. It’s so much fun reading on a larger screen and it makes you want to read just for the sake of reading. I hadn’t anticipated this really, but it makes a huge difference.

Will there be another Kindle DX?

Naturally the question I’m asking myself: if this is such a great device, and if it has an apparent cult following, is Amazon perhaps working on a NEW device of DX proportions? Possibly with a Paperwhite back lit display? One that would be cheaper, have touch screen, have WiFi and just be a larger version of the Paperwhite, aptly titled The Paperwhite DX?

And as nice as that would be, I very much doubt that it’s going to happen. I’m thinking ahead here for once I’m so attached to this device that it would be a disaster if something were to happen to it. I may have to buy a NEW one at some point in the future.

Realistically Amazon now do a large version of the Kindle Fire, and since the DX didn’t sell so well I bet it’s just not lucrative enough for them to stock them. Or develop new hardware. Or even dedicate a couple of hackers for a simple software update. Because otherwise we would have seen this by now.

Besides, you don’t just tell FoxConn “Can we order 100 devices this month?”

Final Thoughts

Even though it’s crazy to have yet another tablet device in the house, and yet another Kindle, the DX fills a very specific gap that I have a need for: reading PDF files without the need for conversion. And if you have a lot of those to read it’s a worthwhile investment – especially now that a DX is available for half what it once cost. I absolutely love it – it makes the most boring text a pleasure to read.

Sometimes the latest innovations aren’t the ones that truly innovate. Instead it’s the things that have already been released and taken off the market that can make your life better than the latest fashionable shenanigans [cough iPad Mini cough iPhone 5]. I feel reminded of the original Polaroid SX-70 cameras for example.

Perhaps in 40 years we’ll think of the Kindle DX as something equally precious, something that we wish had remained in production.

Every major software company has a collection of internal tools to help them develop their software. These are either off-the-shelf apps like Photoshop, or they are so specialised that they have to be custom written in-house by a team of specialists, often by a dedicated department.

Right now I’m in a similar situation myself: We need a dedicated tool to create the data structure for future reference apps. Specifically we need a simple input mask that makes my iPhone App understand what data I’d like to display without having to tweak a text file.

I can’t quite believe that I have successfully written such a tool for precisely this purpose. Best of all, I did this almost without any code using Cocoa Bindings. Aptly titled PatchBay, this app allows us to create a Core Data store file which I can pick up in iOS and display on the iPhone.

Let me tell you how it came to be, why it’s useful for us and how gobsmacked I am that this has become a reality.

When you’ve written one iOS app, you’d think it would be relatively easy to just copy that project, change a few details and create a new app in a matter of minutes. Well it’s not like that at all. You can of course copy and paste portions of code, but there are too many internal values in an app that govern its behaviour. There’s no “template” as such that you could easily customise to give you a head start on your next app. Every time you start, you start more or less from scratch.

In our case, we want to make several other reference apps, just like the 7 that are on the App Store right now. All of them have a certain look and feel, the same functionality, and all that’s really different is the data and separation into groups (say all Columbo episodes in one app, and all Poirot Novels and episodes in another as an example).

Until now we’ve had to hand-write all those titles in a file in text which our apps then display. Each item has a unique value which can track if a user has seen an episode and give links to more information. The time consuming bit is to copy and paste all that data so that the app can understand what we want it to do. It looks like this:

"tvShow2.1-title" = "Etude in Black";
"tvShow2.1-airdate" = "17/09/1972";
"tvShow2.1-imdburl" = "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068398/";
"tvShow2.1-wikiurl" = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Columbo_episodes#Season_2";
"tvShow2.1-image" = "season2.jpg";

"tvShow2.2-title" = "The Greenhouse Jungle";
"tvShow2.2-airdate" = "15/10/1972";
"tvShow2.2-imdburl" = "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068401/";
"tvShow2.2-wikiurl" = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Columbo_episodes#Season_2";
"tvShow2.2-image" = "season2.jpg";

That times 267. And of course if you miss as much as a semicolon everything stops working. You get the picture. It messes with your head after a few hours of working with it.

