Meet QI IQ and Improve Your Scrabble or Words With Friends Score

QI IQ - Memorize two letter words for Scrabble and Words With FriendsOur second app, QI IQ, is now available in the iTunes App Store. QI IQ is a tool to help learn which two letter words are valid in Scrabble®, Words With Friends, or Bananagrams. Knowing most or all of the valid two letter words makes it much easier to join your words in higher-scoring positions.

QI IQ lets you rapidly drill words whenever you have a few minutes. It keeps track of which words you’re struggling with and shows them more frequently. We hope you find it useful!

Lists for Writers 1.1 is Now Available

Our first update of Lists for Writers is now available in both the iTunes App Store and the Amazon Appstore for Android. The update adds some additional lists that users have suggested:

  • Emotions
  • Land forms – geographic features
  • People – relationships
  • Dialog verbs
  • World cities

The update also now supports iOS version 4.0 or higher. Previously only iOS version 4.3 or higher was supported but we heard from several iPhone owners that are still on 4.2 or 4.1.

Thank you for your feedback and we’re happy to hear any more suggestions from users!

Available on the iTunes App StoreAvailable at Amazon Appstore for AndroidAndroid App on Google Play

Lists for Writers is now available on Amazon

Lists for Writers icon

Today is an exciting day for Thinkamingo! Our first app is in the Amazon Appstore today!

We have completed the App Store Trifecta:  iTunes, Google, and Amazon.

Our experience getting apps approved with all three companies has been very positive and we are excited about our upcoming submissions!

Lists for Writers is now available for Android

We’ve heard your feedback and we’re happy to announce that Lists for Writers is expanding to a second platform – Android!

It is now available on Google Play – the new market for Android apps. We hope to soon be in the Amazon appstore for all the Kindle Fire users too. We’d love to hear from NOOK users too if you’d like to see it in the NOOK apps store as well.

Developing Lists for Writers

Our first published app, Lists for Writers, isn’t the most exciting, development-wise. It isn’t the first app we started but it’s the first one we “finished.” It seemed simple enough to develop quickly [hah!] and we needed to learn the app launch process.

The app really started with a collection of lists I had accumulated (instead of actually writing) during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). We liked the idea of having those all rolled into an app where it would be easy to quickly find a name for a character or look at Polti’s thirty-six dramatic situations. The result is this app.

The UI is not too much more than the iOS Master-Detail template. I added a “further detail” view for a few lists where the single tableview cell isn’t enough space, especially on the iPhone in portrait orientation. There were a few struggles like changing the background color of the section headers. That requires completely rendering the view for the section header rather than just setting a property on the table view. I also struggled with showing the master list table in portrait mode on the iPad. You can simply send a setHidesMasterViewInPortrait:NO message to the splitViewController to show the master view but that’s still a private API and Apple rejects plenty of apps for using it. So ultimately I pulled that and the master list is still a pop-over like the default template. There are several free alternative split view controllers and I’ll probably switch to one of those in a future version.

I also had an issue with Google Analytics. I initially had it in the app so we can see which lists were getting the most use, which devices were being used, and just to see how many people were using the app in general. But I read enough posts from people getting rejected from the store for using analytics that it wasn’t worth the risk. I’ll probably stick them into a future app update when a rejection won’t affect us as much.

The most development time was actually spent on our “About Thinkamingo” view. I went through about five iterations of it, starting with a table view then a few labels. Ultimately all the content is in a web view. That makes it easy for the text to flow smoothly, even when rotated. There is some complexity to the links because I used canOpenURL to check if they have the Facebook apps installed and will use the app to open our Facebook profile instead of using Safari. I had a similar Twitter link but removed it for space. (There is frustratingly little screen space in landscape mode on the iPhone.) The web view needed a little work. I had to track down a trick to prevent the view from “rubber band” bounce scrolling when touched, which is awfully ugly on an embedded web view. The last thing to go into the app was our icon. We were stuck waiting on a graphic designer but had to go ahead and drop in a flamingo sketch I did as a placeholder. Our next update will switch over to our new logo.

Other than that, we spent a bit of time on the lists – editing them, parsing them, removing a few philias and other terms that weren’t kid-appropriate. We have a few additional lists and ideas for more that we hope to add in the future.