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.