A lot of silly apps were being made in the early days, and still are I guess, so I thought lets get on board.  I was still learning what could be done, how the language works etc.  But the rush was still on to get more in the store.  Every day I didn't have something in there I felt like I was losing money.

So I came up with a trick app that you can use to fool your friends.  It basically messed with the icons.  You could set it up and hand it to someone who'd never used an iPhone before, and make them think they broke it.  Yes it's not going to change the world, yes it's pretty pointless, yes people are probably going to use it 5 times then delete.  But this was what the market seemed to be demanding.  After all iBeer was still in the top 10.

I first decided to name it Icon Madness but later changed it Crazy Icons.  It used Core Animation in the iPhone.  Here's a sample of some of the code.

[ UIView beginAnimations: nil context: NULL ]; // Tell UIView we're ready
 [ UIView setAnimationDuration: kAnimationDuration3 ]; // Set the duration
 currentPicView.frame = CGRectMake(currentX, currentY, kIconSide, kIconSide); 
 [ UIView commitAnimations ];
 currentX = kColOne;
 currentY = kRowOne;
 [ UIView beginAnimations: nil context: NULL ]; // Tell UIView we're ready
 [ UIView setAnimationDuration: kAnimationDuration1 ]; // Set the duration
 smsView.frame = CGRectMake(130.0, 200.0, 57.0, 57.0);
 CGAffineTransform transform = CGAffineTransformMakeRotation(3.14);
 smsView.transform = transform;
 [ UIView commitAnimations ];
 currentPicView = smsView;

I managed to trigger it using the accelorometer.  The result was that every time you touched an icon it appeared to spin and jump randomly around the screen.

Apple was not impressed and it was rejected.

Their reasoning?  It could confuse the user.  Which was the whole f*ing point in the first place.

So I decided to scrap the whole concept and come up with something similar but likely to be a lot less popular...  Animated Crazy Smilies.

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