Somebody Really Likes our Logo

Thank you Apple graphic designer...you must really like our FTP On The Go logo!

The big app display banner in Apple stores. Lots of motion-blur on all the icons, but it does look like ours. And it's not just on the display, it's there 4 times that I could find!

Scam or Legit?

Yesterday some door-to-door salesman came by, from ECR magazine company or something like that. Bec initially agreed to get some magazines, but when she came in to get a checkbook, I said I don't like to ever buy things like that since it's impossible to tell if it's a scam. I just never buy anything if you call me or show up at my door.

The kid was understandably upset we backed out of buying, and it was a bit of a hassle to get some contact info so we could make sure nothing would get charged or sent to collections. You have to cancel in writing within 3 days? With no email or fax or website listed? It just seemed shadier and shadier as we were trying to stop. Bec did get a number and talked to somebody and sent a fax to cancel, so that should be good.

I wish I'd have thought to whip out the iPhone and start searching right then on the doorstep. The only references to the company I found were at RipoffReport.com. Bad sign for them.

And the continued magic of the Internet: according to Google, this is what is at their address in Florida. Doesn't really inspire confidence. I was expecting to at least see an office park or a "Mailboxes Etc" type store. Which building do you think is "Suite #3"?

Magazines make sense if I was making up a scam, you'd not notice anything was wrong until months later when nothing had arrived.

I'll never know if it could have been legit, but that Googling raised some big suspicions. We'd just be out the cost of a magazine. The kid earns points and will (supposedly) get a big $5000 reward for getting enough points. From Seattle, what's he going to do if some company in Florida decides to not pay?

Wow! Thanks again Apple!

So after a lot of thought I decided to upgrade to the new iPhone 3GS. I could upgrade without paying the early-upgrade penalty, and really need to be able to test with all the different devices.

Waiting at the store seeing the various displays and things, I thought "Wouldn't it be cool if they had one of our icons." Next thing I see is our FTP On The Go icon! At the end of the promo video running in every AT&T and Apple store. It's only there for a few seconds, but it is an obvious one "installed" on the iPhone at the end, not just one of the flyby icons (it's possible another might be in those, we'll have to do a frame-by-frame view to see.)

I filmed it with the new iPhone, and uploaded to YouTube sitting in the car in the parking lot.

Very fine line in app approvals...

We submitted our new iPhone app, Poker vs Girls and pushed the images a bit too much.

We weren't really sure where the line is drawn, and now have a better idea. People taking off clothes or in their underwear is OK, but pretending to take off that underwear is not OK.

We removed the offending images and resubmitted. Of course when the next iPhone OS is out, with more parental controls, it should be OK to be more explicit, just mark it R rated.

Update 1: And that did the trick! Poker vs Girls is available in the App Store. Now we get to figure where the line is for pictures of dudes--we're equal opportunity and Poker vs Boys is coming next. Is there some crotch-bulge limitation? The wife will enjoy choosing those pictures :)

Update 2: The 5 offending images we weren't able to include...

Poker vs Girls

Coming Soon...hopefully any day now.

Programming Poker AI

Peter has done great updates (one, two, three) about how the user interface for our iPhone poker game has evolved.

Since it's looking so good for 2 players with chips, we knew that the one big request we would get is to have an AI so you could play one player against your iPhone.  I really didn't think I could do a good one--not even knowing where to start.

This post really helped get me started, with some methods to do the hand strength and some basic play.  I'd thought there would be some crazy mathematical formulas, but it was simpler than that--simulate a bunch of hands and see the percent it would win made sense.  Brute force I could do :)

I'm sure I could have found some existing poker AI to just plug something in.  But for any feature that's a core thing in a program I am making, I really don't feel I've solved the problem if I use some library to do it.  It's a Poker App--I wouldn't feel right using somebody elses AI.

I'd already done my own thing to detect which is a winning hand for the 2 player game--and while pretty  inefficient compared to the ones I've read about--it works.  And is fast enough it can do all the AI's calculations in a second or two.  Good enough for our 2 player poker game (since only has to do it for one player instead of a full table of players!)  It just took running that hand comparison with the AIs hand against a bunch of random hands.  It can do 100 or so in a second.  Which by my tests, gets it within a few % of the right hand strength.  Any errors where it's off will just make it more unpredictable. 

Interestingly, since the cards haven't changed, we tried having later actions in the turn play quicker...and it was too quick and didn't seem right.  So if it has to decide again (it bet, you raised, so it has to decide what to do), it does more calculations to improve its hand strength estimate--and to take enough time to really seem to be thinking about what it will do.

Starting with the basic strength percent, it also does many checks to play-down or play-up various hand types.  A few examples:

• If it has a pair but there's at least one card showing on the board that is higher than my pair subtracts a bit from the strength.
• Big flush draws when I don't have a flush are scary.
• There's a bunch more...
  

Another thing we've worked on is so it knows some more advanced poker strategies.  Things I've probably done in a game, but Peter has done and knows the reason and names :)

Sometimes, it will slow-play really good hands.  But also knows when to stop slow playing them too.  (AA pre-flop is one it might slow play, but if the board comes 678 suited, it likely will stop slow playing its cards.)

We'll leave other strategies it does as a surprize for when it does them.

It's turning out to be a very competent player!  I'd worked for several days doing many strategy improvements, and the first game, it beat Peter (a good player who's won a nice bit of money in tournaments.) 

Hey Apple...

Another idea for you Apple.

As a developer, we have the iPhone Simulator and can run the iPhone programs right on a Mac for testing.  Couldn't you package the same code so any Mac (and maybe even Windows) user could buy and run any iPhone app directly on their computer too?  As part of iTunes or something, launching them in separate windows so you could have a couple running at once.

There are many that would be pointless (ooh, a flashlight!)...but might be kinda cool for others.  And would give anybody with a Mac a taste of what they could be running on an iPhone or iPod touch.