willclarke.net

I’ve just added Adsense ads to my Scrabble Word Finder web application. This is the first time I’ve really played with Google ads before - the ad creation process is really easy but I had a hell of a time getting my account sorted out with them. In any case, now that it’s somewhat monetized (PayPal donations are next) I think I will try and get it re-listed on Apple’s home page.

Apple has removed their link to my Scrabble Word Search app, probably because it linked to a picture of naked people playing Scrabble.

As you can probably expect, page views have dropped rapidly as a result.

I will probably grudgingly resubmit it with the link removed. But I will miss you, naked people.

I wrote my first publicly available iPhone Web App last weekend - the Scrabble Word Search. On your web browser it might not look too great, but on an iPhone or iPod Touch it is gorgeous.

The inspiration for the app came from playing Scrabble with friends at various places in public and needing to look up words. I’ve been playing Scrabulous on Facebook for a while so I’m used to using the Tournament Word List (TWL) for challenges but there just isn’t a good way of looking up words on the iPhone (Scrabulous has a lookup page but it tries to open in a new window and isn’t very iPhone friendly).

So I downloaded the TWL (along with the SOWPODS dictionary), imported them into a database, wrote a simple lookup script, a few static pages, and styled it with CSS. In four hours it was done.

I also submitted it to Apple’s Web App directory and they posted it as a Staff Pick! I’ve gotten about 6k hits in 12 hours. Not too bad for my first try.

I have some ideas for feature additions, most significantly, the ability to keep score for a game. Stay tuned!