Adam's Game

I recently tried my hand at building a game for my two and a half year old son. The idea came to me when at the hospital, and it looked like he might have pneumonia yet again (he's had it several times this year). While sitting with him on the hospital bed, I wanted to keep his mind off all the poking doctors (and to keep him busy), and so downloaded Preschool Adventure for 99ç to my iPhone. It's a great game for his age group. I was impressed by how easy it was for my 2 and a half year old to play. Because it just involved pointing (no mouse involved on the iPhone). 

Before trying it, I honestly didn't think that I would ever feel comfortable letting him play with my phone. Afterwards I couldn't help but think about games I could make for his age group. Although designed for grown-ups, Apple has managed to build an almost perfect toy for two year olds (Perhaps they can make the next version with drool guards :) ). My first venture into this arena is Adam's Game. The game simply presents three panels and vocally asks the child to touch one of them e.g. "touch the hat". The game rewards you if you get it right by cheering, and getting several right in a row, gives an even better reward. The game lets you customize with your own pictures and sounds as well. Adam likes the game, and frequently asks to play it when I'm doing testing (He hears me playing it). Several other parents have written good reviews for it on iTunes, so it appears to have broad appeal. If you want to try it, and you have an iPhone, or an iPod Touch, here's a link to Adam's Game on the iTunes store.

Working on iTunes store integration for Save Benjis

Are you wondering what is happening here at Sol Robots? Among other things we are working on iTunes integration with Save Benjis. So you can compare the price of music at the store to what you would get on iTunes. At least that's the idea. I don't have anything to show you yet, but while playing with the technology I made this easy way to see the top 100 albums on iTunes.

iPhone App Store Experience

It's been two week since Apple released the iPhone App Store. I'm happy to report that my program Save Benjis has been there from the start. I'm also very happy that it has stayed in the top 100 free apps, and has had great reviews, both in the store and in the world at large (I post some of these in the lower left of my main page). As of last Wednesday we had over 40,000 downloads.

Though everything has not gone perfectly. I've had some serious challenges with "Save Benjis" in these last two weeks as well. Probably the hardest was losing Amazon content. It looked for a while like "Save Benjis" would have to shut down for lack of pictures, reviews, feature lists etc, but Jim (at FindersCheapers) figured out a way to keep us up and running. For the time being we've lost review content and our product details have gotten anemic, but Jim thinks we can improve this soon.

Another set back has been a couple of small issues in "Save Benjis" that are causing us not to get credit for all purchases made with the program. I have fixed the problems and submitted them for update on July 14th. They've been "In Review" for 11 days. The waiting is quite difficult for me, I must say. Particularly hard is waiting without an idea of how long I have to wait. Apparently I'm not alone though, several discussion groups have focused on this, here is one.

I guess the lesson for me is patience, this too shall pass.

I made my first T-shirts last night

In preparation for the launch of Save Benjis on Friday, I designed and bought some T-shirts. I used Zazzle.com's excellent website to do it. Here is a link to the shirt design, in case you are curious. It was quite easy, and very rewarding. We should get the T-shirts by Friday.

Maybe it's starting to work

Ok. Save Benjis has been indexed by google now, but for some reason it only shows up in the results when I type site:savebenjis.com but not when I just do a regular search for savebenjis.com and not when I look at links:savebenjis.com (not even in cache:savebenjis.com). Also it is not finding the first page and only some of the secondary pages.

Here a few things that I've done since last time to hopefully improve the results.
- Validated my html. Previously I had 3 errors that might have been causing problems.
- Added a sitemap to Google Webmaster tools for the site.
- Tweaked various Joomla settings (but I think I turned them all back).

I decided to use Joomla for the Save Benjis site because I thought it would make things easier. Certain things seem much harder (like getting indexed in Google), than writing the html by hand. I hope that as time goes on, the benefits of Joomla will outweigh the initial pain.

Weird stuff

Ok that is weird -- Solar Core has been re-indexed but no change to Save Benjis. What if I give it a clue that it needs to find the index.php file. Here goes -- Google can you find this www.savebenjis.com/index.php?

Save Benjis -- Having trouble getting in Google's search index

Getting indexed by Google has always been easy and automatic for me. For some reason my new website www.savebenjis.com has been having a harder time of it. Several websites had links to the new site as early as June 21. Google indexed those sites but failed to follow the links through to Save Benjis (at least as of July 4, 2008). The Save Benjis site is using a CMS called Joomla, and perhaps I configured it incorrectly for indexing. I've since changed a few settings so perhaps now it will work.  I guess I just have to wait for a site that links to it to be re-indexed.

As an interesting point of reference, Yahoo and MSN have both indexed the Save Benjis site already.