Debrief: Torch Lite
The Torch Lite app is a very simple free app, allowing your phone/ipod touch to show you the way on dark nights!
It came about following some coding experiments with bouncing a ball around the screen. If I made the ball big and white, I thought it looked a bit like the beam of a torch tracking across the screen. So, I added a few different colour balls, a few fade and box effects and some simple blank screens, and hay presto – a torch lite app.
I figured that the default behavior of the screen turning itself off would be a bit annoying if you were really using your phone as a torch. However, leaving the app on full white screen would drain the battery, so I added battery checking so that the app would stay on, only if the battery was over 20%. This took a bit of time to test (waiting for the battery to flatten) but worked out well in the end. I think it’s quite a useful feature.
Most of the screens are really just eye candy, and if you just need an app to act like a torch, then the plain white screen is all you need.
The app has been out there for about a month with about 3000 downloads. Interestingly, most downloads are from France and the UK, where a portable lighting device is called a Torch, unlike the US where I assume its normally referred to as a Flash Light.
It was an interesting experiment to see if I could get an app built and deployed in a single day. As it turned out, it took about a day and a half, so overall, I was pretty pleased.