WWF Words Not In Scrabble

May 2, 2011 John Blanco Uncategorized

I’ll be soon pushing out a word training app that works with both Words With Friends and Scrabble. Just for fun I ran a query of all the words WWF allows that Scrabble doesn’t. Here they are.

For what it’s worth, most of them *really* are in Scrabble, but they took “potty” words out a while back because some religious zealot objected to POOS being in the OSPD. :-) There is a separate word list for those.

The most notable words to remember here are all the 2-letter words, especially GI, and ZEN as well, which is famously not in the OSPD.

DA,DI,FI,GI,
ABO,DUX,EMF,GOY,KED,LEZ,POM,POO,VON,WOP,YID,ZEN,
ABOS,AFRO,ARSE,BIGA,DAGO,EMFS,FART,GOYS,HEBE,HEMI,ITER,
JISM,KIKE,LEDE,MICK,OFAY,PEED,PISS,POMS,POOS,POOT,RORT,
SHAT,SHIT,SPAZ,SPIK,TURD,TWAT,UGLI,WANK,WIFI,WIKI,WOPS,
YIDS,YOYO,AFOAM,ALURE,BIRDY,BLING,BOCHE,BOKEH,BUBBY,CHODE,
DAGOS,DARKY,DIKEY,DIXIE,DYKEY,EBOLA,FARTS,FATSO,GOYIM,HAFIS,
HAOLE,HEBES,HONKY,INBOX,JANKY,JISMS,KIKES,LEZZY,LIPAS,MERDE,
MICKS,MIRID,MULTI,NANCE,NANCY,NESTY,NOOKY,OFAYS,POMMY,POOED,
POOFS,POOFY,POOTS,POOVE,PUDGE,SHITS,SKIMO,SPIKS,SQUAW,SYRAH,
TURDS,TWATS,UGLIS,VOXEL,WANKS,YOYOS,ABRAID,BADASS,BALLSY,BOCHES,
BOHUNK,BOOBIE,BOWTIE,BUCKRA,CONURE,DAGOES,DARKEY,DARKIE,DICKED,
EQUIPT,FARTED,FATSOS,GOOGLE,GOYISH,GRINGO,HAOLES,HOISIN,HONKEY,
HONKIE,JESUIT,LEZZES,LEZZIE,LIBBER,MERDES,MIRIDS,NANCES,PAPIST,
PEEING,PISSED,PISSER,PISSES,PITTER,POMMIE,POOING,POOTED,POOTER,
POOVES,POPERY,POPISH,SHIKSA,SHIKSE,SHITTY,SKIMOS,SQUAWS,TEXTED,
TOMMED,VOXELS,WANKED,WANKER,ABRAIDS,ASSHOLE,BAZOOMS,BLOWJOB,BOHUNKS

Throw Scrabble Strategy Out The Door In WWF

April 30, 2011 John Blanco Uncategorized

A couple weeks ago I finally got to installing Words with Friends (WWF) on my iPhone while stuck at one of those counter tables facing a wall at a Smashburger with some co-workers.

Can I get a window, please?

Anyway, I’ve dabbled in competitive Scrabble and am one of those guys that studies word lists on occasion so it was natural and inevitable I’d give WWF a try. I hadn’t played much of the game since Hasbro kicked Scrabulous off of Facebook and replaced it with a heaping, steaming pile of crap version instead. (Hasbro’s official Scrabble version *and* the new Scrabulous, Lexulous)

While WWF is far closer to Scrabble than Lexulous became (Lexulous has 8-tile racks), the strategy is far different because of one simple change that many casual players may not even recognize and I want to share a few tips about it. :-)

The Secret is the Hotspots

So, how do we put this? Well, one of the most important Scrabble strategies is rack management, and the same applies in WWF. If you’re forming words with “good letters” and leaving yourself “bad letters,” you’ll lose quickly in either sport. What’s changed is what those good and bad letters are.

In Scrabble, a 7-letter play (AKA bingo) nets you a +50 point bonus. In WWF, however, it’s only +35. Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal as you’d guess it would only lead to lower overall scores for both players, but it’s another difference that’s key here.

The hotspot arrangement on a WWF board is vastly different than on a Scrabble board.

Let’s take a look at each of them:

The Scrabble board has an X arrangement of hotspots.

The WWF board has a diamond arrangement of hotspots.

Take a few minutes and study the two boards. You’ll notice that:

• …in Scrabble, it’s impossible to hit a TL and TW in the same play.
• …in Scrabble, extending to a TL does not set up a TW play.
• …in Scrabble, the TL boxes are much further apart.
• …in Scrabble, the TW are at the corners of the board, encouraging more spread.

