6/21/2014
There's a new version of Blackjack Strategizer in the App Store. This was a pretty big update, the biggest yet, so it's been dubbed 2.0.
It's the "iOS 7 update" (released after iOS 8 was announced. Sigh, side projects.). A complete graphical overhaul, I got rid of the felt and leather textures to make way for simplified designs that fall in line with the iOS 7 design principles.
There really aren't any new features to speak of, it's more or less the same exact functionality. In fact, what's more interesting is what I removed than what I added:
No more gesture-driven input. When the app was out in the wild and I watched people use it, nobody would ever remember how to split or double down. Input mimicking what one would do at a casino table was a fun novelty, but it actually made the app less usable. So now there are four buttons at the bottom of the screen.
Lots of code. The original version was built using the iOS 5 SDK but wasn't released until around when iOS 6 came out of beta, so there were a lot of runtime availability checks. With simpler play, there was no longer need for a tutorial mode, which wound up killing more code than you would probably think. The animation code was greatly simplified using the keyframe animations made available in iOS 7. I also simplified the graph view, which meant I was able to delete a lot of complicated math and drawing code.
Images. The original design required over 50 images to construct all of the various real-world looking objects in the app. Version 2.0 only has 6 images aside from the Icon and Launch Image.
I did get to add some stuff. The custom UIViewController transitions are pretty neat.
As for what's next, it's a side project app and realistically I'll probably only do one more update over the course of the next year. The biggest thing people ask for is an iPad version, and given how Universal apps are going to be much simpler to build in iOS 8, thanks to Adaptivity and the Storyboard improvements, I may finally make one. Going on both devices would also be a great chance to finally try out Core Data syncing via iCloud, showing the user's play history across all of their devices.