Carpool Testers

So the carpool to school consists of two 5th graders, my daughter ETC (6th), and one 7th grader They are all pretty familiar with iPhone apps and one, especially, takes his iPhone apps seriously to the max.

Well they were the first to actually use the app and it made interesting listening to overhear their comments as I drove the 25 minutes to school. It was an unfulfilled challenge to actually have them play the game the whole trip -- sadly an 11 year-old doesn't have that same nostalgic pull to Alice that I hope the 45 year-olds will.

It's great to be driving at 65 MPH and hear a tester gleefully announce they froze the app. All you can do is ask them to verbally describe what the screen looks like and see if they remember what they were doing. You try to make mental notes because you know their response to this is to reset the game and launch that dang fishing game or something.

Turns out it was Apple's sound library that kept killing me. Once I replaced that, my crashes were orders of magnitude less.

The day before I submitted it to Apple, the mondo-game-player tapped ahead about 200 times which slows the game down and then it eventually died. Of course I tried to reproduce this and never could. So for all you users that can tap at 200 TPS(taps per second), you may find a bug.