Some may see the differences as minor, but if you’ve played both you’re no doubt realizing that a WWF board gets closed far faster and more often than a Scrabble board. By close, I mean that parallel plays make it harder to find places to lay down a word.

So, what does this all mean?

Your Rack Is Too Big

Sorry, Dolly. 7-letter plays are dead in WWF. In Scrabble, the occasional “bad letter” drop was fine if you thought you could lay down a bingo on the next turn. So, perhaps your rack was SATIREX. Your best play would most likely be dropping the X, hopefully on a hotspot, and using just about any letter you got back to go for a 7-letter play with a +50 point bonus!

Not so in WWF. You’ll find the board is more closed. I’ve personally had countless bingo’s I simply could not put down. At first, I would be angry at the board and think my opponent lucky. Not anymore. It’s the norm, not the exception. Get used to it!

That’s not to say you shouldn’t look for bingo plays, it just means you shouldn’t be holding out for them, and by far you never, ever want to find yourself with a rack of “good letters” that all amount to 1 and 2 point tiles! You simply can’t score enough points to stay in the game against a good player.

A Nice Rack

A nice rack in WWF is a mix of what in Scrabble you’d dub as good and bad letters. You want some bad letters because they have higher point values and since you’re not going for bingo’s like you do in Scrabble, you need to maximize your points in a typical play. Here were some ideal racks in Scrabble (you’ll find the infamous bingo stems in many of them):

• TISNEBA
• RITSAEN
• AELNISH

The good letters are the ones that make connecting words easy and appear often. Remember, you get that +50 point bonus for bingo’s and since Scrabble words, on average, score less than in WWF, it’s often the difference between winning and losing.

In WWF, though, here are what ideal racks tend to look like:

• HKAISEB
• XEEEERI (can you guess why?)
• AMREHVI

The difference is that in the Scrabble racks you’re mentally putting together longer words. (All three racks have at least one 7-letter bingo.) In the WWF racks, you have a mixture of some hard-to-use letters, but they’re 4+ points each.

Take HKAISEB for example. There is not a single word over 5 letters in this, but you’d likely do massive damage in WWF with words such as BIKES, HIKES, BAKES, SHEIK, BEAKS, or SHAKE. The reason is that the BHK are each 4+ points and you can easily combine them. Drop a B on a TL hotspot and the whole word on a TW and you’re already at about 40 points!

Simple Rack Management

So, as I’ve laid out, the key to WWF is to keep a mix of big scoring tiles with good connecting letters like AEISRT. Now what?

Well, what I like to do is deal with two-letter pairs. If I have one of the pair, I tend to wait for connections later. For example, C can be a hard letter to use. It often starts words, but within a word you generally only see it paired with -H and -K if not an -E. So, if I have an H and some choices, I tend to hold it so I can pair it with a -C or -G. (Take a minute and think of all the words you know that have, but don’t start with an H, and also have no C. Not easy. Now add C to make CH and think again.)

In fact, this is a great way to manage your rack physically when looking for a play. Pair letter combinations together and words magically appear. Given the rack KIOICJT you might feel a bit down, but the simple rearrangement into CKIOIJT instantly makes JOCK, TICK, and TOCK appear. By combining into CK, you’ve turned your 7-letter rack into a 6-sound rack and it’s obviously much easier to work with.

In any given play, limit your distribution of the letters. Don’t make plays like EAR that eliminate your connecting letters for low scores, it’s a double whammy. Correspondingly, don’t drop multiple high-point tiles on empty spots unless there’s a TW play included. You might as well throw the tiles away than give them up for practically nothing. The average player knows to lay down XI as a parallel play with X on a DL or TL and score 50 or 60 points with just 2 tiles, so if you’re playing AXES and the X is not on a hotspot you’re doing it wrong if you only get 11 points for it!

With your rack combination of high-point and good connecting letters, simply stay focused on the hotspots, lay down your big-point letters on em, connect the other letters around them and watch the fireworks. :-)

Hope you enjoyed this blog. But, hey, while we’re here, want to play some WWF? You can find me @ ZaBlanc.

Shmoozing with Fish the Mouse

April 27, 2011 John Blanco Uncategorized

While Rapture In Venice is technical consulting I do in addition to full-time mobile work during the day, that doesn’t mean I can’t take it three levels deep and rendezvous elsewhere, right?

Since early October 2010, I’ve joined up with the dads of Fish the Mouse Media to work on what’s become our newly released Animal Alphabet HD. How this came about is kinda crazy.

