Lady Monet Gets Unskrambled

We used the artwork of old masters in the public domain since we didn't want to deal with copyrights for the first version of Skrambler. Normally copyright on the artwork exists for 70 years after the artist's death. Even then, museums and galleries can hold a copyright on the reproduction of these images. It was a lot of work trying to track down if a particular image is under copyright.

For future versions of Skrambler, we hope to work with museums and galleries to bring their collections into the game.

Un-skrambling infront of the real paintings is kind of fun. The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC is amazing, and free!

Removing the Default Shine from Icons

Apple makes it easy to create a good looking app icon. I just needed to specify a square PNG image file named Icon.png and the OS takes care of creating a rounded edge and overlaying it with a consistant shine over it.

I wanted to make my icon have a distinctive hex shape. I created a PNG with a transparency background but found that it didn't quite work because the default shading was ruining the effect. In order to remove the shading, I needed to modify the Info.plist file. This file holds the app's basic settings and is usually prefixed with the app's name, e.g. Skrambler-Info.plist. The setting for removing the shine is not available by default so it is not available in the Xcode editor. I needed to open the file in a text editor and add the following lines:

 <key>UIPrerenderedIcon</key> <true/>

Another useful setting is to hide the status bar when the app is starting.

 <key>UIStatusBarHidden</key> <true/>