All this data can then be accessed by some other funky part of my code which I won’t get into right now. My point is it’s time consuming to do this, prone to errors, it’s difficult to edit and maintain, and from an artistic point of view just not very elegant.

What we really needed is a clever editing tool that let’s us add data in groups, and save everything as one file which we can give to the iOS App, and if we want to make a change it should be fun and easy. A simple text editor – as you can imagine – is not the solution.

Core Data is the answer

Over the last few weeks I’ve rediscovered Core Data, something that Apple recommend to use for storing data in iOS and Mac applications. They also say that “it’s not an entry level technology” – something I can confirm first hand: having looked into it last year for several weeks, my brain just never understood the slightest thing about it. Thinking that some things are not meant to be understood, I tried to avoid Core Data for something as simple as what I wanted to do.

Had it not been for Simon Allardice and the way he explained it in one of his excellent courses at Lynda.com I would still be clueless! Thanks again, Simon

Now that I understand Core Data I must admit I actually enjoy using it – but it does add a level of complexity to beginning developers that has a touch of mystery and mind-blowing-ness.

Once I understood the technology, the next step was to create a simple input mask for our data – which would be too tedious to do in iOS (even on the iPad)… so I had to look into creating a Mac App for this purpose. I had never done that before either. Even though the development tool is the same (Xcode), implementing a user interface is quite different – and not something I was planning on adding to my skill set any time soon.

But it turns out that Mac Apps can do something rather magical, something that iOS Apps can only dream of. Something as tasty as…

Cocoa Bindings

This chocolaty sounding ingredient is a way to connect user interface elements (like a button or a text field) directly to Core Data, thereby eliminating the need for code. I didn’t know this, but discovering it came as a huge help. Imagine the possibilities!

So I devised a simple input mask for all the elements we need:

• episode title
• wiki link
• IMDb link
• etc, etc

The resulting SQLite file can then be imported and opened in my custom iOS App and display the data just the way we like it. It’s genius – and a huge time saver! Here’s what it looks like:

PatchBay’s main data entry window. We have windows for other languages too.

In a second window we can group items together using categories and tags – a bit like in WordPress

The principle was great, but of course there were – as always – a few minor problems I couldn’t quite figure out at first: Core Data can save things like a string or a date, but we also needed the ability to save pictures, as well as a unique index which can identify what the user has seen or watched. I didn’t want to hack in a file name, or manually add an incrementor value. Surely there had to be a more elegant way to do this. But how?

It took a bit of digging, reading complex developer manuals, and quite a bit of coffee – I even acquired a new Kindle DX for this purpose to read those manuals in the bright Florida sun. It wasn’t easy, but over the last few weeks I’ve put the pieces of the puzzle together:

Pictures can be dragged into something called an “Image Well” and saved as plain data – which my iOS app can re-convert into an image. And lucky for me the unique identifier is already being taken care of automatically by Core Data and is called an objectID – it’s a property I can access and never have to worry about.

I don’t want to bore you with technical details here, but this little helper app is quite a breakthrough for me. It’s more powerful and complex than anything I had imagined I would write for a while. I guess spending some uninterrupted time on this project really paid off.

Right now my head is filled with funky sounding things like

• NSValueTransformer
• Fetch Request and Fetched Results Controller
• Persistent Store Coordinator
• Predicates and Sort Descriptors
• Managed Object Context and the NSManagedObjectModel

I’ve documented all this and more over on my other site The WP Guru in the iOS Development Section.

Final Thoughts

To my own surprise I actually enjoy doing all these things. It’s like an extremely complex puzzle for me, an adventure game in which several small things need to be figured out to make a bigger project come together. I never thought I was such a geek!

This time last year iOS Development was an exercise in frustration for me; right now I’m confident that when the next puzzle comes along it’ll be an interesting challenge to figure out, and not something that’ll make me want to throw away the toys.