On September 29th, I got this unsolicited email from Paul Millman, Chief Chipmunk of FTM (no, really, that’s his title):

John, we’re looking for an iphone/ipad developer, who is also a dad, to join our new two-member company Fish The Mouse Media.

…

My expertise is not only in the creative and architectural process of developing apps, but also marketing and as a business manager. For Old Mac HD each interactive scene was hand-painted on canvas by internationally acclaimed artist Norm Magnusson (work in MOMA permanent collection), and original renditions of the Old Mac song were recorded in English by pop vocalist Jill Sobule, and in French by Dominique Durand of the indie band Ivy. All of this was produced under my direction.

Our second app, The Animal Alphabet is now ready for to go and we’re looking for a developer for this app…

The developer on their original app couldn’t commit the time for the new app and he was looking for someone who could do the job.

The email couldn’t have come at a better time. I was mired in a nightmare project at EffectiveUI and I had no current contract work going on with RIV. I got back to Paul and eventually asked to see the specs for Animal Alphabet. I was floored! The app was fully designed — AND HUGE! A 36-page PDF full of graphics and specs. As excited as I was to take this project on, I was terrified of the time commitment I would have to make.

I spent a few days considering whether to join up or not. I actually put together an implementation plan of how I was going to accomplish it so i could determine if I should. The big decision was whether to dive into Cocos2D or stick to the iOS SDK. I’d always wanted to learn Cocos2D and even hit up some 360 iDev talks, but it was a risky technical decision to have to make considering my lack of experience. I was able to get a look see at their previous app, Old MacDonald HD, and was horrified at the work the previous developer had to do to get a far smaller set of animations to work. Using the UIKit was even riskier!

No wonder he wasn’t going to commit to this one. :-)

Ultimately, I decided to go the Cocos2D route and take the project! I still remember the excitement of the early days when I got the Angelfish working (it’s the first letter page — being A and all) and seeing it run on the iPad. I knew I’d made the right choice and was glad to have it confirmed. And every letter after that got more and more fun, but wow what a lot of work.

It’s been a tough road. Just a few weeks after taking it on, Michele (5 months pregnant at the time) went on bedrest for 3 months and I had to simultaneously juggle a full-time job, contract work (I took on two more projects in addition to AA), and take care of our two young kids while Michele was basically bed-ridden. I even came close to quitting the project a couple times simply because I was going insane.

It was all worth it, though. I hope that if you treat your kids to it, they’ll love it, but not only that, I hope you love it, too!

A little note on how it’s done…

For the developers out there who may be curious about the technology behind Animal Alphabet HD, here’s how it’s done…

The core architecture is Cocos2D, an excellent animation library for iOS that was originally ported from Python. The API is well-designed and makes coordinating a huge assortment of sequenced animations a piece of cake. (If you haven’t used Cocos2D, I assure you that someone needs to port the Actions API to UIKit!)

In addition, I use iBoost, a sidekick iOS library I’ve led development on that adds all sorts of useful categories and macros to the base SDK. Highly recommended of course. ;-)

And, of course, there’s Flurry for analytics. We’re keeping track of what the most popular letters are. So, for example, if you keep navigating to Q, you’ll probably see more jumping animals in future iterations. ;-)

In terms of Cocos2D construction, every letter is its own scene. They’re all based on a common scene that implements much of the shared functionality. Each letter scene has the bird game where you get the letter flag into the magic hat using the iPad’s accelerometer. The letter navigation selector is shared across all the scenes as well, reattaching as you go.

I also had to wrap the SimpleAudioEngine so that I could stop all sounds when a letter scene exits while keeping the background music playing. (Cocos2D doesn’t have a stopAllSoundEffects call that’s separate from the background music.) I was really impressed with how you construct animations, though. Sequences and parallel actions, just like my old friend, Flex. :-)

And there you go. Animal Alphabet will see updates, including an eventual port to iPhone, in the future. Can’t wait.

Top 10 Annoyances XCode 4 Fixed For Me

April 4, 2011 John Blanco Uncategorized

XCode 4 is a radically subtle re-think of the XCode interface. The biggest changes are the switch to a single view as well as the overall workflow for running and deploying apps to the App Store.

Here are some of my favorite improvements over XCode 3.

1. Hitting Run while looking at an IB file.

I’ve done this more times than I care to admit. Bring up a XIB, makes some change, and now I want to run the simulator and I hit Command-R and oh wait no but it’s too late. The simulator runs and shows some usually-whacky screenshot of the XIB file. Useless. Now I have to click on XCode and Command-R again.

