Master of Alchemy is on the App Store!

After six months of hard development we’re so happy to announce that Master of Alchemy has been finally published in the iTunes App Store last Friday!

I’m sorry to spam again with this topic, but trust me, it has been a bet for all of us!
And actually it’s included into the “New and Noteworthy” section!
You can see Master of Alchemy page at the AppStore

Reviews

Games Uncovered review…without a doubt one of the best iPad games yet.

Simply a fantastic puzzle game that is challenging, deep and graphically stunning. An absolute treasure.

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Destructoid review:Score: 8.5 — (8s are impressive efforts with a few noticeable problems holding them back. Won’t astound everyone, but is worth your time and cash

Bicephalous Dance is on App Store

Try our first IPhone game for free! It’s a simple but addictive game which will stress your multi-task brain abilities!

GAME BENEFITS:

– Improve your multi-tasking abilities (it’s really important if you want be ready for the next iPhone release!)
– It’s perfect when you have nothing to do! (i.e. when you are on a train or your girlfriend/boyfriend is boring you, …)
– A lot of FUN!

GAME DEFECTS:
– brain’s short circuits possible!!
– creates addiction!!

DESCRIPTION:
Can you split your brain in half and play in two different way at once? Use accelerometers to move the grey ball while using your finger to hit the buttons!Improve your concentration and memory with these simple but addictive game. Share your score with your OpenFeint friends and find out if you are a real bicephalous!!!

GAME FEATURES:
– Tutorial
– OpenFeint support
– Built-in high score
– Endless fun with increasing difficulty

SCREENSHOTS:

Screenshot 1

DOWNLOAD:
app-store.png

Download it from the App Store here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bicephalous-dance/id371977705?mt=8


Apple is evil and developers are not stupid

If you’re an iPhone developer probably you have been involved in the messy App Store publishing process.
Here there is a very interesting post about the Apple’s mistakes: http://www.paulgraham.com/apple.html
More or less I’m completely agree with the author, especially about the app store policies, because I tested in first person. There would be dozen of other topics I can found about it, but the app store is the perfect example.
But yesterday I discovered this post: “Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid“.
After reading that post I realized that developers are stupid because they pretend to publish their applications on the App Store! Wow, I never thought about this! When I signed the iphone sdk I didn’t read anywhere that I should publish my applications on the web because the app store is a mess!
I don’t question the fact that many applications could be published on the web, but that’s is another thing. The point is: I have the choice and I want to choose.
So the conclusion is that we are stupid because we don’t understand how much Apple is evil and we don’t publish applications on the web instead of trying to publish them on the App Store!
The assumption is that I have an application that could be either published on the app store as standalone application and on the web, and is my mistake if I want to publish on the app store.
So why apple simply doesn’t close the App Store for us poor developers and keeps it only for the big companies which pay in order to be in the front page?

Thoughts about flash on the iPhone

I didn’t have the chance yet to try out Flash CS5, but I’m still a bit concerned about the new feature that makes users able to compile their own application into valid iPhone apps.

Things look really good if you look at the examples and if you talk with the people that already had the chance to try this feature out. But I must remember that usually the excitement for a new – and let’s say outstanding – feature usually cannot guarantee the final result to be acceptable. I fear that this feature might evolve the same – bad – way as Alchemy did: they started with a promising project that then felt down to a side project because many users shown that it was possible to achieve the same or better results by just using plain AS.

A few weeks ago I started spending my free time on experimenting with generating a valid iPhone app from a SWF file. I didn’t know anything about the fact that the Adobe would have put the same feature in Flash CS5.
My approach wasn’t too sophisticated: basically, as long as I didn’t have so much time to spend on writing a full binary converter, I was parsing the SWF and then generating static Objective-C/C++ (well mostly C++ and I’ve used Objective-C as glue where strictly required) code that then was compiled by Xcode to a working iPhone application.

I stopped once I figured out that Adobe was going to promote a similar thing (even if their approach is better and probably more powerful), but I had time to figure out a few issues that they may encounter (or maybe they already encountered):

  • Generated applications are really big in size, mostly because there is a lot of glue code generated and because you need to replicate the FPL API in C++ to be able to easilly convert the SWF into an iPhone app;
  • ActionScript is a dynamic language, and this dynamicity must be taken into account when generating binary code (or source code in my situation). Even if using LLVM probably helped with this, you will always need to generate additional dynamic checks that slow down a lot the execution;
  • The FPL doesn’t support (yet) threading API, nor the AIR version does. So, if they want to preserve the portability of a flash game so it can be run with AIR or on the iPhone without any change, they are limiting the developers on building just quite simple games;
  • The same can be said for all the other native APIs. AIR for instance has multitouch API, which are however at a lower level then the ones provided by the iPhone;
  • The other big issue is rendering performance. When I was working on my project, I’ve tried many different approaches to figure out which one was the best to render decent vector graphics with a good framerate on the iPhone. Core Graphics is not an option, as long as it is as slow as hell. Using OpenGL to render the graphics increases a lot the performances, but adds a few limits to the rendering quality. The best approach I found was to mix caching and OpenGL rendering together, but that was not working fine with rapidly changing graphics. But I must say I didn’t have the same knowledge as the FPL developers on this topic and I didn’t have months to work on that too …
  • iPhone developers must take special care for memory and resource management; probably having a huge bootstrapping code and transition structures won’t help.

What I fear most actually is that they’ll be able sooner or later to solve all the issues and create a good product, but probably that product won’t be suitable for complex applications, that will be always developed directly using XCode.

That said, I think that probably a better approach would have been to figure out a way for Adobe to include the Flash Player on the iPhone. It’s already ready and I really can’t understand why they don’t release it (it must be Apple, and probably because having a Virtual Machine on the system will break the basis the App Store has been built over).
Having the FPL on the iPhone will still limit us, but it will open up a brighter future for AS developers who want to release apps that runs on the iPhone too (Did you ever heard about compile once, run everywhere?).

So let’s wait and see what happens. What I’ve seen so far on the app store are really simple games that don’t use so much resources, so I can’t really say yet if they did a great job or not …