We’re currently testing PatchBay internally but I’m confident that the next app will most likely be created using my own development tool.

For the last week and a half I’ve been having fun researching and coding the search function in iOS Table Views.

You’d think there’s just a “thing” you drag into your view, hook it up somehow and “hey presto, it works” (alas that’s how you do it in jQuery Mobile).

Not so in iOS: we’ll have to deal with a search bar, a search display controller and its many intricacies, and then something called a Predicate.

I don’t mind telling you: my head has been smoking… but my hard work and perseverance has paid off, and now I can finally add a search function to all my iOS Apps!

It all started when I submitted my FRASIER Episode Guide to Apple last week. This app is much simpler than the previous ones, only consisting of one table view without tabs at the bottom. First you see all 11 seasons of FRASIER. Tapping a season brings up a list of all 24 episodes, and tapping on an episode brings up details about the episode:

Table views are commonplace on iPhone apps, and since last year I got the hang of them. They’re very useful and can be implemented with relative ease. But many apps implement a search bar at the top which conveniently lets users filter their results based on text input. In fact we’re so used to them and how they work that we don’t think about their inner workings.

I can tell you: unless have to make one work you have no idea what’s happening in the background when you type a letter into that harmless little text field: arrays are being shifted around, filtered via predicates and recreated every time you press a single character. Then a new table view is superimposed on top of the previous one which has its own data source.

None of this happens automatically – and none of it is very well documented by Apple. Table Views are well explained, but how to implement the search function that we’re all used to sadly is not (or it’s so well hidden that I didn’t find it). I had to dig deep, read hard, and test a lot to get the desired results.

And today I finally felt the sweet satisfaction of victory that comes when completing a tough task: my app behaves just like I wanted it! This feels good indeed

The fruit of my labour: hit search, type something, tap on the cell and you get where you want and back. We take it for granted, but making this ain’t easy!

The good thing about such ventures is that once you understand how to do it, you can implement this everywhere you see a table view – such as all my other apps that are available from the App Store. I have taken to documenting everything rather minutely over at The WP Guru – otherwise I’d start from scratch every time I open Xcode.

It was one thing to create the search function – but it was another altogether to hide the search bar initially, and only display it when someone taps the icon. Who would have thought things could be so labour intense?

And once that was done, the thing was hidden all the time – even when you hit the back button, which ideally should bring you back to an option to select another item from your search results, as well as amend the search.

All in all a rather complex process. If you’re into iOS Development, I’ve uploaded a sample project called Table Search 2013 on GitHub to demonstrate how this works. Examine, fork, use and create!

If all goes well, the new version with search results should hit the App Store next weekend.

And maybe I’ll be awake enough to experience it myself

Hipstamatic with Loftus Lens and Ina’s 1969 film.

Hipstamatic with Loftus Lens and Ina’s 1969 film.

Bass Museum of Modern Art.

Hipstamatic with Loftus Lens and Ina’s 1969 film.

After an extremely long hiatus Steve Sprang and his team at Taptrix have released a new version of Brushes, the painting programme that took iPhone and iPad art creators by storm.

Serious artists such as David Hockney and David Cassan have given this app much momentum over the years, and even gave Steve the centre stage alongside Steve Jobs when the iPad was released.

Many have waited for years for an update for Brushes to take advantage of the new iPad's retina screen and perhaps introduce new features. Now it has finally arrived and everyone seems to hate the new version.

Steve doesn't understand it – and neither do many users who are ecstatic about the new offering. Let's explore why and how such a strong negative welcome could have been avoided.

The Situation

The main criticism from users is that Brushes 3 is not an upgrade to the original Brushes. Even the original had been replaced by Brushes 2, a version I must admit that completely passed me by. I now have Brushes 1.2.2 (red icon, very old) and Brushes 3.0.1 (blue icon, very new) to choose from.

