Have Skills, Will Travel Charles Armour

Device Testing

This evening I purchased an iPod Touch to test our applications on.  If you’re looking for a good alternative to the $600+ iPhone from AT&T, the iPod Touch 2G can be had for around $240 locally and $215 online (8GB models).  The majority of the hardware is identical to the iPhone, so there are few performance or look and feel differences.  Highly recommended, especially since it worked out so well for me.  Sadly, the iPod does not have GPS capabilities, so it won’t work to test applications that require that.

After going through the ADC iPhone process to enroll the iPod and get all the development certificates set up and enrolled, I started up iLostMyMarbles for the first time and was amazed at how well Apple’s development cycle is put together.  I have been developing on the iPhone Simulator, which is fine for your basic application but does not simulate the performance of the actual device.  Graphics performance is the real unknown, which is critical to a game like iLostMyMarbles.

I’m glad to report that I only had one performance issue with the iPod hardware, which was related to a tracing text each frame.  I disabled that in favor of a simple shadow and saw no other bugs or issues at all, so we’re on track for our first release.