Introducing Poker Royale
Poker Royale is a FREE, stylish and easy-to-play Texas Hold’em multiplayer game for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Challenge Game Center and Facebook friends to join you and climb your way up through the high stakes tables to win millions of virtual poker chips!
Poker Royale is an app that I created with 2 other developers – Ben Dowling and Mike Ross. It’s a project that’s been in development for about six months but we are finally live in the App Store and going strong!
Building a multiplayer game that can host thousands of simultaneous real users playing against each other anywhere in the world on their iPhones and iPads is no easy task! We’ve built something that really stands out from the competition and our users seem to be loving the results.
I jumped at the chance to be involved in developing a Poker app as for me this kind of project is a real mix of business and pleasure 
I play a weekly poker game with friends and have been known to dabble online occasionally. As well as being a game of skill, probability and maths, poker can be a great sociable game. We’ve worked hard to ensure it’s really easy to play and invite your friends to tables in the game and developed a fun chat experience so that you can banter with players around the poker table. It’s kind of funny when you find yourself chatting to a Russian or Japanese player though – thankfully, Poker’s a global language!
Check out the promo video we made for the app:
What Makes us Unique?
♦ Have You Made The Rich List?
Poker Royale features the most successful poker players and friends in The Rich List – a chart of the top 100 highest rollers in the game based on real-time chip counts.
♥ Social
Poker Royale leverages Facebook and Game Center social networks to instantly connect players with their friends and family by inviting friends to join virtual poker tables. Find your online friends, join their tables, send them challenges, chat messages and compare scores.
♣ Multi-table
Poker Royale is the only iOS Poker game to enable players to compete on more than one table simultaneously. Win more hands on up to 4 tables at once!
♠ Chip Rewards
Win free chips for inviting friends and playing regularly.
What Players Say…
Here are a few of the five star reviews we’ve been getting on a daily basis:
This brings back the enjoyment I got from iOS Poker before the AppStore got saturated with clones…
If you want a higher brow alternative to the popular but annoyingly slutty Zynga poker, this is a great option!
Amazing setup with multiple tables that each have their own blind value and buy in amount from 1/2 all the way to 500M/1B
Wonderfully smooth easy to use game
Works really well, clearly lots of thought has been put into this, really slick design, fast animations, and speedy between games! And looks amazing on iPad! Great job.
The best poker app I’ve found with great graphics and so easy to use. I’m addicted!
If you love poker you’re gonna love Poker Royale. Download it for free from the App Store and don’t forget to tell your friends!
60secondreviews are a new UK-based startup offering a simple and engaging proposition: concise, interesting 60 second video reviews of Movies, Restaurants, Books and Wine on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. The video reviews are delivered by industry-leading expert critics and was founded by Euan MacDonald and Nick Duncalf.
I was hired by 60secondreviews as a Consultant and iOS Developer to build an e-commerce iOS app that could deliver the video reviews, giving users a free taster of the content before enticing them to subscribe using Apple’s in-app purchase subscription model.
The content covered by 60secondreviews (Movies, Restaurants, Books and Wine) is quite broad and whereas it makes sense for Movie content to appear in the App Store’s Entertainment category, Food and Drink are more appropriate the Wine and Restaurant based content. It was these differences which led us to conclude in an early brainstorming session that by creating 4 apps, one for each product, we could divide up the content nicely across a suite of apps. Those only interested in Wine (no wino jokes please!) would be presented with only Wine reviews.
However, we’ve also connected the 4 apps by creating a custom toolbar that enables users to flip between the apps using multitasking in iOS. If an app find that you have also installed additional 60secondreview apps on the same device then it displays a launch icon for each. If you haven’t already installed the other apps then we display a download icon to enable users to download the other apps for free, making great use of in-app cross-promotion.
All of the 60secondreview apps have been built in iOS 6 and make extensive use of the new Apple components and APIs such as collection views, appearance skinning and native Facebook and Twitter sharing.
Want to know more? I’ve even got my own 60secondreview video about the development of the iOS apps and the use of iOS 6. Check it out below.
My wife is a photographer and when she meets clients she lugs about a very large portfolio case holding a selection of suitable prints for each client. The case is heavy and cumbersome. Sure, the prints are ordered but it can be a pain for her to sift through her portfolio to find particular photographs during a meeting. The situation is a similar problem for thousands of photographers and designers. Far from ideal.
