It’s taken a long time to get here, but the first version of Chess Wars is live in the App Store. It’s a bit awkward, but the general story is that Crash Corp was started to make these games, but switched gears when Matt Galligan and I teamed up to seek funding for other, more interesting, games. As a result, Blunder Move was born.

Chess Wars allows you to play your Facebook friends in chess using Facebook Connect. Here’s a list of features for Chess Wars:

• No signup process. Simply log in with your Facebook account using Facebook Connect.
• Play against your Facebook friends! Send challenges and invite your friends to play against you.
• Works over WiFi, EDGE, or 3G. Play using your iPhone or iPod Touch.
• A little rusty at Chess? Don’t worry it highlights potential moves when you select a piece.
• Play and keep track of dozens of games with our simple inbox. Games are organized by game state (e.g. My Turn, Their Turn, New Challenges, etc.).
• Our in-game chat system allows you to taunt your friends easily. Everyone loves rubbing a good move in!
• Get notified on Facebook when a friend makes a move or sends you a chat message.
• Scroll back through move history easily.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact us with your issues. We’ve got a lot of plans for next versions and will be releasing checkers and reversi next.

The short story is it’s not possible to change your artist name in iTunes Connect. The longer story is that, when you sign up for an iPhone developer account, you enter in your artist name and, likely, forget all about it. That is, until your app goes live in the App Store and you notice “I dunno” is what your app is listed under.

What makes this so frustrating is that there is absolutely no way to find out what your artist name is. It’s not shown in any of the certificates nor it’s not shown in iTunes Connect. Sure, your copyright holder, company name, etc. are all viewable, but that very important artist name, which your application actually gets listed under? Nope.

Luckily, I didn’t have to contact Apple through normal channels, which I hear takes 4 – 6 weeks to get a change done, but I did find plenty of things to be annoyed about.

• You cannot preview your application in the App Store without actually publishing it into the App Store.
• Your artist name is not listed anywhere in iTunes Connect so you cannot verify any changes.
• You cannot view the status of a case number anywhere. You have no way of passively viewing the status of your case. You have to email them to find out if it’s closed or not.

Apple could easily fix all of these with very little effort. In fact, they offer a preview of what your applications will look like when you sign up, but not after you’ve submitted apps. I’d like to see three things:

• The list of your applications in iTunes Connect should be switched to look exactly like they would be listed in iTunes.
• In the applications overview it should show the artist name (even if I’m not allowed to edit it I should at least be able to see it).
• Allow me to see a simple overview of any pending cases I have. Just something like a case number, when it was opened, and status (e.g. “In Review”, “Not Assigned”, “Waiting on Developer”, “Closed”).

Add this to the long list of things Apple should fix in iTunes Connect and the App Store for developers.

Today I’m at the iPhone Tech Talk in San Francisco, CA today. The goal of the iPhone Tech Talk is to teach developers the differences and quirks of developing web applications for the iPhone version of Safari.

• iPhone ignores all CSS screen types besides @media (e.g. @media { p.foo { text-weight: bold; } }). Sorry, that’s referred to as a “media query”, which appears to be CSS namespaces.
• 10MB limit for text (HTML, JavaScript and CSS). 8MB for TIFF, PNG and GIF, 32MB for JPEG and 2MB for animated GIF’s.
• 5 second limit on JavaScript execution.
• window.open() and target="_new" open new windows with an 8 window max. Interestingly, you can open 8 windows, but they might get paged out of memory, which means that when the user switches back Safari will need to refresh this screen.
• alert(), confirm() and prompt() all work fine (and look quite nice)
• iPhone doesn’t support showModalDialog() or print()
• Natively supports Excel spreadsheets, PDF’s, Word documens (YMMV), TXT and QuickTime audio and video. Does not support Java, SVG or Flash. Interestingly enough, it does support the <canvas> element.
• Obviously, it doesn’t support a file system so people can’t download files to the phone.
• Window sized to 980 x 1091 and then scaled to fit 320 (I assume 480 if in landscape). They treat .mobi domains differently; they’re not scaled. They scale it down immediately to fit 320/480.
• Use <meta name="viewport" content="width=320" /> if you want fine grained control. Other options include initial-scale (1 is the default), minimum-scale, maximum-scale (which limits zooming in and out) and user-scalable (yes/no allows/prevents zooming).
• Override text scaling with -webkit-text-size-adjust:none (other values include auto, which is the default and percentages).
• You don’t get hover styles, but do get mouse events (click, etc.). Remember to leave room for a finger (Daniel Burka mentioned this in his notes about designing the Digg iPhone application).
• Remember to box content for fingers. They look at the box text is in when doing intelligent zooming. For instance do <div><p>some text</p><p>some more text</p></div> will double tap nicely.
• They send click, mousedown, mouseup, mousewheel (and one I just missed). Also, blur, focus, load, unload, reset, submit, change, and abor. You can’t call blur or focus, but they are called when it happens. You just can’t explicitly blur or focus because they don’t want a lot of jumping around going on when you’re working on a small device.
• EDGE 70-135 Kbit/sec and bursts up to 200Kbit/sec, while WiFi is 802.11b/g and goes up to 54 Mbit/sec. YMMV will vary of course.
  • Send compressed content as the iPhone supports it.
  • Match image size to <img> height and width and minimize image use altogether if possible (e.g. use CSS and <canvas> if possible). Use CSS border, border-radius or Cavnas.
  • Use QuickTime reference movies (e.g. pull one move for WiFi and another movie for EDGE).
• Do not redirect automatically to an iPhone specific site.
• When creating applications use familiar layouts. They have familiar patterns on the developer website.
• Use familiar animations.
• Leverage existing libraries; iUi (by Joe Hewitt, which we used the prototype of for the Digg iPhone application), YUI, dojo and prototype.
• Integrate with the built-in apps when possible.
  • Any maps.google.com URL loads the built-in Maps application.
  • You can explicitly use href="tel:+1 (800) 555-1212" to launch the telephone application.
  • Of course the mailto:foo@example.com?subject=subject+here&body=my+message. Also supports “cc”.
• Use -webkit-border-radius: 8px to get the native rounded record border listings you see elsewhere.
• Interesting that they use onclick events on the li‘s (which have that -webkit-border-radius on them) instead of an anchor tag.
• Hide the address bar with window.scrollTo(0,1).
• Go to bugreporter.apple.com to report iPhone bugs. Do you guys provide any information on when you’ll fix a bug or add a feature? “Um, no.” (Duh)
• Interaction design tips
  • The mouse does not equal the finger. You don’t have multiple buttons, scroll wheels, etc. There’s no hover, rollover, scroll bars, etc.
  • Avoid an entirely interactive website; minimize animation, avoid distracting the user from the primary task, avoid hiding functionality behind rollovers.
  • Don’t require users to enter information; before something useful happens or something valuable happens.
  • Prevent zooming and constrain to vertical scrolling only.
  • Minimize text entry; use lists, pickers and use cookies for user information and where users where the last time they used the application.
• Optimize for bandwidth; design light-weight pages, minimize the use of large graphics.
• Optimize for user’s time; keep things clean, use standard iPhone paradigms, get users to primary content as quickly as possible.
• Oohhhh “Managing Content and Synced Data for iPhone”. My interest? It be piqued. Leveraging current content on iPhone, producing iPhone friendly video and managing portable user data.
  • *sigh* This hs pretty much nothing to do with managing any kind of data as one might expect. I was hoping for something about Google Gears maybe or accesing content on the phone? No idea, but something more interesting than this. Instead I’ve been reading about a guy who got 10 years for selling grow lamps.