Why Word Warp Xtreme is a NEW application!

Just to let you know, Word Warp Xtreme is NOT just an updated version of Word Warp.  We're sure we are going to be asked that question and the answer, like in many cases, while there are some trade-offs, we thought it would be better for most of our users.

First of all, remember, the existing Word Warp game that users currently have, will continue to function normally and users can still continue to play it if they choose.  However, if they want to take advantage of the new features that we've been talking about the past week or so, they are going to need to download the application we've been featuring, Word Warp Xtreme.

Click past the jump to learn more!


There are a couple of objectives we like to keep in mind when we design an application:
-    We want to make it fun or useful
-    We want to make it easy, not just to use, but to get

The second bullet item is not something that users should worry about.  However, it is something that we, as the developer, have to worry about.  It’s not surprising that not everyone wants to run the app in the same way.  So, we add options, run it this way, or that way, or some other way that users have told us they wanted.  When you add more features, the number of options increases, making it more difficult for all our users.  In addition, the interactions between all the settings means there’s a lot of, probably, uncommon, configurations to test.  That slows us down from providing more features that people want, faster.

By eliminating some options, we’re able to simplify our work.  In the case of Word Warp Xtreme, there’s no support for Portrait mode.  First of all, there’s no room for seven-character words in Portrait mode.  Since that was a very popular request, we decided it was more important to do that than to support Portrait mode.

Another example is that we no longer support older versions of the operating system.  Word Warp Xtreme requires OS 3.0 or greater.  Since it is free for iPhone users – and most Word Warp Xtreme users are iPhone users – we didn’t think that the requirement would upset many of our users.  To lessen the pain still further, Apple reduced the price for the upgrade to under $5 when OS 3.1 was released.

Eliminating these features that impacted few users allowed us to put more time into new features than many more wanted.  In addition, it allowed us to maintain a feature that we think makes life much easier – downloads “over the air.”

Many users don’t know – and again, they shouldn’t have to worry about this – that there is a limited to the size of an app that can be downloaded over the AT&T network.  We added a lot of functionality to Word Warp – so much so that it is close to the limit of the size of the app that one can download “over the air.”  By being careful, Word Warp Xtreme users don’t have to worry about connecting via a data cable or connecting via wifi – they can download it whenever they want “over the air.”