We have a new client is a local mom who posts about our neighborhood. YYCMom.com shares her opinions on all things related to shopping, stores and living in Calgary as a Mom. It’s actually quite fun to read so far.
It’s really easy to use wordpress, and having a mom blogging about mom type things validates that anyone can manage and run a website with the right support (i.e. us)
That’s probably it for 2012, see you in the new year!
Every year at this time, people are frantically looking for fun games to relax with over the holiday. We here at Surje aim to please and are summarizing some of our best Holiday games for the season.
Santa’s Loot is a Free physics based game where you collect gifts on Santa’s sled. This will be the 2nd year that Santa’s Loot is available for download on your iOS device and it’s better than ever. We’ve updated it to work on iPhone5 and we hope you enjoy balancing those gifts.
For those of us less interested in Santa themed games I want to recommend our best selling word Games CryptoQuip and CryptoQuip Free. Like the newspaper puzzle, you have to solve a puzzle where each letter is replaced with another. Unlike the newspaper though you drag the letters, matches are filled in automatically and the quotes can easily be tweeted.
Finally I suggest the very original and my favorite game Word Slide. In this game you are given a grid full of letters and you slide then both directions to spell words. since we use the built in dictionary there are thousands and thousands of valid words. Make 2 at a time to get bonus multipliers. It’s a real look into your own psyche, since the world you see won’t be the same as the words someone else does…
All these games and our others are a mental word puzzle work out, and are updated for iOS6 and the newest iPhone, if you’re lucky enough to get one over the holidays. We hope everyone enjoys some well earned relaxation over the holidays, hopefully with one of our games in hand 
I have a client who insisted on the cheapest hosting possible. Despite my recommendation to go with something else, this client was persuaded to choose HostPapa, and now I have to fix my client’s site. Since the host still hasn’t figured it out I though I’d post a quick and dirty solution here.
The hack was a script, run from inside the shared hosting package. I won’t post the details here, but it went through all directories and replaced index.php and index.html files with replacements that simply said “hacked by hacker“.
Replacing those files (index.php , index.html) in your wordpress installation with fresh ones is a good 1st step, but not enough.The hack also sought out the header.php file in your theme directory. (i.e. wp-content/themes/twentyeleven/header.php). That file should be replaced with a fresh one form the wordpress installation package as well.
Voila. Your sites are now up for the time being. Good luck and may the internet have mercy on your domain so long as it’s hosted on a poorly configured host.
I checked our update stats since we released our iOS6 updates and found over 10,000 updates! I interpret that to mean that at least 10,000 downloads of our apps have remained on people’s devices.
There may be 10 thousand people playing our games on a given day. That feels pretty good. I hope you are enjoying our work, and send us bugs and feature requests so we can grow that number.
Although we have nothing in the hopper in the short term, we are patching our apps as needed, and thinking about what we will build next. We may build another game, but more likely will build a meeting productivity app. Stay Tuned…
So in the end we updated Rafter’s Loot, CryptoQuip and Santa’s Loot for iOS6! The physics games work great on the larger screen.
I’m hoping iOS6 will patch the dictionary lookup since WordSlide still works better on iOS5 (on my 4S), or that on the iPhone5 dictionary lookup works great.
I must say Apple is obviously working overtime. Rafter’s Loot Free was approved today(Sunday) and CryptoQuip was approved late one evening last week.
As for BB10, we’ve made almost 0 progress, and still aren’t sure if we’ll make the new year with an app. Time will tell.
So rather than fix my poorest performing game I decided to improve my best performing game for iOS6. We submitted updates last night and hope to take advantage of that bigger screen. Cryptoquip is sometimes a little tight, so the extra space is great.
I’m generally frustrated with this update though. Changing how rotations are handled is huge!
I may stop supporting some games since I’d be working for pennies an hour to update them…
Just a brief update from App land here in Calgary. iOS 6 lands today for the public, so I can give you my impressions as a developer.
Now it’s important to note that I’m not a full time developer as regular readers well know. We have a stable set of games out there for iOS, and we quickly tested our most popular ones last week to make sure they worked. Since everything was hunky-dorey in the simulators I turned our time to other interests, like the web development textbook I’m co-authoring.
What we we weren’t prepared for was the slow dictionary performance in Word Slide 
The game is now a little less responsive due to dictionary lookup issues. How do I know this? Well A Word Theme, is essentially the same code base, except for the dictionary usage. Holding a word in Word Theme is lightening fast as it should be while Word Slide’s performance has degraded.
Next we come to our other games. Thankfully most of them work on the new iOS6 as is, so we can relax for the most part. Rafter’s Loot though is another issue. It’s whitescreening right now, and that forces me to choose: Do I stop supporting the game altogether, or do I invest x hours into fixing it, to continue earning a trickle of cash that will work out to less than minimum wage for my efforts?
The deciding factor was that we are currently advertising Rafter’s Loot it in our other games. I’d have to patch the existing (perfectly fine) games to remove the ad as well as not support it. The efforts to do that would undoubtedly take as long, and the end result would be 1 less sku.
So, with the rest of Calgary drifting off to bed with dreams of Kofi Annan in their head, I am looking down the barrel of a long night, all to squeeze out a little more money for my family, until some better way support them comes along (maybe Blackberry 10?, Maybe my upcoming textbook?, maybe a rich benefactor?)
More “features” and form factors for you means less sleep for me
Our latest game A Word Theme is available now in the App Store.
Like Jewel Slide and Word Slide & Find, this one is build using our sliding game mechanic. This time you are given a puzzle topic and must find all the words that match that theme with all the letters scrambled. You should see updates for those two games and CryptoQuip n the coming week.
We’re working on Land Slide right now, a game that using the same sliding mechanic in a territory /settler style game, but are thrilled to see A Word Theme approved!
Happy Gaming!
So I’ve been busy the last little while, and I haven’t updated. Now that I’m on vacation from my job for the summer it’s nice to sit around with the family, doing fun outdoorsy type stuff. I’m just not sure you want to hear about it. Watched the Calgary Stampede Parade today on TV, for example.
But as we relax and play we thought of a third game to use the Word Slide and Jewel Slide framework. Called A Word Theme, this game will be similar to Word Slide and Find except you will have to find words that match a theme, rather than all alphabet words. The hard part is making levels in terms of total time. The game’s at least a week or two away, but I thoughts I update you all on what’s happening.
As an example:
A theme of “welcome words” might require you to find words like hello, hi , etc… We’re working on some good ones as I speak. I don’t want to give too many away.
Anyhow have a great stampede, and I hope to be posting again soon about the newly released game.
Word Slide and Find has been released!
Word Slide is the game where you are presented with a square full of tiles, and have to rearrange them by sliding the rows or columns. When you’ve made a word simply hold your finger on any letter and the word will be scored, and removed. If the letter is in two words you get a bonus.
This release is the culmination of a lot of work over the last months, and I seriously appreciate the efforts of anyone who helps promote this new release!