The truth is that I never really went anywhere.  I have been staying busy with Android development and have more or less learned what I need to know for iPhone development.

I maintain a full time job as a Mobile Software Engineer at a company where I have been employed either full time or as a contractor for the past 6+ years.  I wrote our Android app and I maintain our iPhone app.  Objective C and Xcode is a beast, it feels very different that developing Java with eclipse or even C++ with Visual Studio, but that isn’t a problem.  Over the past year and a half I have become comfortable doing whatever it is I need to do with iOS programming and have released some good updates to our app.

I have not released a new Android app under snctlnSoftware in years, that will be changing very soon.  However, I have been keeping busy with Android programming beyond my day job.  Last year I took a contract to develop a port of an iOS program and I find the finished product to be a very usable and handy utility.

Recently I started a new project for my friends over at ThePowerbase, an Android app that lists their stories, basically a nice looking wordpress RSS feed reader.  It is shaping up to be a good project, and as always with my code I am implementing it as an Android library.  The current state of the library is that it works with just about any WordPress site, just add a few images and use the library t compile a good looking Android app that presents your WordPress site content in a visually appealing manner.  I even plan to make use of the library to produce an app for this site, snctln.com

Here is what my developers console shows as of today (Tuesday Feb 16, 2010)

Over 1 million people have downloaded this game, and half of them still have it installed on their phone

Yes, this is a free version of a paid game that sells for $1.99, but no, 1 million free downloads does not equal a super phat paycheck that I can retire off of.  I won’t release the specific number but BreakTheBlocks Full has sold between 5,000 and 10,000  copies, which are the numbers that you would find if you were reading the information about the game on the Android Market on an actual device.  So in other words less than 1% of the people who downloaded this game, and less than 2% of the install base, have decided to pay for the full game.  That is fine, I appreciate all the people that have bought the full version and welcome any and all new users.

Last week I also managed to quit cold turkey one of the most addictive substance on the planet, World of Warcraft, and in celebration of these 2 achievements I decided it was time to update my website and start working on some new Android projects.

I have already started on my next Android game, expect it to be coming out late March/early April.   What is it?  Well you will just have to wait to see.

Thank you to everyone who has downloaded this game, I hope to continue to bring fun games with mass appeal to the Android platform.

The changes are relatively minor. Both games were updated to support more phones by building against the 1.6 SDK but setting the minimum SDK to 1.5, so 95% of Android users should now have access to these popular games, including HTC Tattoo users.

Also WordWrench users should no longer have issues with the bottom row of buttons being cut off, I believe this was due to my last build being incorrectly build against Android 1.1