JPS Grooves

Too much to mention!

Welcome back! I’ve been saying this to myself a lot this week, as I have picked up the original SnowCone MathFest as my current hobby project.

6 months ago I released the app after doing 7+ marathon months on getting it to a spot that I felt okay about releasing. And release I did, I even did a party! Then…I took a break. a 6 month break.

It was probably the best thing I could have done if I were actually interested in the quality of this app. While I was enjoying working on a new game, I kept thinking, dude, you have this whole project just sitting there, people kinda liked it, what if you could just add and add to that? Simulator has been sidelined, and you know what I’ve worked on today?

An options menu! Seems boring, but it gets me excited thinking about the night and day difference that has taken place in one part of the app.

The thing I’m most excited about, and worked the longest on, is the new jukebox: SnowCone Radio

If you saw what it looked like before, you would notice the work that went into it today. The hardest part was the scrubber! I wanted it to be like a fully competent mp3 player from the 90s, and after hours of testing, I must say, I think it’s pretty solid! I have stress tested the heck out of it, doing things that no normal user would probably notice, and then I did even more testing by accident and found another bug that added another hour of time. I almost quit, I almost said good enough was enough, but almost by providence, the errors ultimately relented and I had a build that had a really nice functional foundation for SNOWCONE RADIO (possibly a future podcast or something lol) I even thought about doing a GTA thing with a fake radio station, but not today..

The biggest thing that added to my time today was the cloud. I kept having issues where my files would go to the cloud and then couldn’t be copied over, which halted my progress completely. so finally, long overdue, I moved the files (off github, thank God, because they were not gonna copy onto my computer without a big ol fight) onto my local drive and I have been cooking through updates and tests without issue. So hopefully those 2am freakouts wont happen as easily. I’ve learned alot in this process, and one thing is back back up up your stuff stuff!!

Next up, and waaaay easier for the AI to nail pretty quickly, the profile tab!

This is one of those instances where AI made this extremely easy on me and in the end will provide a more personalized and maybe connected experience to any players. the problem before was the profile tab had too much going on, with a full badge system that you could scroll thourgh. so I moved that out and not you can see the essentials! no scroll!

alot of what I have been been doing is removing the tldr aspect of the app and helping it really get to the fun and point of things. Cooolest feature that I asked for, that was promptly delivered? The choose your own icon option. I like player choice, and my testers loooooooove the emojis, so I figure this will be a fun way to include them in an iOS exclusive game in a way that I can probably use them later.

So yea, New Options menu!
~Profile tab update
~Cone (badges) tab added!
~Data tab fully revised! (from being Version tab)
~Theme tab small header added, hope to work on some art for these soon!
~Radio tab (formerly Music tab) looks good and survived my stress tests. Jam on!

Next up, I want to work on the welcome screen and add streak encouragement. I don’t think that will take long at all honestly, but I really need to wait until tomorrow when I’m fresh…I used a lot of my time on this today and my brain isn’t going to have much to run on after midnight.

After that, I’ll publish to Appstore and be happy that I’m making this app as good as it can be. Little by little now, since it can already stand on its own, I’ll work on where is stumbles and help this thing really run full sprint into 2027!

RIP Browser version…I just can’t keep up with you.

Visit https://apps.apple.com/us/app/snowcone-mathfest/id6756327336 and make the purchase now! Hopefully it looks a little different over the next few months! You won’t regret practicing some math today!