This is what happens when you look for automatic upgrades and never see one – why would you look on the App Sore and check if an app by the same name and developer has come up again?

Being a completely new app, users are frustrated that they have to pay again for something they thought they could use forever with their initial payment. Having said that, Steve is not asking for several hundred pounds for his update like Adobe does with every major revision of every piece of software they produce. He's asking for the equivalent of a cup of coffee, something most of us pay several times a week without even thinking about it.

Besides, Brushes is free to try and still works without the addition of layers which is an in-app purchase.

What users fail to realise is that if you sit down as a developer and write software for a year, then your development time isn't being paid for with free upgrades. So you can't make a living by releasing free upgrades. That is why I personally have no problem with an extra £1.99 the year after: if I want the new version I can pay, if I don't need it then I'll stick to the old one. Simple as that.

The Problem

This is not an issue when the old version can still be obtained – but in the case of a Brushes 3, Steve did something that reminds me of the New Coke incident in the early nineties: he removed the old version from the App Store, and now all you can do is buy the New Brushes. Users cannot install the old version anymore, unless they have the file as a backup on their computers.

That is the fundamental flaw in what happened with Brushes 3: you're forcing users to agree with you, that the new version is the best and only version there is, and they can no longer make a choice by themselves. Of course many will be angry about this.

That is what Coca Cola did by replacing the flavour of their beverage in 1985. They didn't introduce a new flavour alongside and let the customers decode which one they liked better. Coke made the decision for them, forcing their customers to like the new flavour as much as their management did.

People had a massive problem with this.

Users are also unhappy to lose some functionality of the old Brushes in the form of the Brushes Viewer for Mac: having started at a time when the iPad was only available at a fairly low resolution, Brushes would record each action users performed so they could later be played back and assembled off-iPad at high resolution.

This was a revolutionary idea, one we haven't seen from any other painting app to date. Not only could painters create very large files of their images, users could also showcase how a painting was created via video export. There are several masterpieces on YouTube and it's a pleusure to see these come to live.

To use this option users had to download a small utility for their Macs from Steve's website. With the arrival of Brushes 3 however this utility has been removed. Moreover, the video and stroke export function does not yet exist in the latest offering. Many artists have come to rely on this essential function, giving them resolution independence while creating art and even potential income from print sales.

Many users are – understandably – extremely unhappy about this.

In a thread on Flickr Sprang apologised for his long absence, even though we're still at a loss as to what happened during the years. He said he was surprised by the negative reaction to Brushes 3 and said that so much has changed in the iPad app world that a brand new version was necessary rather than an upgrade to existing code.

As someone who dabbles in app development I can certainly feel his pain: new iOS releases mean that older ways of doing things just get abandoned by Apple, and newer easier ways come to take their place.

Sprang also promised that hi resolution export will be implemented in the new version soon. Brushes 3 had been in the works for a while and he didn't want to hold it back any longer.

The (possible) Solution

It appears to me that all Taptrix had to do was introduce the new version alongside the existing one and make it clear to users that there would be no support offered for the older version. Very important would have been NOT to remove either the old Brushes nor the hi res utility viewer from his website.

That said, why not just bring it back and make a LOT of people happy?

Users will understand that the focus has shifted to the new version. Devices and software change all the time, and I'm sure many woud willingly give the new version a try, probably even embrace it.

But giving people a new toy while throwing away the old one is a bad move. This is fairly easy to rectify though.

Yet herein lies the artists' dilemma: do you create for yourself, or do you create for other people?

Only Steve can decide what's most important to him: Write software that he supports 100% without legacy and compromises; or be liked by the audience and be a commercial success while making other users happy.

In a truly artistic sense I can understand option 1. If we look at Brushes itself as a work of art. Forget the old Brushes and focus on the new version. That's what Apple would do. Da Vinci didn't paint Monarch Lisa 2 due to its commercial success, he moved on and did something else.

SketchBook Pro for iPad