iOS – Simon Geldner

Who of Us App

Simon — Sat, 11 Feb 2017 08:54:03 +0000

Update 19 March 2017: The iOS app will soon disappear from the app store, since it is not commercially viable. However, I developed a simple online version. I describe the development in this post.

The App

Who of Us is an app I build a couple of years ago. Inspired by a card game, I set out to build a digital and better version of it. The whole app development was a great learning process for me. I hit many walls, but could mostly avoid to hit the same wall twice (I guess that’s what you call learning). The design is very basic, so is the functionality. It’s more of a prototype version that needs to be designed and developed further. Also, I brainstormed all these cards together and translated them (app is available in German & English).

Get it here: Who Of Us by Simon Geldner (this link deprecated)

The rules

You need to gather some friends, maybe some wine or other drinks; then you read out a question, e.g. “Who of us is the laziest?”. You give everybody time to think about a person to choose. Then you count down 3, 2, 1 and everybody points at the person he choose (to the best of his knowledge) – certainly you can point at yourself. The chosen one is allowed to defend him- or herself (if he wants to try). Unless the group accepts the defence, the chosen one has to take a sip.

The game includes more than 400 cards
There are various packs (standard, girls-only, guys-only, adults only
Exclude cards you don’t like
Favor cards you like

What I had planned for V2.0, V3.0… (but never implemented)

Improved Design
Move database online and fetch changes automatically (currently local DB)
User ratings of questions (like, dislike) are uploaded to the database. This insight is used to influence, which questions are displayed
…

Financial outcome

Besides all learnings, what happened on the financial site wasn’t great. Not that I expected to make huge returns on it, but I wasn’t even able to sustain my iTunes Developer account, which is $99 annually.

The app has now been in the app store for three years. Overall, the app was downloaded 2.400 times. The In-App purchases for more cards make a total of $57, from which apple forwarded $34 to my bank account. Meanwhile I transferred $297 to Apple for my dev account…

One nice thing I want to add

It wasn’t only friends who bought my app, but I had several international purchases and one day I received an email from a user with suggestions for improvements for the app and plenty of ideas for new cards. Thank you

Zitate 2.0

Simon — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 16:25:31 +0000

Zitate 2.0, which translates to Quotes 2.0, is another iOS app I created. It features a great amount of quotes, sorted randomly. You can favourite quotes, export the text, or generate memes and share them with friends. You get the app here:

Zitate 2.0 by Simon Geldner

Seven – 7

Simon — Thu, 14 May 2015 13:34:41 +0000

After I developed Who of Us and Zitate 2.0, I wanted to have a look at developing a game. At this time the game 2048 was a huge success. The game is fairly simple: You have 16 tiles on a 4×4 field and your goal is to push tiles into each other. The same numbers will morph (2+2=4; 4+4=8; etc.). The highest number you can reach is 2048. However, at some point you might be unable to move the tiles, since all fields are filled taken and new tiles keep coming in automatically.

I built on the idea of having tiles moving, because i thought it might be fairly simple to implement. I then brought some math and a little more logic into the game. So I created a puzzle, where number-tiles can be pushed around. When you push in one direction, every tile will move if it is not blocked. Tiles are counted positive when they are on red fields, negative when they are on blue fields. Otherwise they are not counted at all. By adding and subtracting all numbers respectively, your goal is to come to the result 7. Once achieved, you move to the next level.