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Review comments from Appstore – My Response

Posted on August 26, 2011 by admin

Aug 17, 2011 by Naan Than

Good but not great – In iPad 2, at expert level the app keeps getting crashed. Sometimes have to touch the coin multiple times to move. Undo functionality is required in this type if games. Sometimes, unable to move the coin out of the bowl; had to play other coins.

Dear Naan Than, I am sorry that the App crashed on iPad 2. I am hearing that in rare occasions this happens and when the iPad is running low on memory. I will try to fix the problem as soon as possible and release an update. Since iOS 5 is expected soon, I am unable to release a version now. Please let me know your feedback then.

Aug 13, 2011 by Hungphone

Fun but needs work – Never heard of the game before but really enjoy playing it.Three stars due to interface problems… Need to fix coin selection. On iPad it is a minor nuisance, sometimes have to touch it two or three times; on iPhone 4 the game is almost unplayable due to the coin selection problem.App support link takes you to facebook, dev website link does not exist. I don’t do Facebook so I have no way to tell developer.

Dear Hungphone, I acknowledge your feedback. Yes, I have people reporting the same. The problem is now fixed and it will be available as soon as iOS gets released. I will also test it on iOS5 before I make the release. Yes, the website had to be taken down briefly due to spamming issue and now it is up.

Aug 11, 2011 by dancinjammin

1 on 1 parcheesi. – That what the game basically is, and it’s fun too! This new free app brings an almost unheard-of board game into the spot light. Like I said, it’s free, so try it out! I think you’ll like it! Maybe has a few bugs, but nothing to harm the stability of the app.

Aug 11, 2011 by Velvet Gypsy

Wonderful!!!!!! – What a wonderful game!! The only thing negative I have to say, sometimes it is very hard to select which piece you want to move with multiple pieces on the board (started using the side of my pinky finger & hence the 4 stars). Other than that is game is a MUST have.Awesome & Thank you for this addicting and well made app 

Apr 25, 2011 by Vamsham

Great buy – fun and strategy – Excellent implementation of a traditional Indian game. Preserves the fun, luck and strategy inherent in the original game. Well implemented. Easy to use. Nice graphics. Great buy!!

Feb 3, 2011 by Srinivas Rowdur

Addictive Game – Flashback 15 years – This is good game. I remember sitting and learning this game from my grand mother. Very additive and a game for the whole family… I wish we can have more than 2 players play the game.. and new intelligent rules ( to move two coins together at once)..Great job…

Jan 26, 2011 by Foxie Lee

FUN – I read the only review and from the information that was given decided to give this game a go as is only 99 cents. I have never heard of this game nor ever played but let me tell you it is easy to figure out and WOW!! So much FUN!! I love this!! Kinda like Ludo only better-I said kinda like Ludo games. If you like Ludo games you will LOVE this concept!! Thanks to the person who gave the first review as it was a lot of help in deciding to buy and THANKS to the developer.

Version 1.2

Hong Kong

Jan 23, 2011 by artem.k.v

Great game – Great game. Look forward to getting updates with more features as promissed.

Jan 23, 2011 by Clicksuresh

Nostalgic – I used to play this a lot when I was kid, now my son plays this game with his grandfather whenever he visits him…this is his favorite pass time… I’m happy that this digital version has preserved the most of the tricks/strategy of the real world game..plus excellent yet simplistic UI…

Jan 21, 2011 by Sri

Very Interesting Game – This is a very interesting board game. The best feature in this game is, when you pause and restart the game, it starts with 0 sec delay. I like the graphics and design very much. This is definitely an attractive mind game for kids.

Jan 5, 2011 by Bhanu Prakash

Great Indian traditional game – This is one of the awesome board game ,i like those graphics and the way coin’s are moving. It’s a traditional very popular game in India and now it’s on iPhone.

Dec 20, 2010 by raganesh

Excellent Board Game – My 5 year old daughter loves playing this game. And I’m happy that this game keeps her occupied

Really impressive art work. Please add other classical Indian board games, too.

Dec 19, 2010 by Vijayaraghavan

Vimanam – Nice Application with an excellent UIDepicts the traditional Indian board game Vimanam in an excellent mannerGood theme and excellent usabilityHighly recommend this app as a perfect pastime

A big thanks to all for taking time to drop in the feedback. It is really encouraging and motivating. I have a lot of ideas and will work on them as soon as I find time. Thanks once again!!

