Knuckle Head, Take 2

Here’s a sneak peek at the soon-to-be-released iPhone version of my MMA fighter app Knuckle Head, built with Appcelerator. I chose to do the native Android version first, as it allowed me to iterate through versions very quickly, making changes as users gave me feedback. Now I can apply that feedback without having to go through Apple’s much slower approval process with each iteration.

There were 3 main drivers behind this port:

• The Android version has been rated really well so far, and I’ve had requests for an iPhone version.
• I will be joining the Appcelerator team in a week and a half, so this seemed like a great way to sharpen my skills with it.
• I was just curious how the download and ad fill rate numbers would stack up against each other with a niche app like this one on Android and iPhone.

Also, there’s a chance I will open source this and put it all up on Github once it’s approved for the Apple App Store. If there’s any interest let me know. If not, I’ll probably turn out some blog articles based on things I learned doing this port. The short version is that Appcelerator definitely has its quirks, but is in all likelihood going to be your fastest route to a quality iPhone app. I went from zero to complete port in about 20 hours of work.

And that doesn’t even get into the cross platform potential. Expect a lot of content going forward on how you can turn the “potential” of cross platform code into “actual” cross platform code using Appcelerator.

Knuckle Head for iPhone video

So here it is, in all its water-marked, sub par quality glory. You’ll have to forgive those issues, I’m currently evaluating ScreenFlow. Seems like a good tool so far, but I don’t like shelling out $99 for software without playing around with it a little bit.