04 Mar, 2013, mudrammer wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
Dearest MUDbuds of the mudbytes,

My new app MUDRammer, a modern MUD client for iPhon... focused on speed, readability, and flexibility, is live on the app store!

MUDRammer is right at home on your iOS device: it stays connected in the background, syncs your preferences with iCloud to your other devices, and has a (new!) nifty gesture control for rapid player movement. You can quickly add your favorite MUD and set up aliases, triggers, and gags. MUDRammer supports TTYPE and NAWS.

Behold, iTunes redeem codes! Please share if you use one.

T9XJ66MT3J96
MT9XX4ATE47L

I've got lots planned for MUDRammer: xterm256, MCCP, better accessibility, more cowbell.

If you have questions or feedback, or issues with a particular MUD, please use the in-app contact link or send me a PM.

> get mudrammer from app store
You pick up the MUDRammer. You're an unstoppable force for righteousness (or evil) wherever you are!
05 Mar, 2013, roguewombat wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
Hah, wish I'd waited till you posted here to grab it. Too bad for you, you got my money instead. :wink:

I use it occasionally, but I am looking forward to updates. Best played with brief mode on (assuming the MUD server supports it). In portrait mode on my iPhone, I get a fair amount of screenwrap, but in landscape mode I see about two lines of text. Great work, though. Don't suppose you made it with an environment like Titanium and could compile to Nook? :tongue:
05 Mar, 2013, roguewombat wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
And I think I posted this idea in the HackerNews thread but never went back to see if you responded there… maybe ideas will be a little easier to generate here, so I'll duplicate it for other folks to build on. It would be nice to be able to swipe the screen to use directional commands (perhaps using diagonals for up / down). Another option would be to look for an exits listing and make them clickable hyperlinks that sent the command.

Maybe a more abstract idea would be to just tap and holding on a word to open a context menu that lets you select actions. The first could be to send the word as a command to the game (useful for exits), the next perhaps to fight / kill (configurable based on MUD server type?), the next to get. Could make it easy to access score / inventory / who list as well. Or maybe you do a who in the background and populate a separate page with the list of visible players online.

Oh, and I will say it took me a while to figure out how to bring up the menu when playing a game.
05 Mar, 2013, mudrammer wrote in the 4th comment:
Votes: 0
Thanks for downloading MUDRammer! And, by Great Odin's Beard, imagine meeting an HNer outside of HN!

roguewombat said:
It would be nice to be able to swipe the screen to use directional commands (perhaps using diagonals for up / down).


I'm curious if you've updated to MUDRammer 1.1? I wrote a pretty nifty gesture-based movement control.

An iPhone-sized screen is super narrow, so you're either scrolling horizontally or client-side wrapping, and my focus on readability and font size control led me to the latter.

I'd love to build more contextual word-based actions. You've some great ideas there for future updates.

Lastly no, I wrote MUDRammer in native obj-c. Your quest for a Nook client may not yet be at its end… :)
05 Mar, 2013, Idealiad wrote in the 5th comment:
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Tapping on a word to use it is a good idea. Some IF interpreters (and one, Frotz, on iOS use this).
05 Mar, 2013, plamzi wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
mudrammer said:
An iPhone-sized screen is super narrow, so you're either scrolling horizontally or client-side wrapping, and my focus on readability and font size control led me to the latter.


Since iOS4, it's been super-easy to add fonts to your app. There are free monospace fonts that are much nicer and more readable than Courier New. It also doesn't help that there's no smart word-wrapping or zooming that I can see.

So far, what you're offering is about the same as the free Pocket MUD app.

I'm curious, when you were pricing your app, did you research Pocket MUD Pro and Mudmaster? We're talking peanuts in a tiny niche, but still…
05 Mar, 2013, mudrammer wrote in the 7th comment:
Votes: 0
plamzi said:
I'm curious, when you were pricing your app, did you research Pocket MUD Pro and Mudmaster? We're talking peanuts in a tiny niche, but still…


I've tried all the MU* clients on the App Store. (Btw - pocket mud is no longer free.) I tried to write the client I wanted for myself and price it what I thought it was worth.

Definitely looking at other mono fonts for a future update. Thanks!
05 Mar, 2013, Nathan wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
So,



What advantage do you think you offer over the other options? I see that there are two other apps for the same price, and they seem relatively similar from the available screenshot. What makes yours better?
05 Mar, 2013, roguewombat wrote in the 9th comment:
Votes: 0
Accessibility. He's here and is talking about it. That's worth dollars to me. :biggrin:
05 Mar, 2013, plamzi wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
roguewombat said:
Accessibility. He's here and is talking about it. That's worth dollars to me. :biggrin:


I sense a shill here. This person just created an account yesterday just to advertise their app, and they suddenly get another new poster jumping up and applauding everything they say and do? Hard to believe.

For full disclosure, I'm the author of MUDMaster for iPhone. I've been here for years and posted about it on all MUD forums. I've also dealt with app users for several years now, developing a long list of features per request. I can say that no-one has been as enthusiastic as this wombat fellow, and that includes the blind community I've worked with to make the app fully accessible.

Could be that there are some magic mushrooms wrapped into Mudrammer, but I find the first explanation much more plausible.

