Game Over - End of the Trivially Era in the iOS App Store… (and now open sourced!)

What’s the average lifespan of an iOS app?

Our Trivially app first appeared in the iOS App Store on 6/30/2011. This version relied on Bluetooth for communication with players, requiring the use of the companion Trivially Remote app.

Frankly, it worked just OK… but Bluetooth wasn’t really suited for what we were trying to do with it.

A complete rewrite ensued, moving to a web page-based experience for players that communicate with the iPad console app via Web Sockets. This version first appeared in February, 2012.

It supported in-app purchase of additional trivial contests, and a completely new UI design, designed around the fabulous and fun art of Ed Fotheringham.

Six more updates followed, adding the ability to download custom contests created in Google Spreadsheets. The last update, 2.6.5, appeared in the App Store on 2/22/2015.

It was challenging, and fun, to figure out how to deliver a web-based experience to as many remote players as possible; the solution we settled on was to serve the web experience from the Trivially app; the app includes an embedded web server (based on Cocoa HTTP Server), with player responses from the web page communicated back to the app with very low latency via Web Sockets. It works pretty well!

Somewhere in there, based on requests from a number of customers, we offered Trivially Pro.

Like Trivially, Trivially Pro allowed customers to create contests with their own questions and answers. However, Pro took this one step further, allowing customization of the appearance of the app: colors, photos, video, text, fonts, and so on. For the initial version of Trivially Pro, we worked with a customer who had a set of very specific requirements in mind; as we figured out how to support their requirements, we made sure to generalize the capability so that all customers would benefit. We think that as a result of this close collaboration from the start, the initial version of Pro, which appeared in the App Store on 7/20/2014, was an especially robust app.

Unfortunately, we never got around to adding multi-user capability to Trivially Pro… it started as a single-user experience and stayed that way. The intention was to scale beyond Trivially, which requires users to be on the same Wifi network as the iPad and limited the number of users to 11. We actually spent quite a bit of time exploring high-scale options for a multi-user experience, and settled on using Firebase. We probably got to about 70% of a complete implementation, but never completed it. We think that a Firebase-powered Trivially Pro app should have been able to scale to about 20-30 users on a new iPad (and higher on newer iPad Pros).

We’ve heard from many customers over the past 6 years; it was gratifying to hear how our apps were used in schools, bars and restaurants, community gatherings, conferences and companies, for trivia nights, to help teach kids, entertain wedding guests, kick off business meetings, or draw in convention-goers.

However, as the code base enters its 7th year, as we face the fact that a new round of investment is needed to keep the apps competitive and modern… we’ve decided to retire them from the App Store. It’s unfortunately, but we’d rather make a clean exit than risk exposing customers to a poor experience.

We also decided to share the source code on GitHub (Trivially, Trivially Pro), in the hopes that someone might find something useful or interesting there. The GitHub repositories aren’t complete; for instance, the graphics assets aren’t there. But 35k lines of CoffeeScript you’ll find there that represent the core of the apps might be interesting to browse, or learn from. We hope it helps someone!

Thanks to everyone who helped make these apps a reality… many people helped directly, and many helped in any number of small but significant ways, along every step of the way.

And thank you to our customers, who provided great feedback and showed us how our apps were injecting some fun into everyday events.

Problems with the new Google Drive Spreadsheets when publishing your Custom Trivia Pack?

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For reasons known only to itself, Google broke Trivially’s Custom Trivia Pack feature when it started rolling out the latest version of its Google Spreadsheet service.

In previous versions of Google Spreadsheet, you saw these options when you “published” your spreadsheet (as outlined here):

In particular, note the options under “Get a link to the published data”… Google offers options to publish the data as an HTML page, a CSV file, or in other formats.

As Google rolls out the latest version of Spreadsheets, this is what you might see instead:

Note that there is no option to control the format of the published data. This confuses the current version of Trivially.

We’re working on a fix for this, but in the meantime, here are some workarounds for this problem:

Make a copy of an existing spreadsheet and modify it for your Custom Trivia Pack
Click on this link to create a new spreadsheet in the old format: http://g.co/oldsheets. This is an undocumented capability that Google provides, perhaps to assuage their guilt at breaking Trivially. Note that you’ll need to be signed into your Google account to make this work.