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Vimanam 1.2 is now universal

Posted on January 26, 2011 by admin

Now enjoy Vimanam on iPad 2 as well.

The game very closely simulates the real world experience.

Dice Accumulator: Each dice roll is now accumulated and the same can be applied to move the coins in more strategic manner

Powerful AI opponent – Your device is now equipped with powerful AI component along with the dice accumulator for better decision making

Instruction:

You can continue to roll the dice and the dice values will automatically get accumulated
Once done, you can select the glowing dice(s) from the right side of the screen and apply it on any coin of your choice.

More features to follow soon on. Sit back and enjoy this great game with your friends and family!

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Categories: Games, iPad Games, iphone, Mobile, Old Indian Classics | Leave a comment

Version 1.1 is ready for the launch

Posted on December 11, 2010 by admin

While version 1.0 still stuck in ‘Waiting for review’ state, an interesting thing happened. When some of our friends have seen the app, they wanted a iPhone version of it that we mercilessly declined. Mainly due to the following reasons:

The board was too big to be shown on an iPhone
Second, when the coins have to be manually selected, I was not sure if people with ‘fat’ fingers can touch the screen to make the selection

Though, we were not fully convinced that it would work, we just wanted to give it a shot. Spent 3-4hrs on the app and migrated all the screens to fit (a lot of photoshop work and a few lines of code extra) the iPhone resolution of 320×480 (iPhone 4 will automatically scale it to fit its resolution of 640×960). The result was very impressive and now we are happy to announce the ‘universal’ version of the app with version 1.1.

Things did not stop with this and here is a list of new things that we added:

Added an option to select the number of coins from (1 to 6)
Added a quick help
Bug fix (when multiple coins were on the board, rolling 1 wont move the coins if the player is iPad/iPhone)
Coins re-arrangment – If a slot has many coins and when a coin leaves, the coins would animate and rearrange themselves
Sound effect for settings, about, help
The feature that we really like is that now ‘You can play a random game’. Click this option, your iPad/iPhone will dynamically create a game for you and most of the times we see that this game is challenging enough to keep the user locked
Removed the ‘Roll’ text and last dice image as it was a bit confusing

Here are the screen shots from my iPhone running the game.

Already series of testing is happening (very difficult to test games!!) and no bugs are found yet. So, planning to upload the version 1.1 today. We will keep you posted.

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Our first iPad game title

Posted on December 5, 2010 by admin

Dec 16,2010 Update: The game has been approved and is available for sale. Here is the link.

While we were having a chat a couple of weeks back around the gaming trends and how iPad is making waves in the gaming, the question that struck all of us was that what it would be like to develop indian classic games for iPad.

Interesting thought! Now all of us play games which are westernized and it is sad to see that our kids do not even know about our own treasure. So, we decided to give it a try.

As a result, we short listed a few games and the criteria we had for selection are that

It should be very unique and untried one by others
It should not be there on the Apple Appstore
Capable enough to keep a person locked up with the game for at least 30mts to an hour once started
Since it is our first project, we did not want to complicated strategy games as we are not sure of the popularity and hence it has to be simple and yet provide immersive game play
Should have an excellent graphics and better user experience

So, we concluded with a game called ‘Vimanam’ (it is a Tamil word and means ‘Plane’ ) as the layout was very different and it was long forgotten. Though we wanted to keep the game simple, the UI design took most of our time and coding ended up being complicated, mainly because, the direction of path for the players are in opposite direction and the conditions we had to handle. Nevertheless we enjoyed our time.

We started the development on Nov 20th and we spent nearly 100 person hours to develop the game. The first cut was ready by Nov 29th and people who had seen it really enjoyed the antique look and feel and found the game was quite interesting than they thought!

So, here we are presenting the ‘Vimanam’ version 1.0 today. It is submitted to the Appstore this morning and we are eagerly waiting for its appearance in the appstore.

Here are the screen shots

Just a quick poll:

[polldaddy poll=4198847]

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Categories: Games, iPad Games | Leave a comment

whaZZup Pro 1.2.1 – Released

Posted on March 24, 2010 by admin

A major update to whaZZup Lite that comes with rich features. If you liked whaZZup Lite, then you will definitely love the Pro version. Check it out here: http://www.mobihand.com/product.asp?id=55415&n=whaZZup-Pro

The Pro version comes with a lot of performance improvements over the Lite version and provides access to your personal data in Yahoo upcoming. You can publish events to your Yahoo upcoming account, see what your friends are attending and also look for the group events.

