The simplest of all of the Agents just received its first major update. I present ScoreAgent 2.0 — now available in the App Store.
“Woah, woah… ScoreAgent 2.0? Was there a ScoreAgent 1.0 for starters?”
Technically, yes. You might remember GameAgent, the simplest of all the Agent apps: it kept track of the individual score of up to six players. Well, long story short — I received what is probably the nicest cease and desist email from a lady at Aspyr, the company that owns the GameAgent trademark. I mention that it was a nice email since it simply asked me to change the app’s name — no legal threats were made — and I think I was even offered a job. So fair’s fair and I changed the name to ScoreAgent.
So beyond the name change, what else is new?
This 2.0 update had just been submitted to Apple still under the old name, but had to resubmit to change the name. So this isn’t an update just to change the name. If you take a closer look, you’ll see it looks new.
The biggest changes to this new version might not be apparent besides the visual overhaul; that’s good, since it means the simplification of the app worked. The app has been completely rewritten to be even simpler and easier to use from the beginning. But that idea wasn’t there at the beginning…
I had a bunch of new features in line for this new version, but all were scrapped since it added unnecessary bloat. Yes, you could say this app is now following Twitterrific’s philosophy of cutting all features not crucial to the app’s experience in order to favor simplicity. And what more is there to a game counter/manager than keeping track of scores? That’s why the virtual “dice” from the first version were removed for this one, as well as other widgets I had implemented, like a virtual coin toss, player randomizers, and what-not.
The end result is a lean app that will preoccupy the user’s mind with nothing beyond the ability to track of all the players’ scores.
The new ScoreAgent, also like the newest TipAgent, is exclusive to iOS 4, has fast app switching, and iPhone 4 support. Also, the best news? It is FREE (although technically I started giving out the old version for free once I had submitted this update). So if you find the idea of tracking the scores of all the players at some tabletop game, I hope you’ll give ScoreAgent a chance. And I do hope you enjoy its new-found simplicity.