The iPad
The iPad is the perfect device for photographers to present their portfolio to clients. Swiping and zooming through photos on the iPad not only looks amazing on it’s HD display, it enables professional photographers to take their entire portfolio to client meetings in a lightweight device that fits inside an A4 envelope.
Apple’s Photos App
But Apple provide a great Photos App for the iPad already so why not just use that? Here are a couple of reasons.
- What about when your private pics get mixed in with your professional ones?
- What if you want to add a title and description to each of your photos?
- What if you want to import your photos from Flickr or Dropbox and not have to rely solely on iTunes and iPhoto syncing?
iPhoto is a great app for viewing photos and videos of family and friends but when it comes to the professional photographer, you want a bespoke looking app that that looks like it belongs to you. Your Brand. Your Portfolio. Your App.
Introducing Portfolio Pro
Portfolio Pro for iPad, my latest project, is a brandable photo & video presentation app built for photographers, designers & creatives.
With batch import from Flickr, Dropbox and your iPad, Portfolio Pro gives professional users an extensive collection of ways to get their work onto the iPad. The app consists of 3 main sections: home screensaver for featured work, galleries and flippable fullscreen slideshow mode.
Portfolio Management
While Portfolio Pro imports your high res JPGs, PNGs, TIFs, GIFs, MOVs, MP4s and M4Vs you are free to simultaneously drag and drop to rearrange galleries, add names and descriptions to your work (also automatically imported from Flickr and Dropbox).
An Intuitive Experience
Having tried and tested pretty much every portfolio app for iPad in the App Store I can honestly say I think it’s rare to find a portfolio app that is both beautiful to present with and easy to use and configure. That’s exactly what I’ve set out to achieve with Portfolio Pro. Not only does Portfolio Pro look beautiful when presenting your work to clients, making changes to galleries and media is also super-simple and intuitive. Triple-tap any screen to switch between client and edit modes. Check out the video to see it in action.
I’ve set-up a dedicated website for Portfolio Pro here showcasing screengrabs of the app in action and many further details but if you’re already sold already here’s a direct link to Portfolio Pro on the App Store:
LoveThis is a Startup founded and conceived by Alexis Dormandy who won the company 2 million dollars of Series A funding before they even launched their main product, an iPhone App for sharing recommendations with your friends. Pretty impressive!
The LoveThis iPhone App enables users to share product and venue recommendations with their friends. Even friends not using the app via Facebook and email.
I was contracted by LoveThis to build the majority of the iOS app and to consult on various aspects of the App Store marketplace, native Facebook integration, online/offline Core Data syncronisation and a whole lot more.
After a lot of hard work the LoveThis team finally launched version 1 of their iPhone App a couple of weeks ago and it already appears to be stacking up a lot of 5-star reviews.
The LoveThis app makes it very easily to quickly add and share recommendations and tightly integrates with Google Places API to automatically find relevant locations to your recommendation such as nearby restaurants and bars.
The app is nice and simple to use on the surface but behind the scenes it’s powered by a complex server application that connects multiple social network identities and activity and aggregates the data right into the app. So if a recommendation is shared on Facebook both Facebook comments, LoveThis user email comments and in-app comments are all brought together into a single activity stream within the iPhone App.
It’s early days for LoveThis but I think they have an exciting 2012 ahead and I wish the team the best of luck. I really enjoyed working with them all!
Birthday Reminder for Facebook is a beautiful and useful iPhone App that will stop you from forgetting your friend and family birthdays ever again!
I built Birthday Reminder over a period of 5 development days as part of a new book that I’m currently writing for Apress/Friends of Ed publishers. The concept of the book is to teach new iOS programmers how to develop iPhone Apps by building an app from start to finish! It’s very hand-on and a great way to learn Objective C programming for iPhone.
The book (which you can pre-order here) is titled Foundation iPhone App Development: Build an iPhone App in 5 Days with iOS SDK and will be published in September 2012. It covers all kinds of iOS and Xcode features from Storyboarding to Core Data. At the moment it’s all iOS 5 but assuming WWDC announces iOS 6 this summer you can bet that the book will also cover new iOS 6 APIs.
Birthday Reminder works even when you’re offline and will fire local birthday reminder notifications based on your settings.
Import friends birthdays straight from Facebook or the iPhone’s native address book. It’s really fast and intuitive to use.
I’ve featured the app’s birthday cake user-interface and icon design in a number of presentations recently on How to Make Lickable Apps! I’m right in the middle of writing chapter 9 of my book which is all about iOS skinning techniques including the iOS 5 Appearance APIs which are a really awesome new addition to iOS SDK.