Broadcast your event through twitter so that the your followers can attend as well.

See venue tips in and around the event venue (using FourSquare).

This app is powered by Yahoo Upcoming APIs. Follow @whazzuppro in twitter for latest updates

Coming up soon: Use ‘check-in’ feature on the day of the event to check-in into the venue and earn four square credits!

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Categories: Blackberry, blackberry, mobile, mobile-development, appstore, Mobile, smart phones | Leave a comment

whaZZup Lite – My Blackberry app

Posted on March 6, 2010 by admin

Update: whaZZup Lite goes OTA here at Mobihand App store as freeware. Check it out here -> http://www.mobihand.com/product.asp?id=55415&n=whaZZup-Pro and click on the ‘Free Trial’ link.

1. Have you ever imagined how would it be to have the December season concert details at the finger tips?

2. How about all the IPL Schedules?

3. How about all the kind of events that are happening around your current location or any location of your choice?

4. How about seeing all the events scheduled in your favorite venue (Museum, Hotel, Music academy, Universities ….(the list is endless)

5. How about seeing the venue location in a map and let the mobile show you directions to take you there to the venue?

6. How about an application that is aware of your location and enables you to search for events around your place?

7. How about adding your events to your Blackberry calendar (and hence to your outlook) and let the calendar remind you about the event when appropriate?

8. Adding events and venues as favorites so that you can revisit them later on?

9. Search for keywords around a location

10. How about sending an invite to your friends? (Later)

Hmm. At least I would love to have one that fulfils the above

I have always been interested in the mobile platform right from the Palm OS days (anyone remember the Palm Pilots?) and the passion inside me woke up again and I wanted to get my hands dirty once again. But I started wondering as to what to try.

We have plenty of applications that pretty much do everything and I wanted to do something unique (non-existent or un-tried). After doing some research, I had narrowed down to a few ideas and then the question of which platform to develop struck me big time. So is it going to be iPhone or Blackberry put me in loop some time

As iPhone demanded a big fortune to be kept aside for the development environment set up itself. So natural choice became blackberry with its native support to Java and a lot of goodies available as free.

I set up my Eclipse and chose Blackerry 4.6.0 as my base SDK so that I can use my mobile itself to try out the results. So the development stated around Feb mid and the app took some good shape. Next thing I tried was to then make it backward compatible (so that it runs on 81xx, 88xx, 83xx Curve devices) and hence moved my SDK version back to 4.5 and I was not surprised when the application did not even compile. Fixed some of the APIs that were missing in 4.5 and had to provide a workaround to get the UI back.

Development Environment

IBM Eclipse Ganemede 3.4.2
Blackberry SDK 4.5 (JDE 1.x with 4.5.0 component pack)
81xx, 83xx, 88xx, 89xx Simulators
Yahoo Upcoming API Key (you can sign up to get one)
Blackberry signature files for accessing securing API keys ($20 and takes a week to get all 3 keys)
Yahoo Upcoming RESTful APIs
Use Location Based Services using device GPS (if the device does not have one, it is handled gracefully)
Invocation of Google maps if installed
Blackberry PIM manipulation

This is what whaZZup is all about.

I started the development around Feb 12 and now the application has reached a good shape to be shared with others. Has only one known glitch (the pop up menu gets a bit slugging on the home screen and I am working on it).

Let me know if you need the installation files (drop me a mail or leave a comment and I will send it to you). Use the Apploader.exe (“:Program FilesCommon FilesResearch In MotionAppLoaderLoader.exe”) to point to the alx file and you are done. The application is already signed. It has a small foot print of 125k.

Disclaimer: The events shown are as posted on the upcoming site and the application is not responsible for inaccurate results showing up (:-)). Believe me, sometimes search keywords gives me some results that has no relevance. It is a rarity though

If you have tried out, let me know how useful it is for you.

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Categories: Blackberry, Mobile | Tags: Blackberry, Mobile, RESTful, upcoming | 1 Comment

Vedanthangal – A Travelogue

Posted on January 14, 2009 by admin

Vedanthangal is a small village near Madhuranthagam and is quite famous amongst birds than the people.