We apology for any inconvenience this has caused. We wish Google had (i) announced their intention to drop this much-used capability and (ii) provided a new way to accomplish the same result. So far, Google has not acknowledged that they removed this capability and have not documented any workaround. It’s been crickets.

Trivially 2.6 - Now, with more cowbell*

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A really rewarding aspect to shipping Trivially is hearing how people are using the app, especially the Custom Trivia Pack feature. Lately, we’ve heard about large and small companies creating their own trivia packs for internal and external events, and a number of schools and church groups working up fun quizzes and study guides in the form of custom trivia packs.

And we’ve also been hearing from folks who build their own custom trivia packs for use in pub trivia night events: run Trivially on an iPad connected via cable to a flat screen (details on this page) or, via AirPlay, project it to an Apple TV box connected to a flat screen. Run Trivially in the background during the day, or as part of an active contest at night.

Which brings us to this new release, version 2.6. Really, only one major new feature comes to life with version 2.6. In previous versions, the number of seconds you could choose to display a question ranged from 10 seconds to 30 seconds, in four increments,. Now, the upper limit is 9 minutes, 30 seconds, with a number of steps in between. That’s literally 9 more minutes of fun per question at your disposal!

This is what the upgraded “Time Per Questions” option looks like on the Start Page (in the oval):

We added this feature because we’ve heard from pub trivia players that 30 seconds might not be enough time for some of the (presumably tricky?) custom trivia packs they were putting together. Enjoy!

PS: in case this doesn’t make sense to you, see this.

PPS: there’s a little present in this version of Trivially… we’ve let slip through a little bug that might just be worth your time to try to find, especially since it involves a cool feature that typically costs MONEY but is now FREE - at least until we can ship a fix through the Apple App Store. Can you find it?

Trivially and iOS 7 - new version available!

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As of right now (Thursday, October 3, 2013 - 4:50pm PST), a new version of CrowdGame Trivially, version 2.5 - is available in the Apple App Store (at least, in the US store - with more to roll out within hours).

This version requires iOS 7. We made dozens of fixes and minor improvements and upgrades to ensure a high-quality experience with iOS 7.

Download Trivially v2.5 from the App Store here.

Please give it a whirl and let us know what you think… we’d love to hear from you!

Trivially and iOS 7 (Part 1)

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This is the first of two posts detailing our plans for supporting CrowdGame Trivially on iOS 7.

Wrapping our heads around iOS 7

We’ve been using early versions of iOS 7 for a while now, and are excited about most of the decisions Apple made about how to move iOS forward, from an end-user experience perspective.

However, now that Apple has changed the operating system, the apps must follow. For the most part, existing apps should mostly run as-is under iOS 7 (as to why “mostly”, see below regarding Trivially).

However, Apple’s vision and intention is that app developers follow Apple’s lead with the new design; Apple would be happiest if all existing apps were updated to use iOS 7’s new features and design overnight. Based on its experience with previous releases, Apple expects the vast majority of its iOS users to upgrade to iOS 7 within weeks. It’s really astonishing how quickly the millions of iPhone, iPad, and iPod users take up Apple’s major new iOS offerings.

To that end, we’ve been working to figure out where and how we should change Trivially to adapt/adopt to iOS 7’s new design and capabilities. Generally speaking, the changes are fairly specific and targeted, since Trivially is a fairly customized full-screen experience. And a bit of the work is “under the hood”, where the magic happens.

As of this writing, we’ve identified the backlog of work that has to be done, and have made good progress on doing the work. And so, we thought we’d share what we know so far.

The current version of Trivially, 2.3, runs “mostly” fine on iOS 7

The first thing we did was test the current version of Trivially on iOS 7. The good news is that it works fine EXCEPT: sound does not work. So, if you can live without sound for a while, please continue to enjoy version 2.3 of Trivially once you upgrade to iOS 7.

The next version of Trivially, 2.5, will be iOS 7 only

At this point, this is what we can tell you about this new version.

Version 2.5 of Trivially will only run on iOS 7. Taking this approach allows us to focus on ensuring that Trivially delivers a robust and entertaining experience on iOS 7, which we expect the vast majority of our users to upgrade to within days or weeks of iOS 7’s release.

