As a few read­ers of this blog may know, I have been tin­ker­ing with iPhone devel­op­ment for about a year.  Tech­ni­cally, a bit longer than that — since the first jail­breaks and com­mu­nity SDKs — but real­is­ti­cally, with all seri­ous­ness, about a year of what I’d con­sider above “tin­ker­ing” but below “pro­fes­sional.”  In recent months, I even picked up an iPhone devel­oper cer­tifi­cate for code-signing.  At first, it was for the “gee whiz” fac­tor of run­ning code out­side the sim­u­la­tor, on a real device, but I quickly came to real­ize how close I was to hav­ing ship­pable apps.

Given that intro­duc­tion, I would like to present my first offi­cial iTunes Store app, ARG Tools (iTunes link).  It is a bit of a niche util­ity, aimed mainly toward puz­zle solvers and ARG play­ers, specif­i­cally with an eye toward live events.  For a long time, I have had a set of JavaScript-based encod­ing and decod­ing tools at stackoverflow.org.  I find them to be use­ful, but not always con­ve­nient.  I designed ARG Tools with the fol­low­ing things in mind:

Offline Use — The tools and ref­er­ence are specif­i­cally designed to work offline.  You can load the app up on your iPod Touch and run off to an event with­out wor­ry­ing about whether a WiFi access point will be available.

Count­down Timer Decoder — A com­mon theme among ARGs and trans­me­dia sto­ries is an ini­tial count­down timer.  It often acts as a buffer, allow­ing the word to spread and a com­mu­nity to build up before a game kicks off in high gear.  This tool lets you punch in the count­down value and see the exact date and time at which the count­down hits zero.

Com­mon Encodings/Decodings — The app lets you decode a num­ber of dif­fer­ent for­mats, from ROT-n (1..25) to Vigenere (that would have been crazy use­ful for that ARGFest cake) to sub­sti­tu­tion to trans­po­si­tion to base 64.

Com­mon Let­ter Rep­re­sen­ta­tion Ref­er­ence — Codes, love them or hate them, are not always trans­form­ing one let­ter into another.  Many times, they are turn­ing a let­ter into a com­pletely dif­fer­ent entity alto­gether.  I solved a puz­zle a few weeks ago in which 6-packs of beer rep­re­sented let­ters in braille.  The ref­er­ence sheets in this app include a num­ber of com­mon encod­ings like braille, Morse code, and semaphore.

Google Search - A Google search bar is always vis­i­ble on the home­page.  I admit that the app can­not con­tain every pos­si­ble encod­ing, decod­ing, or let­ter rep­re­sen­ta­tion in exis­tence.  I once had to solve a puz­zle in which let­ters were encoded as chem­i­cal names.  I solved another in which I needed con­stel­la­tion names.  An in-app Google search is a touch away.

Quick Links — ARG Tools con­tains an embed­ded browser with links to the top ARG and trans­me­dia forums and web­sites.  You can quickly get to that piece of encoded text, copy it, and paste it into the app.  In the field, you can use your iPhone to report updates from a live event.  Play­ers that may only be famil­iar with a few of the included web­sites might be exposed to new and dif­fer­ent sites.  Web­mas­ters: the main menu links all include the suf­fix “?source=iphoneargtools” if you have a fancy log­ging setup that lets you track such things.

Eas­ily Obtained — The app is small enough to be down­loaded over the air.  It is also free-as-in-beer (but I chose not to go Open Source).  This means that Per­son A can show it to Per­son B and Per­son B can instantly down­load it onto her iPhone.

Eas­ily Expanded — This is more of an “under the hood” fea­ture than a vis­i­ble one, but the main menu is just a data file (a plist, for those in the know).  It maps main menu entries (names and icons) to embed­ded “applets” (View­Con­trollers, for those in the know) for each of the types of encod­ing and decod­ing.  It maps to self-contained sta­tic web pages for the ref­er­ence mate­r­ial (braille, Morse code, and so on).  It maps to URLs for the web links.  This means it is rel­a­tively triv­ial to add new items.  This, in turn, makes updates and bug­fixes easier.

So go forth!  Down­load the app!  Tell your friends about it!  Give it high rat­ings!  More details as well as a few more screen­shots can be found at http://iphone.netninja.com/applications/arg-tools/.  If you have sug­ges­tions for how to expand its func­tion­al­ity, please share.

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Tagged as: argtools, itunes, store