We released the first version of “Penguin Links” game on Android Market (called “Pair Up” there) on March 2009. And then the iPhone version on June 2010. In the past two and half years, we had released many upgrades; and our games had their own up and downs. Being on both development platforms for a long time, I think it will be interesting to compare these two mobile platforms head-to-head. And here it is.

1. Development Environment
Before I started iOS programming, I was a long time Java programmer. I was used to some awesome programming IDEs such as IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, or NetBeans. My personal favorite is IntelliJ. I like it not only because it has a rich feature set, but also the consideration they have put in for those features. The seamless integration with maven/ant, color coded file names, highlighted changed lines, quick and easy refactoring … Nowadays, number of …

Nowadays, the competition in Apple App Store is so strong that it takes almost a perfect product and some luck to be successful there. You can’t control luck, then you got to make your product close to perfect. For games, that means not only fantastic game play and graphics, but also a lot of tiny details here and there. In my recent game “PenguinLinks 2″, I implemented a special effect in the level choosing screen, which I call “Focus Area”, to enhance the user experience. I don’t know how many users it has gained for me, but I certainly had a lot fun when I implemented it. That’s the topic we gonna cover in this post.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Then a video must be worth more than a million. Now let the video to explain what the effect look like.

As you can see, in my level choosing screen, …

This is the second post for #iDevBlogADay.
Bejewled is a very popular game on phones. It has a lot of variaties, one of the famous game on Android is called “Jewellust”, which is an Egyptian treasure hunt theme of this game. I developed a similar one on Android 2 years ago called “Same 2D“, which is essentially a timer based Bejewled. Despite praises from players saying it’s very addictive, this game didn’t fly.
What didn’t go well?
Going through player comments, I got 2 points for improvements: limited game levels, and too simple graphics.
First about graphics. Graphics/Animation is the key to games, and I admit that my photoshop skill is very limited. So this time I went out and hired a graphics designer. Theme is the first thing we need to decide on. As I said earlier, there’s a lot of Bejewled variaties out there, and we need to come …

After a long wait, finally it’s my time to contribute to #iDevBlogADay!
Today I won’t talk about anything too technical. Instead, I’ll talk about how to make better decisions based on data in my iphone app development experience. Be more specific, how to leverage the power of Google Analytics.
There are plenty of tutorials online about how to do the integration, such as Google’s own doc, or this one from icode blog, so I don’t want to repeat that. My focus will be what data I track, what I have learned from that, and how these data have impacted my decisions.
1. A Little Bit Background

In June 2010, I released my two iphone games “Penguin Links“, lite and full version (the latest version is available in app store at: http://itunes.apple.com/app/id443106263). After that, I had two updates followed in August and October.
In US, they are not …