According to our analytical data, about 10% of our current users enjoy Trivially on iPad 1 devices. Since iOS 7 doesn’t support iPad 1, those users won’t be able to upgrade to Trivially 2.5. Those users will need to continue with Trivially 2.3. This was the difficult part of the decision for us. While we’d like to always have all of our users using the latest and greatest version of Trivially, we don’t have the resources to ensure that it works excellently on both iOS 7 and pre-iOS 6 devices. We suspect that many, if not most, of the smaller app development houses will take this approach, and that Apple expects us to.

Remote experience on Mobile Safari

The experience that remote players have - in multi-player situations where each player visits joincg.com to join the game - will be degraded slightly due to Apple’s changes to full screen options in Mobile Safari.

Prior to iOS 7, we could control more aspects of the experience, so that the player saw more Trivially on the screen, and less iOS (specifically, the browser address bar). Now, however, iOS no longer allows Trivially to hide the address bar, with the result that the player will need to scroll the page up slightly to see his or her player name at the very bottom of the screen.

While this is hopefully just a slight annoyance to the user, it’s much more of an annoyance to us, since we designed that screen carefully, down to the last pixel.

As far as we know, there’s no way to automatically make use of the full page in iOS 7, as was possible in earlier versions. We’ll be keeping an eye on this.

Next Steps - Trivially 2.5

We’re working as fast as possible to release Trivially 2.5, to address the sound issue and other work that we’ve identified. We expect to submit this new version to Apple for review within a week or so.

Watch this blog for more info, as we get closer to releasing Trivially 2.5. And, as always, thanks for your support!

Any requests for the next version of Trivially?

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We’ve been working on the next version of Trivially, and would love to hear from you: what features would you like to see?

(And, I suppose, we should also ask, just for completeness: what bugs would you like us to fix?)

Drop a note to “support@crowd-game.com”, hit us up on Twitter @crowdgame, or leave a comment below.

We’ve love to hear from you…!

Crowdgame Trivially 2.3 - Name your Avatar! New Features for Custom Trivia contests!!

We’ve learned a lot since launching Trivially nearly 20 months ago, and I don’t just mean all of those trivia facts (since we still test our apps by hand, the old-fashioned way).

But when we hear from customers - what they like about the game, what features they wish we’d add - that’s when we learn the most.

If you talk to to enough customers, patterns emerge. They might use different language or terms, but you start to see common threads, which, if you’re lucky, you can distill down into common threads and maybe even implement.

By far, the most common request we’ve heard to date is this: “Can I name my Avatar?”. It’s often the first request we hear, when we show Trivially to someone for the first time. And, no, it’s not just the kids who want this.

So now, for Trivially 2.3, we bring you the ability to name your Avatar. Instead of being stuck with the built-in names, each player starts out as “Player 1”, “Player 2”, etc., as displayed on your remote - i.e., on the web page you see when you join a game by visiting joincg.com.

To change the name of your Avatar, just tap the Avatar, enter your name, and then tap “OK”. That’s it. Your new name is instantly visible on the Trivially app running on the iPad, for everyone to see. You can change your name as often as you’d like. (We can see how this feature might lead to some in-game trash talking.)

Here’s a screenshot of a full CrowdGame house of players, each with their own names. Don’t they look happy!?

One more note: If you’re playing directly on the iPad, you’ll always be known as “Console”. Sorry 🙂

Progressive Scoring

Speaking of trash talking, we’ve added another often-requested feature: Progressive Scoring. What this means is that the more quickly you answer with a correct answer, the more points you’re awarded. If you answer correctly within the first three seconds, you’re awarded three points. Answer correctly within the first six seconds for two points. Answer correctly after that, for a single point.

The number of points you’ve scored is displayed on your remote, and on the iPad when the correct answer is revealed.

If you’ve turned on “First Correct Answer Wins” (on the Start Page), then the first person who answers correctly within the first three seconds not only wins three points, but ends the round for everyone else.

So it can get pretty competitive pretty quickly!

