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This post is more of a public service announcement. Prior to Tilt to Live’s Game Center/Retina update we wanted to extensively test the game with a wider tester base. So we ran a small ‘open beta’ (as open as Apple’s ad-hoc program would allow us). Prior to iOS 4.0 users had to do a cumbersome dance to get an ad-hoc game on their devices. And by cumbersome, I mean anything dealing with the desktop iTunes client. There was a lot of room for error, and for those (like me) that loathe syncing with iTunes, it creates a barrier because the act of adding an ad-hoc pretty much wipes my personal device since I buy all my apps 100% on the device and never sync. - Jeff Scott

In this post, I'll take a quick look at how to keep your projects in git and how to manage that easily on the Mac. More importantly though, I'll take a look at why you'd want to do this, even if you're the only developer, you don't need to share your code, you don't have formalized releases that need to be tagged and you already have a backup system protecting your code. - Jeff Scott

Gravity Hook (as opposed to Gravity Hook HD) was maybe the fourth Flash game I ever made, and the first one I released that felt like a kind of actual game, the kind of thing I could play and enjoy.  Simple controls, skill-based gameplay with random or procedurally generated elements, a lonely, mysterious hero in a dark and hostile environment, pixel art, and a cool Danny B soundtrack.  I built Gravity Hook in Flash in about a week, and did all the code, art, and sound effects (SFXR ftw) myself.  I made Gravity Hook publicly available from my website pretty much the day I finished it, at the end of August 2008. - Jeff Scott

I have a handful of books on user interface & app design, and one shining star is ‘Tapworthy, Designing Great iPhone Apps‘ by Josh Clark. Josh takes the reader through a journey to understand what makes great iPhone apps. Josh examines how real people use their iPhone and their apps, what thrills them, how people like to get in and out of an app quickly and use it for one thing without having to think too much about it. For example he compares gestures that are known by everyone with gestures that most people never use (ie don’t design for a UI gesture that only geeky iPhone experts know about). He introduces all the standard controls and talks about how to use SDK components to structure and organize the your UI in a way that will be natural for iphone users, and then goes on to show how you can dress UI components for a custom look. Josh doesn’t shy away from discussing when you shouldn’t use a standard interaction too, and Apple should take note: no-one likes the shake! - Jeff Scott

I own 81 books covering iPhone app programming, design, marketing, and business, and I’ve browsed plenty more. From all those books I’ve picked out the ones I consider to be the very best. - Jeff Scott

As game players we all think we can design games, but to make a great game you really need to step outside your own enjoyment of playing games, think about what makes games fun and more, how games generate an emotional experience for they player. ‘A Theory of Fun‘ by Ralf Koster is an easy to read 221 page masterpiece exploring what games are and why they are fun. Every 2nd page is a cartoon that illuminates the concept on the proceeding page. This is no gimmick, it really makes the book more accessible and will aid your understanding. Koster gets right to the heart of what the human mind gets from game playing, how people vary in how they like to play, whats happening when players cheat. This book is so good, I need to go read it again for a third time instead of describing it more. Making a game? Buy this book. - Jeff Scott

If you’re making iPhone apps to try to make money, then marketing is key or only your friends will ever download your app. When most people hear the word ‘marketing’ they think of telling people about a product after its been built, but I see marketing as much more than that, and in fact I think the most important type of marketing is the basic understanding of the market in the first place, and that comes before you make you app. Why? The most important factor in getting people to buy your app is having an app that people will want! If you can do that the rest is much easier. You have to think about out what kinds of apps people want to buy, why they choose one app over another, how many people want something like this, what you can do to make your apps desirable. Once you’ve got a handle on all that, then you actually make your app and go ahead with the advertising and PR part of marketing to get the word out. So here are some books to help… - Jeff Scott

The iPhone 4 features a vastly superior display resolution (614400 pixels) over previous iPhone models, containing quadruple the 153600-pixel display of the iPhone 3GS. The screen is the same physical size, so those extra dots are used for additional detail — twice the detail horizontally, and twice vertically. For developers only using Apple’s user interface elements, most of the work is already done for you. - Jeff Scott

Their blog post is what inspired me to write this one as we just hit a $100K milestone in App Store revenue for our wireframing app, iMockups for iPad. - Jeff Scott

This week, we talk about why games have been getting less challenging lately. - Jeff Scott

If you follow me on Twitter you probably noticed that I’m working on 2 Christmas games (if not, please check them here :), and both will be Universal. Since this is the first time I’m doing an Universal App (Game), I had to decide on an asset management strategy: how to manage, name and structure files for iPhone 3GS-, iPod Touch, iPad and iPhone 4? - Jeff Scott

The way you handle color in your web designs is about to change. Perhaps you’ve been playing around with hexadecimal color values since you were a wee web-babe; if you were, get ready to to grow up fast. CSS3 has arrived, and your palette is about to get a whole lot bigger. Compared to what’s coming, it’s sas though designers have been color-blind, working with only a small part of the chromatic spectrum. No, new hues will not be added to the rainbow. - Jeff Scott

One of things I decided to try with this game was to build it as a universal app (that is, one app that runs on iPhone/iPod touch, and iPad, instead of separate apps for iPhone and iPad). The game is 100% OpenGL on the rendering side, so I needed to figure out how to set up my frame buffers for a universal app. I thought I’d go through that today. (Holy moly, a technical post instead of an indie lifestyle post! Hold on to your hats!) - Jeff Scott

Showing your other applications within each of your applications (wow, the word application is starting to lose meaning) can have a tremendous impact on your sales.  It’s a great way to promote your other apps for free and will give them much more exposure across a wider audience.  Moving all of the promotion logic out to the web allows you to dynamically add and remove apps from the view without updating your apps in the store. - Jeff Scott

