Bigger Is Better

What a week! I always thought about porting Doodle Blast! onto the iPad at some point. But when Apple announced last Saturday that the iPad app submission deadline is on March 27th at 5pm, I realized that “at some point” has suddenly come to mean “now”.

I woke up on Sunday morning and started. I must admit, I felt a little overwhelmed. I haven’t even installed the required SDK yet, let alone read through the iPad documentation or try out the iPad Simulator. I like working on my own pace and suddenly having a hard deadline in a week felt strangely reminiscent of work.

I glanced through the docs and I ran into a very interesting point – in order to install the SDK you need to be running Snow Leopard. I was only running Leopard at the time. Hmm… Inquiring further into matter, I came to find a number of people complaining about Snow Leopard on the Internet about missing drivers and compatibility issues. Double hmm…

So I went down to the Apple store, picked up a copy of Snow Leopard, asked the sales girl whether I can boot up an Apple machine from an external hard drive, witnessed her nodding aggressively (although I had some doubts as to whether she had any clue about what I was asking), picked up an external HD and went home. Kudos to Apple, you actually can install and run an OS from an external hard drive pretty easily. The machine even shows you pretty chooser at startup time. If you are interested in doing the same, these instructions proved very useful. As a side note, though, Snow Leopard runs pretty smoothly. I was worried about having all my game-making tools work nicely with it, but they do, so my fear was unfounded.

Anyway, that killed my Sunday – lots of downloading, lots of shopping, lots of installing, and lots of reading.

What followed for the next five days was a whirlwind of coding and testing and rewriting and redrawing, an effort that eventually culminated in my iPad app submission about two hours ago, followed by a frantic re-submission about an hour later when I realized that my new code had a deadlock in it which didn’t show up in the simulator.

I’ll post some more highlights and gotcha’s in the coming days, but for now I’m getting sloshed on wine and hoping that I didn’t miss anything major (which is always possible, given that, like most mortals, I’ve never held the device in my hands). Good luck to me!