Features for Custom Trivia Contests

Trivially 2.3 also contains a number of important features designed to enhance the experience when you’re running a contest using your own questions and answers, via the Custom Trivia Pack feature. We know that if you’re running a contest multiple times, you’ll need some or all of these features to keep things moving smoothly:

Reset Usage Count

When you tap the “Reset” button for a Content Pack, Trivially resets back to zero its count of how often each question in that Pack has been used.

This means that you can be assured that the next time you play that Content Pack, your players will see a randomized sample of the entire Content Pack, not just the ones that hadn’t been seen (lately).

This is useful when playing the same Custom Trivia contest repeatedly with different audiences. But note that it works for any Content Pack, not just Content Trivia Packs. So if you find that you’ve run through all of “Geography for Mapmakers”, tap “Reset” and see how well you do the second time around…

“Play All”

This new option, on the Start Page, Allows you to play the specific number of the questions in your Custom Trivia Pack, beyond the 5, 10, or 20 question options. This means that if your Custom Trivia Pack has say, 27 questions, you can use this option to play all of them in one go.

Note that there’s a limit of 50 questions with this option, to ensure optimal performance.

“Finish Game”

This option is available while game play is in progress. When a question or correct answer is being displayed, you can tap the Pause button (in the top-right corner of the screen) or tap the countdown clock in the center of the screen. This pauses the game and displays the game play options show here:

Continue Game: un-pause the game and continue with the current question / answer.
Finish Game: end the current round of questions and display the Scoreboard page, showing scores for all players.
Restart Game: end the current round of questions and go immediately to the Start Game page. You won’t see the Scoreboard.

The “Finish Game” option can be helpful if you’re playing in a ground towards a specific score; as soon as a player reaches that score, you can finish the game and display the Scoreboard.

Support for more browsers and PCs

In the months since we first released Trivially, we’ve watched - with some hope - as various other browsers have caught up with the specific feature (WebSockets) that makes Trivially work so well when players join the app running on the iPad.

With this release, we’ve added a few more “officially supported” browsers to the mix. Here’s the official list:

Safari
Chrome
Firefox
IE10

You can enjoy Trivially by firing up the latest versions of any of these browsers, on iOS, MacOS, Windows, and Ubuntu, and visiting joincg.com. You can follow the instructions there to join the game that’s running on an iPad on the same Wifi network as your browser.

Trivially may work on other browsers - let us know what you know, and we’ll gradually expand the list of “officially supported” browsers.

THANKS!

As always, we’ve really enjoyed talking to you about these features, and then coaxing the many, many lines of tiny characters to organize themselves correctly to make it all work. We hope you enjoy this new release! Drop a line and let us know! Tell us what to build next!

Trivially on the Big Screen

An idea that’s always captivated us as we built Trivially is the idea that the iPad and its ilk can double as an awesome mini-game console when connected to large external monitor.

You can see this for yourself if you have an iPad 2 or later device, using either of two methods: direct connect via video cable, or via AirPlay.

To direct connect: use a Apple-approved VGA or DVI video cable adapter, such as this one or this one, for the older 30-pin iPad, or if you have a Lightning-equipped iPad, this one or this one. The composite video cable adapter is not recommended. This approach requires an iPad 2 or later device.

When you connect your iPad to an external display this way, everything on the iPad screen will be mirrored onto the external display. Trivially’s sound effects will still only come from the iPad, so if you’d like big sound to go along with that big picture, connect a stereo cable between your iPad and your TV or sound system.

Alternately, you can use Apple’s AirPlay system, for the “no wires” approach, if you have an iPad 2 or later device and an Apple TV. Follow Apple’s instructions, here, for mirroring your iPad’s display to the Apple TV device… it’s easier than it looks. Then, just fire up Trivially as usual… the screen and sound will be duplicated to your big screen and sound system. Note that in this case, you may want to lower the volume on your iPad.

Trivially’s gorgeous hand-drawn high-resolution graphics really jump out at you on the big screen, as do the sound effects, some of which are also “hand-crafted”.

Give it a shot, and send us photos of your party!

CrowdGame Trivially 2.2.1 - A huge release!

