I was going to write this: http://www.amazon.com/none-CAR190-Labyrinth/dp/B00000ISLL

but I realized I don't have the required skills in: Cocoa, performance, accelerometers, game code, tuning, usability, Objective-C, iPhone SDK, coding, testing

Will someone write this? I guarantee I will buy it.

It exists, and it's (surprise) called Labyrinth: http://labyrinth.codify.se/

And to allay fears further down this thread, yes, the accelerometer is way sensitive enough for the game.

I wonder if the accelerometer is precise enough for that-- it seems to have a slight delay when changing orientation, but that could be lag in the software.

I'd certainly be cool, though.

I have already seen this on an iPod Touch. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the game.

given the accelerometer built-in to the iphone, that's an excellent idea. and it would probably be less work than mine, which is going to be a whole lot of coding.

Go for it. For bonus points, start a blog about writing it. Build your own iPhone development community. I'll gladly beta test it too.

It's on my list of things to play around with.

My pal Jonathan Zdziarski has written a book about iPhone development that O'Reilly will publish soon. Should be a good read.

already? did apple give him a sneak peek at the sdk?

No, he's doing it based on the open source (i.e. hacked) iPhone. He was involved in the 'jail break' stuff.

I'm also very interested in iPhone app development and think casual games such as Hearts have great potential in a mobile environment.

Why not write it as a web app? That way you won't have to port to Win/Linux and you can develop for iPhone already. Using WURFL you could also make the app available to other mobile devices.

As the iPhone stands, with a web app your user interface options are limited to onclick(). No drag, no drop, no respond to the touch to give feedback, nothing until until the finger is removed and you get the click.

Compare this to just the first few seconds of iPhone experience...

  1) Press button to turn on. (no buttons for you)
  2) Slide to unlock. (no sliding for you)
  3) Enter unlock code, notice how the buttons highlight as you touch them. (no highlighting for you, no click feedback)
  4) Touch an icon to run it, notice the feedback highlight (no highlighting for you)
  5) Kept my finger down too long, icons are now jiggling (not for you, no notion of how long the finger was down)

I took that limit as a challenge and wrote a sudoku player that is designed for click-only. I enjoy the interface more than the traditional web sudokus to the point where I won't play them anymore, but it is limited. I don't support marking (I don't mark) and cheating is trivial (I don't cheat), but within those constraints it is a peaceful user experience.

http://sudoku.lunarware.com if you want to peek

Finally a sudoku that is fun! When I played it, it just filled in the correct numbers wherever I clicked. Solved the puzzle in no time - I feel so smart now ;-)

i've never heard of WURFL before, so i googled it, and it sounds interesting. not really up my cup of tea, though. i think you can get a much richer user experience by writing native Mac and iPhone apps, which i intend to do.

Hopefully the SDK will let you do lot's of nifty stuff like pick who you want to play against from the contacts or detect gestures. Plus the app can work offline, the major downside to iPhone/iPod Touch apps.

i'm not sure how you could pick a network player from your list of contacts. you need to establish a tcp/ip connection; how do you go from a phone number to an ip address?

my idea was to use udp broadcasts to detect other people on your local network who are running copies of the game. if you want to play against somebody who's not on your local network, you'd have to enter a hostname or ip address.

Or have a centralized server, a la Xbox Live, Battle.net, etc. If users of the game "sign in" to the server, than anyone can connect to anyone.

Plus, your phone's contacts typically have iChat contacts associated with them, so if done well, the system could match up based on phone number and/or ichat screen name, and be able to find mobile and desktop clients of your friends.

I've been putzing with my iPhone for a couple of weeks now. I'm messing around with OpenGLES, UIKit, and the accelerometer.

Does anyone out there know how to get multitouch input in an objc app? I don't want to sit around experimenting with the crap in UIKit/ to figure it out.

You should implement your idea!

Check out UIView-Gestures.h, http://www.hackint0sh.org/forum/showthread.php?t=20448, and http://code.google.com/p/iphonedoom/wiki/GestureEvents.

I love GUI design.

The mobile-safari web-app I built: http://poptakeout.com

Contact me through wademeredith.com if you need a graphic designer. (I can provide more design examples, as well.)

I've been wanting to do some native-mac stuff for a long time.

Would love to see more samples.. See my userinfo for what I'm working on...

that's very pretty! i'll send you an email, once i get some other stuff out of the way today

poptakeout looks very professional and clean!

We are doing IPhone development. Its a web app. To the best of my knowledge, there is no official SDK available (yet) to build native IPhone apps. Is there any specific reason why you want to build a native app?

Perhaps building a framework to make networking games easier would be fun for you?

i've already got all the networking code ready to go. would anybody here use such a framework?