When you've been behind some of the most iconic gaming franchises, you're rewarded with a certain amount of attention when you speak out – even what you're saying has been accepted by large portions of your peers.   To that length, id Software co-founder John Carmack's assertion that the level playing field represented by the Apple App Store will soon become adopted by other platforms might not be revolutionary, but it's certainly relevant. - Jeff Scott

For iOS developers, two very important things happen during the holiday season. The first is the App Store freeze, a period of time (between Dec. 22 and Dec. 29) when the rankings and app listings are frozen. During this period, developers are unable to log-in to iTunes to submit or modify any of their apps, and are unable to get sales data until the end of the freeze. If a game or app is lucky enough to be in the top ranks of the charts, it basically gets stuck there until the freeze is over. While this is great news for apps at the top ranks, it also means apps on the rise lose the ability to move up the chart for over a week. - Jeff Scott

By now, you have most probably heard the ridiculous number of mobile applications available on the various platforms. Apple is leading the way with its 300,000 iPhone apps in the App Store and Google is catching up fast with 100,000 Android apps in the Android Market. Overall, as far as the consumer is concerned, this trend is a positive one. The more selection, the lower the prices, and the higher the standards for mobile apps. - Jeff Scott

A little over a year ago I wrote up a post outlining my must have tools and utilities as a Mac and iOS developer. A lot can change in twelve months. We’ve gotten iOS 4, the iPhone 4, the iPad and now a sneak peek at Mac OS X Lion. As noted Windows developer Scott Hanselman does every year, I’ll try to make an update to my tools list a yearly occurrence. I’ll outline new products to the list as I go by marking them in bold. - Jeff Scott

Meet Green Lantern, aka super-mentor Ben Lewis. Ben is a co-founder and VP of Product at Tapjoy, a platform offering mobile publishers solutions for application discovery, rich advertising, and virtual good sales. Before life as an entrepreneur, Ben was a product manager at Google and worked on consumer products such as Toolbar, Search, and Checkout. Ben was also an engineer on the original Xbox Live team. - Jeff Scott

In conjunction with the jQuery conference in Boston, John Resig announced and released the highly anticipated jQuery Mobile. Though currently in an alpha state, the framework is fantastic. Today, we’ll dive in, and build a simple Tuts+ RSS reader, using PHP and jQuery Mobile. When we’re finished, you’ll have the ability to add this simple project to your iPhone or Android phone with the click of a button, as well as the skills to build your web apps! - Jeff Scott

One of the most important techniques comes in the form of Public Relations and I think it’s important enough to warrant its own article. PR is how you launch companies, build buzz, and get valuable attention that ranks well above the noise of buying advertising. For example Apple only aired the 1984 ad once, but received over five million dollars of free publicity due to everyone talking + airing the ad again on the news. Like anything worth striving for in life, getting attention from the press is hard, but if you attack it with the right approach, it becomes fairly easy to do. We’re launching a new version of Padpressed later this week and I thought I’d share some tips I’ve learned over the years. - Jeff Scott

[This is part 2 in a 3-part series looking at how the one-button runner Canabalt was created for the browser and ultimately sold on the iPhone and iPad.  Part 3, focusing on the iPhone port and biz aspects, will be out in a few weeks I hope.  Onward!] - Jeff Scott

It’s my #iDevBlogADay turn to write about books. I’ll write about the books I think that are fundamental to indie iOS developers. - Jeff Scott

Thanks for learning more about my book App Savvy. I wrote it to be a field manual for those wanting to successfully launch iPad and iPhone apps into the App Store. The book details a proven strategy for taking an idea and turning it into an App Store sale. Aside from sharing my own process, there are two or three interviews in every chapter with practical insight from some of the most successful App Store publishers. - Jeff Scott

was recently developing a PHP website that used mod_rewrite to make its URLs search engine friendly. Websites have been using mod_rewrite and .htaccess strategies to do this for years now and there are a 100 ways to accomplish the task. One issue that was occurring with this site was URLs without the a trailing slash would work, but URLs with a trailing slash would break (trigger a 404 error): - Jeff Scott

For my (triumphant?) return I’ve decided to not write a technical post. I was going through a list of technical things I could write about, but I just wasn’t feeling it. I decided I’d rather write about game design today, and perhaps more generally, about the creative process in general. Specifically, I’d like to talk about the problem of creative block. - Jeff Scott

WordPress SEO is the most complete SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress.org users. It incorporates everything from a snippet preview that helps you optimize your page titles, meta descriptions and keywords to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between. - Jeff Scott

This post is going to be a list of interesting libraries that are ones we have used or would consider using, I’ve missed off larger libs such as OGRE / Irrilicht as those include many features covered by our own multi-platform technology. That being said we do occasionally use alternative solutions for things we do support in our tech either as an experiment testing out other interfaces or if feature implementations for a particular project would be too much of a time/cost investment. - Jeff Scott

Craig is still super busy finishing up artwork for Linkoidz, and one of the big remaining items on my todo list is adding leaderboards and achievements. We’ve swung back and forth a little between just adding Game Center directly or doing it via OpenFeint, so I set aside a little time to take a look at how OpenFeint’s Game Center support worked in one of our other games, DoubleTake. - Jeff Scott

Whilst I’ve been working on freelance projects, as well as my own non-game apps, I’ve been thinking a lot about what to do for my next game, and what will make it something special. Originality is certainly something that’s important, but I think there is something far more valuable — magic! - Jeff Scott