technobubble.info » My app is out!

March 23, 2009 on 10:24 am | In Coding | 5 Comments

Very excited this morning my first iPhone application has been approved by Apple – it’s a very simple, but useful app for keeping track of the scores in a Snooker match. I’ve used it to keep track whilst watching Snooker on the TV and it seems to work for me.

There’s plenty more I would like to add to it, like working out how many Snookers someone is behind, collecting statistics for an entire match, allowing mistakes to be undone. I’d love to be able to get live scores into it somehow, so you can follow games as they happen (a bit like the wimbledon desktop app that IBM seem to do each year) but I’ll have to try and find a live score feed from somewhere. Tricky. Perhaps it can be ‘crowd-sourced’ from someone willing to sit on a web page and update the scores?

The main barrier to adding new features is time, and B’s macbook being dead again, so I have to share my iMac with her. Fingers crossed that the repair guys actually fix it this time.

Anyway – it’s been fun learning how to make an iPhone app so far and going through all the gubbins needed to get it on the app store. I don’t think Apple have made it too hard, although some parts (like tax forms) could be easier.

Now we’ll see if anyone likes it!

Update: Direct link to Snooker Scorer in iTunes app store.

5 Comments »

RSS feed for comments on this post. Add Comment Feed to Bloglines. TrackBack URI

Is this site any use? Is there anyway you can scrape the scores from it?

http://www.worldsnooker.com/china_open_news.htm?tid=123

Comment by cha0tic — 26 March 2009 #
That’s the site I was thinking of trying to get scores from. They have some flash-based live scoring and I assume it must read from an XML stream somewhere. By turning on some web snooping I might be able to figure out which and then grab it. But that’s probably quite a ‘brittle’ way of doing it and prone to breaking. Worth a try.

I’ve only seen one review of my app so far – got a 4 out of 5 so not bad. Did mention it needed an Undo button, which I do agree with. I’ll probably add that first…

Comment by bubb — 26 March 2009 #
I have bought your snooker scorer app. It’s nice!
Found 1 bug tho, and have 1 request.
Bug: when I potted the yellow ball after potting the last red, the yellow ball should be the next ball on, but in your app the yellow ball is grayed out, and I must select the green.
(so when I pot red-yellow-yellow-green-brown etc..)

The request : can u make a button with which I can undo some points? Maybe a button like the foul-button, which you press together with a colored ball, to specify how many points to reduce.
And, not tried yet, but what happens when I foul AND pot a red ball? In your app i only need to give opponent points, but red ball stays off the table.

Comment by Ruud — 31 March 2009 #
Hi Ruud, thanks for the comment!

I will look into that bug tonight – it does sound wrong, thanks for spotting it. I should be able to fix that today but it might take a few days for apple to approve the update.

There is an updated version coming out as soon as Apple approve it, which has an Undo facility. So if you make a mistake you can undo it very easily. I don’t know if that would be suitable for your request?

You make a good point about potting a red ball as a foul. In that case the red would stay off the table. I’ll need to do something to fix that. Also it is possible to accidentally pot two (or more reds) when trying to pot one red – which is not a foul, but only counts as 1 point. Also you might pot a red accidentally whilst going for a color, which would be a foul on the color (e.g. 7 points if trying to pot black) but again the red would be off the table.

It seems like I need a way to edit the number of reds left! I will have a think about that and try to implement something today.

Thanks again for the feedback!

Comment by bubb — 31 March 2009 #
Ok, here is my suggestion: when you hold down the ‘foul’ icon the ‘swap players’ icon changes to a ‘remove red ball’ icon instead. You can then tap that to remove a red ball from the table, but it won’t affect the scores or the current player at all.

That way you can show that someone has
* potted two reds
* potted the red and a color

without affecting the scores.

I think that should work.

I may also add in the ability to set up a match that’s in progress, by using a slider to choose how far along the match is in terms of number of reds/colors left. That would probably be on an improved Preferences screen.

Comment by bubb — 31 March 2009 #