The Apple Store is not Setup to Handle Pair Programmers
Today I spent my time coding, sending emails to companies, and brushing up on Ruby.
The first thing I did was complete a couple of programming exercises that Dimagi has available for applicants to show off their capabilities. I've yet to email them to Dimagi though. I think I'll write up a few rspec tests for each first and then email them out tomorrow.
I spent the evening with Ran at the Creamery working on Trifecta. We added combo bonuses! Combo bonuses are awarded whenever you clear 7 or more blocks at once. For your efforts, you are awarded with bonus time. This, of course, is a feature for the timed version of Trifecta. We don't have bonuses for the unlimited version (yet). We used CAKeyFrameAnimation to have the bonus text grow larger and then shrink away. The text also changes opacity (brighter and then dims to nothing) while scrolling upwards on the game board. It looks pretty good but Ran is going to spend a little more time styling it to make it look great. I'll spend my time coming up with a better algorithm for the bonuses and for scoring in general. Right now it's too easy to score big on the small level and too hard to do so on the xl level. And I want to make sure that it's not too easy to stay alive forever with the new timed bonuses.
We were hoping to submit our app to the app store tonight but that didn't happen. The difficulty is that we each have our own individual iOS developers accounts but we can only submit the app through one of them. While we can attribute both parties in the description and perhaps on the splash screen of the game itself, only 1 person can be listed as the seller. Being that you can search for an app by the seller's name, it's not entirely trivial. Plus it would be kind of cool to see my name listed under the app's name. I imagine Ran feels the same. Also only one of us will have access to login and check the app's stats, which if nothing else, would be kind of cool to look at. The other option we toyed with was setting up a third shared account. This has two problems. First, it would cost us $99/year just to maintain a free app. That's bad, but not completely out of the question. Second, Apple would still require we list the seller of the app as a 'legal name'. This can be an individual's name or a company name. So we still couldn't list it as Ran Tao & Kris Fields or Kris Fields & Ran Tao. We'd have to choose one of our names or we'd have to start a company just for the purpose of submitting an app. That's pretty ridiculous so in the end we'll probably resort to flipping a coin. I pick heads!