Category Archives: Entertainment

You may call my newest app Congratulations Generation a joke or a linguistics exercise. For me, it’s an experiment. Or more precisely, a continuation of experience with different apps. Suffice to say, it’s my first non-game (Entertainment/Lifestyle categories). I don’t risk to launch new games before the Holidays because of high competition with top titles (downloads of my games dropped significantly during Thanksgiving for the same reason).

Well, what does the Congratulations Generator do? It creates a random six-string greeting to a friend using a “best wishing database”. There are four databases (modes) corresponding to 1) Christmas/New Year, 2) Birthday, 3) Other happy occasions (graduations, weddings, etc.), 4) the Valentine’s Day. For each mode, there are more than 1,000,000 unique combinations of strings. Some results look like real serious messages, others are funny jokes, the rest is a grammatical or semantic nonsense. I didn’t realize how difficult it is to make strings agree with each other. OK, the app is free, so nobody should be very angry. After all, I suggest to use this app as entertainment + inspiration, not as a reliable source of pre-written greetings to friends and family.

The new technology I implemented in this app is a Send E-mail button. I found the sample code online but it didn’t work properly for iPhone with iOS 7 and required thinking and tuning that eventually led not only to solving this bug but an existing bug in my apps dealing with closing UIViews in Cocos2D. It’s always nice to learn something new and useful even in such modest apps.

If users like Congratulations Generator, I’ll prepare an update with extended database and more holidays.

Acknowledgements: icons for buttons were downloaded from iconmonstr or were created with Font Awesome. The Birthday cake icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com.

Thanks!
Happy Holidays!