By and large, Double Quotes is won not with big words, but with small ones. 2 letter words particularly, will help you keep your move-average high and improve your chances of forming a quote word. Memorising the following list is probably the single best thing you could do to improve your score.

AA AB AD AE AG AH AI AL AM AN AR AS AT AW AX AY BA BE BI BO BY CH DA DE DI DO EA ED EE EF EH EL EM EN ER ES ET EX FA FE FY GI GO GU HA HE HI HM HO ID IF IN IO IS IT JA JO KA KI KO KY LA LI LO MA ME MI MM MO MU MY NA NE NO NU NY OB OD OE OF OH OI OM ON OO OP OR OS OU OW OX OY PA PE PI PO QI RE SH SI SO ST TA TE TI TO UG UH UM UN UP UR US UT WE WO XI XU YA YE YO YU ZA ZO

Your word protests have come in, and by popular demand v1.11 adds the following words to the lexicon:

BLOG, BLOGGER, BLOGGERS, BLOGGING, BLOGS, CHATROOM, CHATROOMS, EMAIL, EMAILED, EMAILING, EMAILS, ETHERNET, EXTRANET, INTERNET, INTRANET, MALWARE, MEME, MEMES, MEMETICS, QIN, SUFI, SUFIS, TEXTING, WEBLOG, WEBLOGS, WEBSITE, WEBSITES, WIKI, ZEN

I hope players are enjoying the game. I know I’ve gotten a kick out of watching my opponents improve, as they begin to realise that they are not playing Scrabble anymore. Scrabble or Words With Friends strategies will only get you so far in Double Quotes. If you ignore the quote and if you don’t double tiles, you will most likely lose.

How do I turn off the trumpet sound?

I can’t control this via software. You need to go to Settings > Notifications > Game Center and set Sounds to OFF

How do I quit a game?

Well, bear in mind it is considered bad form to quit simply because you are losing. But sometimes you will need to quit because your opponent hasn’t responded in a very long time. To do this, press the GAMES button and swipe from right to left across the game you would like to quit.

What dictionary are you using?

Double Quotes uses a custom lexicon that began with the Public Domain ENABLE wordlist by Beale and Cooper. Each update of Double Quotes will contain new words as defined by popular valid “Protests”, so please do keep sending them in. There are currently over 150,000 words in the dictionary.

How are quote words scored?

Your total move score = standard move score x 2 x number_of_quote_words_played_this_move

So for example, if you were good enough to play 3 quote words in a given move, then your total move score is multiplied by 6. As you can see, this is a great way to achieve massive move scores – even in areas of the board not commonly associated with large scores.

How do I invite a friend who is not in my Game Center friend list?

Your friend needs a Game Center account. If they have an account, ask them their account name and then open the Game Center app. Select Friends > Add Friends then type in the account name of your friend.

I’ve reinstalled Double Quotes, how do I restore my previous In-App purchase?

Well, with any luck iCloud will do it automatically for you. But if not, just repurchase the upgrade using the same Apple ID you originally used. The Apple Store will recognise your previous purchase and won’t charge you a second time.

Do you have 2 and 3 letter word lists handy?

Sure: 2 letter word list and 3 letter word list.

I’d like to report a bug

Please send as full a description as possible to the email address listed at the bottom of this web page.

Double Quotes is now available in the App store. Hooray! Now to begin my next project…

I’m really pleased that Double Quotes has passed review in the Apple app store. This comes just under 6 months after creating the first .m file. Which is a little longer than I would have liked for an iOS app, but I did have to go through the whole iOS 5 beta process which slowed things down considerably.

Even though it’s been accepted, I haven’t actually released it live. That’s because late last week I found that an intermittent bug I thought I had squashed, was still in fact alive and kicking. Sneakily sitting in the code just waiting to bite…

I have uploaded a fix as version 1.1 and now await Apple approval of the update.

And so once again I float in the weird limbo that lies between creations. I’ve some graphic ideas I want to explore, but my creative energy needs to build back up before I actually begin them. I love this time. When everything is pure potential. Pure possibility. A time ruled not by pragmatism, but imagination.

This world is but a canvas for our imagination ~ Thoreau

I’m embedding this here for inspirational purposes. Link.

Currently in the middle of a turn-based word game designed purely for iOS 5 called “Double Quotes”. This is my first iOS project that doesn’t use openGL and has proven a refreshing change of perspective.

The whole turn based word game mechanic is actually trickier than you might think at first glance, but a lot of fun to write nonetheless. It has been a revelation re just how well designed iOS API’s are and how amazingly amazing a language objective-c can be. Particularly with ARC onboard. Definitely a convert!

What a delight to finally code for a fixed platform after all these years. There’s something incredibly reassuring in the knowledge that what you are seeing as a coder is exactly what everyone else will see as well. I haven’t had that since, well, the early 90′s and the Amiga 500.

I’m currently using OpenFrameworks and a fairly icky mishmash of C++ and objective C. A lot of learning all round was required, as I’d forgotten how to write in C++ (probably not such a bad thing) and had never used XCode. So my very first “hello world” app on the iPad was preceded by hour upon hour of compiler errors and weird Apple developer certificate hiccups and randomly selected XCode options to see if it would “just work” for me. Of course if I had actually read some instructions I’m sure things would have progressed more smoothly!

Little by little, I’m starting to get my C legs back and objective C isn’t looking quite so square faced alien.

Am currently working on a screensaver with a dab of interactivity and am generally having a great time. It’s a wonderful thing to code with no real goal and no deadline/agenda. Just playing about, seeing if something looks nice and if so, keeping it and then moving on.

What have I been doing for the last 3 years?

The observant might note that my productivity in entertainment software totally nose-dived in the last few years. Why is that?

Well it all started with a loose comment at my old job, working on the front desk of a day spa. At the time, we didn’t have a decent booking system and discussing it one day I volunteered, “You know, I can do that”. Internally I was thinking, “After all, how hard can it be?”.

Well, over 300 000 lines of code later I can say with experience that perhaps, just perhaps, I underestimated the size of the project. It does all sorts of things like SMS sending, automated online backups, web status uploads, rostering, gift voucher emailing and a whole lot more. Technically it is all cross platform compliant code but in reality wxWidgets and mac cocoa have a little way to go yet, so it’s windows only for the time being. Still, I’m happy with the result and it is now in use in some of the top tier spas in Australia. Which is kind of nice.

But wow, I’m so overdue to code some visual “for the fun of it” stuff.

A quote from my favourite thinker, Terence McKenna:

In a sense, computer code is magical language. It is language which when executed, causes something to actually happen.

The context here regards language as magic as exemplified by spells, incantations (and, one could argue, prayer). This was an accepted Western worldview prior to the Age of “Enlightenment” – the period circa 17th century where logic, rationality, reason and science attained primacy.

The interesting modern development, according to McKenna, is that with the advent of computers, we have come full circle on this topic and language as magic has effectively remerged in the form of computer code. Computer languages can now perform actions of almost unlimited variety and scope: via virtual reality, entire worlds can be conjured – or via computer-machine interfaces, the material world manipulated.