Yes, it is our country’s oldest and yet smallest bird sanctuary and is a spectacular breeding ground. This is situated around 80kms from Chennai.The name means “place for the hunter” and remained a famous hunting spot around 300 years ago. Villagers then wanted to protect the seasonal visitors and prevented the hunting of these migratory birds. During the British era, this place was converted into a sactuary (Google says 1936 )

When you visit here, the first thing that strikes you is how the nature is still preserved here. You cannot see big billboards, commercial establishments except small petty shops. This lake is very well maintained and the garbage is collected by volunteers and workers. Even the restrooms are very well maintained. All these for a small fee of Rs.5 for adults and Rs.2 for kids.
stork-1

The sanctuary consists of a small lake containing small islands heavily covered with shrubs and bamboo plants. There is crescent shaped path takes visitors for a around the sanctuary. There are two watch towers, watch points that help you take a close look. Around 115 species of birds have been recorded and here is the compiled list of species (thanks Travellady).

Garganey Teals- Canada
Glossy Ibis – Sri Lanka
Grey Heron – Bangladesh
Grey Pelican – Australia
Open-billed Stork -Bangladesh
Painted Stork -Siberia (Seen above)
Snake Bird-Sri Lanka
Spoonbill-Burma
Spot Bill Duck -Canada

In addition, Cormorants, Darter, Grebes, Large Egret, Little Egrets, Moorhen, Night Herons, Paddy Bird, Painted Stork, Pintails, Pond Heron, Sandpiper, Shovellers, Terns, White Ibis, etc. are also reported seen.
We could see Grey Heron, Painted Stork and Egrets (Seen below) in large numbers.

What is really striking is the sheer number of birds which typically run to thousands. I can’t help thinking about the proverb, “Birds of same feather flock together”

Below is the flight of Painted-Stork on its mission to catch a fish.

And here is the jackpot

We started from Chennai around 12:30PM after packing good amount of food (tamarind rice, coconut rice and curd rice). Even these food taste good on such trips. My lovely Innova really did very well and faithfully, safely and comfortably transported all of us (around 9 of us). The travel was around 1.30hs from Vadapalani. The route to reach this place is straight forward.

Directions:

Hit NH45 towards Trichy and drive for 45mts. Take a right on Uthiramerur road on the right of NH45. You should see clearly laid out sign boards (thanks to highways) and this detour should come at least 20kms before Madhuranthagam. Best time period is between Nov to March and beyond this period this place wears a deserted look and you will end up watching only crows The best timings are 3PM-6PM. But the birds are seen around 12PM onwards. Best transport is your own

Another Painted Stork on its flight.

Can you identify the following?
bird-3

As the sun started setting all the birds could be seen returning to their nests in huge numbers and it is an amazing site to watch. This also reminded us that we should return home too. So we had to bid good bye to these beautiful species and left the place and needless to say with a sad note
sunset

Speaking of Madhuranthagam, a place close to my heart, I really feel nostalgic. Because, this is where I spent my early childhood days and is also a place of very famous Rama temple (“Yeri Kaatha Ramar”). I first went to school here in 1976 and did my 2 and 3 grades and learnt the English alphabets here in my 3rd grade. Vedanthangal is around 15Kms from here and I remember my first ever trip to this place around that time frame along with my dad and grandpa. We took a bus early in the morning and reached there and spent around 3-4 hours and took another bus to return home in the evening. This place is very poorly connected by public transport (even now) and I have faint memories of that trip even now

On Bird Photography – Some Tips

Bird photography is challenging even for the experienced. You really need

A fast lens with a good tele range, 300mm or more. It is time I upgraded my kit (I hear my wife’s voice as I write this) with a long range.
Hi-speed memory card with good write speed as you will capture continuous shots to get at least a few right. Regarding the bird flight shots above, I took nearly 20 shots to get these right.
Solid tripod as you have to shoot only with ambient light. You need a really sturdy one. It is good if it has a Pan head. I mounted the camera and for the continuous shots, I had to pan the camera to follow the bird
A good camera with good FPS (Frames per Second) and good built-in image buffer.
The other accessory that you need is a pair of Binoculars (mine is a good 10×50 and 8×40) and we really enjoyed watching the birds through these.

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Categories: Landscape and Nature, Photography, Travel, Travelogue | Tags: bird-sanctuary, Nikon, Photography, Travel, vedanthangal | Leave a comment