P. S. I understand the excitement that comes with releasing a new app, but when that fades, you're going to regret any shady steps you took in promoting it. It will be especially regrettable given that there's no real money to be made here, so you'd be compromising your integrity for chump change.
05 Mar, 2013, Idealiad wrote in the 11th comment:
Votes: 0
@plamzi, I highly doubt roguewombat is a shill given what I know of him from other game dev communities, and it doesn't reflect well on you as the author of MUDMaster that you'd make that kind of accusation.
05 Mar, 2013, plamzi wrote in the 12th comment:
Votes: 0
Idealiad said:
@plamzi, I highly doubt roguewombat is a shill given what I know of him from other game dev communities, and it doesn't reflect well on you as the author of MUDMaster that you'd make that kind of accusation.


It's what it looked like. If it's not true, then I'm doing the OP a favor in pointing out what it looks like.

Since you vouched for roguewombat, I did some quick googling around, and it's possible that I was wrong. I was hoping that this would be the case. It would be a very odd case, but hey, now I've seen everything.

P. S. I didn't hide that I'm the competition, nor did I dispense anything except what I thought was helpful advice. So if you think that reflects negatively on me, that's just, like, your opinion.
05 Mar, 2013, mudrammer wrote in the 13th comment:
Votes: 0
Nathan said:
So,
What advantage do you think you offer over the other options? I see that there are two other apps for the same price, and they seem relatively similar from the available screenshot. What makes yours better?


I've focused on what I think really matters for a mobile client, especially where I've seen other clients falling short: backgrounding, speed, customization, usability, gesture controls, integration with iOS. MUDRammer is just 2 weeks old and it's surely not the most feature-rich client on the market, but I think it's a strong foundation on which I'll be building for some time to come.

MUDRammer is also my first independent iOS app, into which I've poured my lifeforce (and three bars of adamantium, and some mithril dust) over the last 5 months. This humble developer thinks you might like it and I'm always open to feedback!
05 Mar, 2013, plamzi wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
mudrammer said:
Nathan said:
So,
What advantage do you think you offer over the other options? I see that there are two other apps for the same price, and they seem relatively similar from the available screenshot. What makes yours better?


I've focused on what I think really matters for a mobile client, especially where I've seen other clients falling short: backgrounding, speed, customization, usability, gesture controls, integration with iOS. MUDRammer is just 2 weeks old and it's surely not the most feature-rich client on the market, but I think it's a strong foundation on which I'll be building for some time to come.

MUDRammer is also my first independent iOS app, into which I've poured my lifeforce (and three bars of adamantium, and some mithril dust) over the last 5 months. This humble developer thinks you might like it and I'm always open to feedback!


I gave the app a whirl. It's a good start but do consider pricing it more competitively. There's really nothing the app does ATM that the other two apps in the same price range can't. And there's a whole lot you're still missing, including in the exact areas where you view other clients falling short.

Also, the real trial begins now. Will you keep your enthusiasm to improve the app and add features in the face of low demand, bizarre and unhelpful reviews, platform updates that break things, etc.

Don't take this the wrong way. I wouldn't mind at all if you succeed wonderfully and turn this into the best MUD app for iOS. The fact is that I've stopped actively adding features to mine, and I do want to see someone do better and go further. Maybe that someone is you :)
07 Mar, 2013, roguewombat wrote in the 15th comment:
Votes: 0
plamzi said:
I sense a shill here. This person just created an account yesterday just to advertise their app, and they suddenly get another new poster jumping up and applauding everything they say and do? Hard to believe.


w00t, will have to add shill to my business card. Post count != new poster, if you consider I joined MUDBytes in 2011 and lurked until fiddling on some projects recently with an old MUD friend. :tongue:

No, I just happened to find MUDRammer from his post on Hackernews (you'll notice my similar comments). I assure you I have too much going on professionally and personally to waste my free time covertly shilling for other peoples' app adventures, though I wish everyone writing MUD related apps the best of luck. When the author showed up here, I'd had more of an opportunity to play with MUDRammer and figured I'd throw in some additional feedback. Not a sin, right? If I've already paid for it, why not engage?

fwiw, I didn't pick MUDRammer over against another client (such as yours) - was more the chance occurrence of a HN thread when I happened to be thinking it might be nice to use a client on the iPhone - MUDding from the toilet and all that. Still, I'd much prefer a client on the Nook, so I may have to give it a shot some day.
07 Mar, 2013, mudrammer wrote in the 16th comment:
Votes: 0
Thanks roguewombat :)

To all: A new free copy of MUDRammer appears! http://tokn.co/cyuw8fuf
08 Mar, 2013, Zeno wrote in the 17th comment:
Votes: 0
Android? :(
08 Mar, 2013, mudrammer wrote in the 18th comment:
Votes: 0
Zeno said:
Android? :(


No plans. I'm flying solo here with MUDRammer and I've too much to do in iOS, let alone porting to Android.

I understand BlowTorch is a popular Android client.
11 Jul, 2013, Ristowe wrote in the 19th comment:
Votes: 0
Props on a beautiful client. It was clearly designed for mobile users (unlike some I've seen). I've recently started curating a list of MUD clients, and just wrote a blog post comparing it to three other popular iPhone MUD Clients and, in my opinion, it comes out on top. Here's the post, if you're interested in reading it: http://www.mudclientlist.com/which-iphon...
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