Trivially 2.2.1, released just a few days ago, introduces these features:

Create your own Custom Trivia Pack, featuring your own questions and answers! Liven up your next birthday party, anniversary, training event, class, or just for the fun of it. Requires in-app purchase.
Introducing new, for-purchase content packs, including the first in a series from a pub trivia master, and a “Learn Mandarin” language training series.
Upgraded and tuned-up graphics, screens, and gameplay, including support for iPad 3 Retina displays, and “First Correct Answer Wins” option.
Players can now connect to the game with Safari, Chrome, or FireFox browsers on PC or Mac, or IE10 on Windows 8, as well as with iOS devices.

The Custom Trivia Pack feature is an idea we’ve had for a while… ever since the first version of Trivially shipped in July, 2011, we’ve been asked to make it possible for players to create their own contests. “We love your built-in and for-purchase content - don’t get us wrong”, they’d say… “but we really have some great ideas for own contests, because we have a special event X coming up and we want to do something new and different”… where X is:

A oil spill response training class in Alaska
A youth club gathering
A teacher quizzing students on recent history topics
A trivia contest at a company morale event
A reception at a wedding of two game-loving folks
A fun addition to a company fund-raiser
Trivia pub night event in several cities around the world

So, have at it. Visit this page to learn more about how it works. Once you’ve created your own contest, it’s easy to share it with friends, groups, etc, as a URL, via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

Here are some of my favorite ideas for creating a Custom Trivia Pack:

Zoe, your 8 year old is having a birthday party with her friends. Create a “When Zoe Was a Baby” trivia pack for the occasion, with questions and answers that her friends will have fun guessing over.
It’s election season. Put together a contest that shows your command of the political landscape. Have your buddies over for a Presidential Debate party, with Trivially as the warm-up.
Are you a teacher? Use Trivially in your classroom to make learning (more) fun. Invite your students to make their own contests, for play with their classmates.
Need to educate or train your colleagues at your company on a new procedure, process, or get some new hires up to speed in a hurry? Create a Custom Trivial pack and score points with the boss.

Of course, all of these scenarios benefit from AirPlay: use Trivially on an iPad 2 (or later) and AirPlay the screen to an Apple TV connection to a large screen. Trivially’s graphics really shine, and it instantly attracts your attention. It’s a lot of fun.

We’re also excited about the three new content packs that were created just for Trivially:

Learn Mandarin #1: Match characters to pinyin (Easy) (US$.99). Match a Mandarin character with its correct pinyin. #1 in a series of contests designed to help the aspiring student master the reading of Mandarin! 祝你好運!

Learn Mandarin #2: Match characters to pinyin (Medium) (US$.99). Match a 2 character Mandarin phrase with the correct pinyin. #2 in a series of contests designed to help the aspiring student master the reading of Mandarin! 祝你好運!

And, introducing trivia from Tommy:

Tommy’s Curious Quiz #1 (US$.99): Original trivia for people who know too much! First in a series from Seattle pub quiz refugee Tommy Williams. Rated 9+ for questionable taste.

Please show your support for our budding trivia authors… each is only $.99. Buy all three!

Finally, you’ll also see a number of important improvements to the game:

Upgraded and tuned-up graphics for iPad 3’s Retina display
Many improvements, performance enhancements, and “defect removals” (bug fixes)
A much-requested feature: the “First Correct Answer Wins” option. With this option turned on, the first player who rings in with the correct answer wins that round.

Give it a try! If you like it, please rate us in the App Store. And please let us know what you think - we love feedback, and ideas for what features to add next.

Help us build and test the next version of Trivially! Interested in user-created contests??

Well, if you want to help code, that would be great!!

But we’re also looking for:

- Ideas for new features you can’t live without

- Feedback on current features that you think could be improved

- Notions on new content packs you’d like to see added for instant purchase and download

Regarding a particular new feature: we’ve heard from a few folks that it would be really excellent to be able to create your own contests, for play on your iPad or to share with friends for play on their iPads. So we’ve been cooking up this feature a bit. We’re not sure exactly what final shape the feature will take or how it’ll be monetized (if at all), so we’d like some feedback.

We think that it’s about ready for testing (by more than our staff monkeys, that is). So if you’re interested in trying out an early version of “user created contests”, please drop us a line (support@crowd-game.com, or use this form). We’d love to hear from you!