April 5, 2009 on 7:26 pm | In Coding | 1 Comment

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).

There are three things I’d like to add at the moment.

First, a UK reviewer mentioned wanting to keep more player stats, which got me thinking. At the moment there are no stats, but I think I can add them relatively easily. Right now I just have a ‘swap players’ icon to end a break, but TV stat scoring distinguishes between three different cases:

• a missed long pot
• a missed short pot
• a safety – no pot attempted

If I can come up with some good icons for these (could be fiddly!) I could allow people to distinguish between these different cases (the initial break-off shot would count as a safety) then I could track lots of good stats such as:

• pot success rate (long, short, overall)
• safety success rate
• highest break
• average break
• average shot time (with some extra code behind the scenes)

I’d show these stats if you hold down a ‘stats’ icon, which I think would replace the current ‘swap players icon’. Something like this – but with icons instead of text:

Secondly I’d like to put in a more comprehensive settings screen that allows users to set up a game that’s in progress, so you can edit not just the name of players but the scores and balls remaining.

Finally, in a previous post I mentioned wanting to get some live scores downloaded from professional matches. I did look at the world snooker website but that was problematic for a couple of reasons; most importantly their terms and conditions don’t allow it, but also their scores are rather unreliable.

I think a better long-term idea is to allow users of the Snooker Scorer app to upload their scores (as they change them) to a web server and then let other Snooker Scorer apps to view the scores from that web site. That could be this web site in fact – I don’t think it would be a lot of bandwidth/usage and this website allows MySQL databases so I’ll look into it. I think this ‘crowd sourcing’ is the way to go; everyone could then benefit from just one person either watching the game from the audience, or at home watching the TV. There would be no legal issues regarding the data either.

I’ll try to get all of these changes into the Snooker Scorer app eventually, in the order I’ve talked about them. I’m getting into iPhone development now so hopefully it won’t take take too long. I’m optimistic about getting stats tracking in by next week. Right now I’m racing Apple’s approval process – it seems to take about a week to decide on each revision, by which time I usually have a new version to upload. So it looks like I’ll be keeping Apple busy with new versions for the time being (if you’re reading – sorry guys!)