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When using a Navigation Controller in a Cocoa Touch application, the framework takes care of many things, including generation of a back button when you push a view controller to the navigation controller. The back button gets the same title of the parent view, which a lot of the time is what you might want, but every now and again it's not. For example, in my cool application, the initial view has the title 'My Cool Application' - when you navigate to the settings view, the back button has the long, unwieldy title 'My Cool Application', making the button so big that it pushes the 'Settings' title to the right.

I stumbled upon this reversi game, Deep Green Reversi, which runs on Android. The graphics in the game, in particular the status bar under the board and the menus look very similar to Reversi on the iPhone. Furthermore, the game description for Deep Green on the Android market is an almost verbatim copy of the description for Reversi on the App Store, with 'iPhone' replaced by 'Android'.

Much time went into making the AI of reversi strong enough on its higher levels to challenge human players. The highest three levels (of the seven available) are challenging for most human players. On the lower levels, the intention was for it to play as a novice human would play. On the lowest level (beginner) in particular it plays for short-term gains, without considering longer term strategy at all. On each turn, the beginner level plays the move that flips as many of the opponent's pieces, taking a corner if one is available and avoiding squares that would give the opponent a corner on the very next move. This reflects the basic manner in which most novices would tend to play reversi.

Magnetic Block Puzzle is now available on the App Store for a small amount.

It's a departure from my two previous games, Reversi and Merelles, which were both abstract strategy games. Magnetic Block Puzzle is, as the name implies, a puzzle game. The aim of each of the 110 puzzles is to join the coloured blocks, which are special magnets that only stick to other blocks of the same colour, by tilting the puzzle to make the blocks move.

One of the best things about the iPhone is you can have thin fingers or fat fingers, and pressing buttons and using controls on the touch screen is still quite easy. On old-school touch screen devices (WinMob phones in particular spring to mind), one had to be very precise as the first location touched on the screen immediately triggered a touch event, which is why a stylus was almost always necessary. The iPhone takes a slightly different approach, where a touch that consists of many points on the screen (as would occur with a finger) is converted into a co-ordinate through some sort of averaging of all the points. In general this works really well. However, using this approach still requires the controls on the screen be sufficiently large that a user will be able to put a finger over it, with the average falling comfortably on the control. From my experiments, I believe a control needs to have a touch area of at least 32x32 pixels.