Probably happens to me twice a day.

With XCode 4, Interface Builder is integrated with XCode and there is no longer an ability to “Run XIB.” Happy news.

2. iPhone Simulator switching to iPad

This has never historically been a problem, but if you’ve used XCode 3 in the last few months, this bug crept in and IS THE RUINER OF LIVES.

Basically, the problem is that for various reasons, some known and some unknown, the default simulator will switch to the last on the list. For example, a couple months ago, I was working on an iPad app and every few runs or so the simulator would switch to iPad. It *always* happened after a clean. What was even more frustrating is that I finished that project, got a new XCode update, and the problem had reversed! So, I found myself doing iPhone work and frequently have the iPad simulator pop up. JEEBUS!

I think this was a secret ploy by Apple to get us all to move to XCode 4. Well, it was a big reason, honestly. :-)

3. Wading through 100 windows.

Several times a day I wanted to look at a specific window I had open, perhaps a certain line was highlighted or perhaps I forgot the filename and just needed to find that particular window. And that’s when you realize you have several dozen windows open. (Project, Console, 6 code windows, search, 2 XIB’s, errors window, ARGGG!!!)

XCode’s new single-view interface keeps things nice and clean, though you can still double-click to open a file in its own window. It especially cleans up Interface Builder, since each one of those files had two of its own!

4. Escape in the middle of code.

This one happened to me a dozen times a day.

Let’s say you have a line of code and perhaps its a call to open a UIAlertView. The arguments have gotten a little munged and you want to see the method’s parameter list again but you don’t want the text inserted into the editor. You move your cursor to halfway in the text “alertView” and hit escape and — nothing. There had to be at least a space after your cursor for it to complete.

Hooray! XCode 4 no longer has that prohibition. Now you can use autocomplete like a handy reference.

5. Using four apps (XCode, Finder, Chrome, App Loader) to release an app.

Fuck that.

XCode 4 lets you build and deploy directly from XCode. Thank the freakin’ gods.

6. Constantly losing the IB Objects window.

This drove me batty. Open up a XIB, make some changes. Then, do some code. Come back to the XIB, and 9 times out of 10 the objects window is hidden somewhere. Most times you can click the IB icon in the dock and you get it again, but it as simply obnoxious because it occurred all day.

Again, the single-view interface alleviates this. Sort of. The objects view is collapsable which can be construed as becoming “lost.” The good news is the collapsed view is very handy and saves space. Try it condensed and see!

7. Losing Console output every run.

Ever run an app, get some console output that maybe showed a crash or something. You go to fix it but if you re-run the app, the console clears. i tend to program quickly, so it’s usually not what I wanted. The only way around it was to copy-and-paste the console output, which is way too manual for my tastes.

XCode 4 retains console output for each run. Simply go to the Log Navigator (Command-7, tho I remapped to Option-7) and see all the output for your runs as well as builds! Thanks, Apple!

8. Changing three items just to run a different target.

This one isn’t always a problem, but can sometimes be. In fact, it was so obfuscated, I can’t even strictly remember the naming scheme. Basically, if you had a couple targets in your project, and wanted to switch, you had to change the target *and* … *and* something else. I can’t even remember it was so stupid. :-)

In XCode 4, the schema system is, at first, a little too involving. But, in a short time you clearly see that it’s bundling all these options into one. Very easy to switch targets now!

9. Multi-View Counterparting

I didn’t realize this was a problem until I got XCode 4. In general, when you editing a *.m file and had to change the *.h you’d hit Command-Option-Up. That doesn’t work anymore in XCode 4 and is one of the top annoyances. (Muscle memory is a bitch. They changed it to Command-Control-Up and you can’t switch it back in XCode, you’ll need to remap.)

Now, in XCode 4, the recommended way to do it is to bring up the Assistant with Command-Option-Enter. It will show you the current file’s counterpart. So, if you’re looking at a *.m, it shows you a *.h, and vice-versa.

Now, I keep the Assistant open all the time, in a smaller pane than my main file, and also hide my Navigator (I mapped the key to Option-~) so I have maximal wide-screen space enough to show the *.m and *.h side-by-side. It works nicely, and if I change to a different source file, it loads both for me automatically.

10. A Cleaner Navigator

The old project navigator was too bulky. Aside from your source code and other files you expected to be there, there was also:

• linked projects
• executables
• old searches
• products (and this still is, grrrrr…)
• etc.

Still not sure why Products is still there. So useless. If you want to change anything about the project, executable, targets, etc. simply select the project at the top and a tabbed system will show you. It works great and keeps everything much cleaner!