Dotmatics Elemental – iFunBox – Doodle vs. Minimalist

Yesterday I took a break from blogging here because I was busy with real-life tasks and didn’t have much to say about app development. Since almost nobody reads these posts, I feel free to use blogging as an exercise in writing. Seriously, it’s the most significant piece in English I’ve written since the defense of my Ph.D. dissertation.

Three things to talk about today. First, I decided that chemical formulas in the amino acid app will be drawn in the Dotmatics Elemental editor. It’s available for free as an iPad app, though I’ll use the ChemSpider website. Sadly it was designed first of all for searching substructures and lacks several important features (I can’t specify the functional group or add a text box; charges are not circled as I like). But the results are beautiful and I’ll figure out how to get the graphics I want with a little help of the Gimp editor. I can start drawing the structures right away, but I want to set the best size, orientation, and so on.

Second, the file manager iFunBox was a surprising discovery (thanks, L.). It’s not available on the App Store but you can download a version from Mac, connect your iPad or iPhone and browse the files in the apps. Contrary to what I thought before, those files are not archived, encrypted, or protected from viewing and sometimes from editing. For example, you can set 999 gold coins in a game where you are supposed to buy them for real money or earn by long playing. It sounds like cheating but it seems that big game developer don’t care about this hole. Nevertheless, it poses a question whether I should encrypt the data in my apps. Now I’m leaning that it’s too much trouble and work to bother myself.

Third, I read about the game called Blendoku on iPhones.ru today. It’s not a sudoku-type game but it’s very simple puzzle, exactly from the category “color points in the black field”. I’m not going to play it myself but it’s very popular that again make me doubt if a doodle design with a story is better than a minimalistic design with no story. I’m working on two games now. For one of them, I’ve planned a doodle design with fruits and monsters. Wouldn’t it be simpler to use just abstract geometric figures on the grid?