Apple put us through the wringer (don’t get me started) but our latest app, Tracker for DI, is live. DI being Diablo Immortal since Apple wasn’t too keen on us using that portion as part of the name… even though, you know, there’s a million and one unofficial Minecraft companion apps but whatever.

The app is geared around being a notification manager for all the various events going on in Diablo Immortal and adjusts those notifications to your local time when a server offset is set. We hope this app proves useful to all you hardcore players! Go kill all the things and now you can be stylishly punctual doing it.

The last several months have felt like non-stop coding and, as such, we’ve yet again neglected to stop and update the masses.

So just what have we been into? Well, we had a hankerin’ to do a WatchOS app – specifically a shiny tic-tac-toe game to get our feet wet. That went well enough but stalled for now because of a more pressing project…

El Diablo! Specifically the Blizzard variety. Yep, we’re making a Diablo Immortal companion app and it is rather close to release (unlike this website, which we swear we will get around to giving some loving eventually).

There have been a lot of technical challenges with the project and the learning curve at times leaves a programmer bloody and bruised… That said, we hope to release the app within the next week or so. Stay tuned!

Lots of work ahead but… it’s a start, right?

Just a quick update into what has been accomplished of late…

Hosting of the website has changed which was an adventure in and of itself. Nothing much (yet) to notice on your end but there was there was all sorts of mayhem over here during the process. The website itself (even pre-move) is largely unfinished and we’ve given ourselves a stern talking to about that. We would just rather be coding apps and are still unconvinced WordPress is a good fit 🙁

A beta for US S&C has been made, regrettably, to rip out all of the Google Firebase functionality (crashlytics and analytics specifically). This is due to the never ending changes Apple and various regulatory bodies’ are making to their privacy requirements. While the data collection on our end was basically stock functionality with no ads nor sharing of data for any reason outside of app->Firebase->us, it simply is not worth the huge time investment to navigate these ever-changing legal waters to gain marginal more insight as to how the product is used and where any crashing might be occurring. Maybe in time when Apple and the rest of the world can agree to some sane non-insurmountable approach that not only protects users but, also, can be accomplished for small developer groups without a full tech-savvy legal staff on standby…</rant> *Coughs* Anyways, this should get pushed to the App Store “soon”.

Lastly, been kicking around a new app in the past ~month so expect a beta, screen shots, etc in the near future. The premise is a sliding puzzle where the goal is to get the pieces in their proper places but only a piece with a free space nearby can move (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliding_puzzle). Pretty meh, right? Where we hope to spice this up a bit is being able to change the puzzle setup freely, in more of a dynamic methodology. You want it to be a 3×3? Okay. Same puzzle in a 10×8? Why not? This leads us to some decision points as to whether the puzzle should be generated as-is (which likely means each puzzle piece is not square), crop a rectangle out of the image to start with which matches the requested puzzle grid (which equates to square pieces), or pad the image up with bars so that the image also matches the requested puzzle grid but without image loss (which equates to square pieces). Also, not really a novel idea but very rarely implemented: upload your own images. You want a game using the backdrop of a pet, family member, or various artwork that suits your fancy? Right on. Then does the user become responsible for setting up the image per aspect ratio via stock/crop/pad? More on the roadmap for this one later after nailing down a bit more of the basic functionality.

Alright, let us be the first to say: remembering to provide updates may or may not be a weakness of ours. Sorry! We’d usually rather be spending time knocking things off a todo list than simply talking about the todo list ^_^;

So, then, what have we been up to? Well…

1) Many, many major color management changes to support the theme manager. That was not a pleasant task :{ After the blood, sweat, tears, and maybe just ever so light amounts of profanity… then some time to reflect… yeah, we’ll just generically call it a “learning experience”.

2) Theme manager (both the class and the UI to access it) is mostly ready (IAP to help with development costs). Mostly down to three issues to be finished:

a) handling Apple Store Server 2 Server Notifications,
b) safeguards for certain themes that introduce minimum color contrast ratio issues against non-customizable colors (i.e. the green for correct yet the theme is also green), and
c) a cosmetic issue on Navigation Bar colors not updating unless flipping from light mode to dark (or vice versa) on the theme selection screen.

Some issues might be a touch more of an OCD thing on our part but that’s just how we roll.

3) Minor rewrite of view management to better allow for future expansion (purely behind the scenes changes but important long term).

4) A million (not literally) extremely small coding changes / polishings that aren’t really worth boring anyone with.

This week has been plagued by custom font weirdness, a MacBook with battery/charging issues, yet more UI rendering strangely on other devices, your basic “meh”… but, all in all, some progress has been made and battle lines have been re-re….re-drawn.

Negative progress is a thing. Today’s venture included verifying that SwiftUI previews and simulators are not to be trusted and then weird yet-to-be-explained haptic feedback issues with iPhone 7 Plus (possibly others, time will tell). Either way… we’re alive and going at it with the pointiest stick we can find.

The roadmap toward releasing US States & Capitals 1.0 narrows down to hopefully (fingers crossed!) a few minor tasks. More updates soon.

While it may seem trivial for a standard sized company… drafting a modern privacy policy, terms of use, and cookie policy without the benefit of a tech-savvy legal team is a task we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy.

This is the humble beginnings of BrutalBytes ripping the ol’ WWW a new one. No good can come of this.