Going for a walk yesterday was obvious a good move; not only was it a warm and sunny day but I also had a bit of a brainwave for the UI design of the Snooker Scorer. The problem I had was that I wanted to add some extra buttons in what was already a complex UI. I’m going to add some stat tracking so that users can see the pot and safety success rate – but right now there is only one button to swap players at the end of a break. I need to let users choose between three options; a safety (no pot attempted), a missed short pot and a missed long pot.

My previous prototype had some extra button squeezed in. This wasn’t great, because it made the space for all the other ‘pot ball’ buttons smaller, and also I just couldn’t work out how to make an icon for ’safety’ or ‘missed long pot’.

My brainwave was to not put new buttons in. Instead I’ll make an overlay appear when the ’swap players’ button is pressed and held down. The user can then drag up the screen to choose a short/long pot miss. If the user just presses down and releases their finger they will get a ’safety’ which is roughly the same behavior as before. I think this will feel quite good in practice and also can be done without looking at the screen too much.

Continue reading UI thoughts for snooker scorer…

After hearing about Dizzee Rascal’s appearance on Newsnight and hearing his new track, I just had to combine the two. With apologies to all involved, I give you “BonkersNight featuring J-Pax”!

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direct link for download

So my ’snooker score’ app has been out for a couple of weeks now and I’ve been really pleased with it so far; I’ve had some great feedback from people and there are quite a few more things to do with it than I had originally thought.

In testing with Apple at the moment is a 1.1 update that will add

• Undo (which I was planning to add anyway but was mentioned by a Finnish reviewer)
• A bug fix – if the last ‘red and color’ you potted was a yellow, this would incorrectly have been considered as the last yellow. Now it will ask you to pot the yellow again, which is correct (pointed out by Ruud – many thanks!)
• Remove Red Ball – a new action on the menu, you can take a red ball off the table without affecting the score. Ruud pointed out that you sometimes need to do this in Snooker, e.g. if you pot two balls in a single turn that’s not a foul, but you’ll only get 1 point for it. Also you could foul by potting a color and a red. In that case the color would be respotted (and the opponent would get points) but the red would not.
• More info – the single line of information now changes every 2 seconds to show more information, including Current Break, Score Difference, Maximum Break, Points Remaining, Red Balls Remaining.

All in all this is a good next version – I’m very happy that I managed to get undo and an updating info line in so easily (the NSTimer class being easier to use than I’d expected).

Continue reading Snooker Score – update and future thoughts…

It’s a little old but I love this introduction to the F1 from Fuji TV in Japan. Every sport – actually everyone – needs to have Anime versions of themselves! It’s excellent! The music by Queen really adds to it as well.

Although I do think Lewis Hamilton looks more like Barak Omaba and Kovalinen doesn’t look like himself at all! You’ve got to love Alonso’s mad hair as well