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Electric Hands Software: News

2012-01-27, iControlPad support for Submarine Hunt 1.2.2

What good are Christmas for? To buy gifts! I was meaning to buy my father an iCADE but they don’t ship them to Spain. Even better, I found the amazing iControlPad, a bluetooth controller with even more features.

Submarine Hunt is a very simple game and doesn’t really need specific gamepad controls, but it’s just so cool! Version 1.2.2 fixes some bugs and adds in game iControlPad support. In game support means that you can use the iControlPad to move your ship, shoot depth charges and pause the game. But menu control is not possible yet.

Rewriting the menu system to work with keyboard requires much more than simply reading control input because all the onscreen menus require a movable focus for the user, and this requires graphics and adaptation to situations where the menus are not linear, and other inconveniences. It would take us much longer to do this, so we released this version first. Enjoy!

2011-12-08, Submarine Hunt back in the US app store

We are putting Submarine Hunt again on the US app store, but not the lite version, which seems to be the problem with Lodsys patents.

2011-07-17, Submarine Hunt withdrawn from US app store

Recently patent trolls have started to attack iOS/Android developers. Their reaction has been to withdraw their software from the US app store. As software developers we believe that software patents stifle innovation and are wrong at many levels. We don’t have any financial or legal power to answer to lawsuits. Therefore, we have removed Submarine Hunt from the US app store, because it contained a button which allowed users to go to the app store and buy the full version. Lodsys' broad patent seems to include that too as innovation.

2011-05-15, Submarine Hunt 1.2.1 in Català

Thanks to the gentleness and work of Juan J. Vara now Submarine Hunt is translated to Català. During the generation of the binary we did some mistake (or Apple changed something) and now the app store tells the game is only in English, but we will try to fix that as soon as possible. Remember that you can help in the translation to any language if you want to.

2011-05-04, QR codes for download URLs

Typing URLs is a bother, and if you are reading this on your computer and want to download a program with your iPhone, it gets boring to type everything again. However, if you have a QR scanner you can now scan the following QR codes for Submarine Hunt and Record my GPS position:

2011-04-16, Record my GPS position 1.3 released

We have reached version 1.3 of Record my GPS position. According to previous statistics there are about 400 users of the application. The changes since version 1.1 are:

• Added nice graphics.

• Added exportation to GPX format with accuracy tags.

Remember that you can get the source at https://github.com/gradha/Record-my-position.

2011-03-02, Submarine Hunt lite 1.2 released

We now have a lite version of Submarine Hunt. You can freely recommend the game everybody and they can test themselves if the game is worth buying. The link to the lite version is http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/submarine-hunt-lite/id422142576?mt=8. Enjoy!

2011-01-24, Submarine Hunt will be free

Together with Daily App Dream, some day of this week Submarine Hunt will be free for you to grab for a few days. Keep your eyes open.

2010-12-20, Record my GPS position 1.1 released

Version 1.1 of Record my GPS position is available for download. Version 1.0 wasn’t really useful, so it was disabled on the app store until 1.1 was approved.

This program is open source. You can check out the source code at https://github.com/gradha/Record-my-position courtesy of eFaber, who paid for the development and are friendly to open source.

2010-07-09, Submarine Hunt 1.2 released

Submarine Hunt version 1.2 has been released. The only significant change in this version is that the application detects being run on an iPad and uses 32bit color output then. iPhone applications can be scaled on the iPad, and in this mode the color dithering stands out. However, since the iPad packs more power, it works fine with more colors.

On the left you have a graphic showing the before and after on the iPad (the graphic is scaled to make the dithering more noticeable). Notice how much better the sea and clouds look.

Let’s see now if we mange to return to coding and release a lite version or some more games…

2009-12-08, Closing the shop

Since the beginning the sales of Submarine Hunt have been low. We are forced to leave the idea of developing games on our own. Aritz will keep on working as freelance artist. Grzegorz has joined the team of programmers at http://tooio.com/.

What this means is that all the improvements and other game ideas we have will likely not come true. Or if they do, they will reach you slowly as we will treat this as a hobby from now on.

2009-10-22, Promo codes giveaway

We have sent 50 promo codes of Submarine Hunt to iPhone App Reviews. If you want to get one of these, check out their web page for updates. In the following days they should publish the promo codes. Good luck!

2009-10-15, Submarine Hunt 1.1 released

Submarine Hunt version 1.1 has been released. The application launch speed was slightly improved (every little helps), there are new translations for Basque (eu) and Polish (pl) and you can now flip the game screen vertically. Some people feel more comfortable holding the device the other way round, and who are we to contradict that!

We are thinking of giving all our promo codes to the AppGiveaway website since it helped us to get some positive reviews in the App Store. However their website seems to have stopped publishing promo codes. We will make the announcement when we know more about their situation.

2009-09-20, Translate Submarine Hunt

For our next release of Submarine Hunt we are opening the internationalization of the game. If you would like to translate Submarine Hunt to your language, contact us and we will tell you what to do. There is more information on the translations page.

2009-09-09, Our own RSS feed

Finally you can keep in touch with us using your own RSS reader. Other than that we can say that Submarine Hunt is getting good reviews inside the App Store and other news sites like Touch Reviews, rating the game 4.5 out of 5 stars.

We are not going to stop here. Slowly but steadily we will bring more and more features to the game.

2009-08-27, Video channel on Youtube

We have started a video channel on Youtube were all our videos will be published. We started with a basic Submarine Hunt video and will be adding more soon. The nice thing about the Youtube channel is that it provides an RSS feed, so you can subscribe to it and know when we make a new video.

2009-08-24, Promo codes giveaway

In collaboration with the AppGiveaway website, we are offering 25 free promo codes for Submarine Hunt. These promo codes only work for people with an iTunes USA account.

The only thing you have to do to get a free Submarine Hunt game is join that web and enter the code lottery, which expires the 26th of August. Good luck!

2009-08-20, Submarine Hunt for sale

Submarine Hunt is available for sale. Follow this link to view it in the iTunes App Store.

2009-08-08, Submarine Hunt rejected

Today won’t be the big day. An email from Apple tells us that the game doesn’t follow application design guidelines. The mistake is in the button to turn on/off the vibration when you receive a hit by a mine. This button can’t appear in a program for iPod Touch since this device doesn’t support vibration.

This button was being shown even though it didn’t do anything on an iPod Touch. Apple has the corrected version. We are back to waiting.

2009-07-31, Submarine Hunt sent to the App Store

Our first application, Submarine Hunt has been sent to the Apple store. Once sent, Apple is in charge of approving or rejecting the program, and we don’t know when that decision will happen. We hope the game will be published soon. Looks like most programs sent take less than two weeks to be approved.