RatCat Software

Fun and Educational software for kids!

Archive for June, 2009

Updated Meghan’s Memory Games now available

Jun 26

Posted by Ted Moroz in Educational Games, Meghan's Matching Games | 1 Comment

Meghan's Memory Game Preschool

Meghan's Memory Game Kindergarten

Meghan's Memory Game First Grade

RatCat Software is excited to announce that the latest version of Meghan’s Memory Games for the iPhone and iPod touch is available in the iTunes Apps store. This version currently available in Preschool, Kindergarten and First Grade edtions is certified for use with iPhone OS 3 and backwards compatible with OS 2. In this version we added an optional timed display of words prior to the start of the game. This new feature, as covered in a previous blog post, provides your child an opportunity to memorize locations prior to match play. The goal is to enhance memory, increase awareness and concentration skills.

Interesting observations for iPhone developers: these apps were uploaded on June 10th and took fifteen days for approval. Prior updates had only taken six days.  It would appear that apple is doing some new OS 3 compatibility checks or that there is some lag time with a rush of new apps that had been waiting for the new OS to be released.  Something else to note is that iTunes now indicates (iPhone OS 3.0 Tested) alongside of the version listing . I wonder if that indication will have a negative affect on two other editions of Meghan’s Memory Game (2nd and 3rd grade) which have been in-house tested for OS 3 compatibility but have not been released since the OS 3 hit the store.

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Introducing Meghan’s ABC123

Jun 24

Posted by Ted Moroz in Educational Games, Meghan's ABC123, What's New | Comments off

Meghan's ABC123Having noticed sales trends to be way in favor of our Preschool, Kindergarten and First Grade editions of Meghan’s Memory game we decided to focus our efforts on the development of a application geared toward the Toddler. This new game, simply titled Meghan’s ABC123 takes our game platform to a new heights offering three levels of increasing game play and a new learning mode designed like an interactive blackboard to help the little ones learn their ABC’s and their 123′s. Meghan’s ABC123 is now in final testing and early results have been very positive with two of the four testers having already given the two thumbs up. Will it be our next top 100 iPhone app? Who knows, but what we do know is that we are learning more each day about building an independent software company (or INDIE as it is know in the industry) geared to iPhone development that you just can’t read in a book or on a blog.

To learn more about Meghans ABC view the product page.

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Meghan boosts her reading score!

Jun 13

Posted by Ted Moroz in Educational Games, Meghan's Matching Games | Comments off

One of the light bulb moments I experienced in making the decision to start RatCat Software and to build iPhone apps came one day watching my daughter struggle with reading. For the first 3 marking periods of school this past year she consistently came home with a C on her report card in the reading category. Everything else, straight A’s. I thought to myself there has to be some way we can help boost her ability to read and understand the words on her grade level. A way that would be fun yet educational. I did a bit of web searching and found some really neat websites. We became especially found of spellingcity. One of the games that they offer is a memory match, which gave me the inspiration to create a similar game for the iPhone and iPod touch. Hence, Meghan’s Memory Games where born. Now the grades are in for the final period and bingo, Meghan raised her score to a B. Now is this conclusive evidence that Meghan’s Memory Games improve reading skills… Probably not.. But Meghan thinks so!

Good Job Meghan, we are proud of you!

To learn more about Meghans Memory Game view the product page.

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Updated our subscription options

Jun 12

Posted by Ted Moroz in Independent Software Development, Website Development | Comments off

Picture 4This morning I added Feedburner to our blog. This service from Google allows us to provide RSS and Email subscriptions of our updates.  This way, if my sister wants to read the blog via her Google reader, she’s covered, and if my Mom wants to see whats up, she can subscribe to the email notifications  and be notified when a new blog entry has been posted. WordPress by default offers RSS feeds however Feedburner takes it to a whole new level. If you want to read more information about Feedburner it is available here on Feedburners site. Like the Google Analytics installed yesterday, Feedburner was very easy to setup and add to the site. You start by creating an account (which authenticates with a gmail account), adding your current feed url and shazam Feedburner creates a new url for you to begin using on your site immediately.

To make the feeds easy to sign up for I  also added a WordPress plug-in called “Subscription Options” from a site called Digital Cortex.
This plug-in creates three buttons that link to each of the available feed options, RSS, Email and Twitter.

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Attempting to learn more about our sites visitors

Jun 11

Posted by Ted Moroz in Independent Software Development, Website Development | Comments off

Not sure why I didn’t know this right from the start, but it hit me like a bolt of lightening today… We need to understand who is viewing our web site and why. From what I can tell Google Analytics can help us learn more about where our visitors come from and what they do when they get here. This information will help drive future decisions on what we do with the blog, our product pages, and our youtube postings.
The process of setting up google was very simple and straight forward. You sign up for an account, they assign you a bit of java code to add to the head section of your html and your off and running. RatCat Software is using WordPress to maintain our site, so I first attempted to add this via a plug-in, which too is a very simple and easy to do. Well, it didn’t work as expected and although I only installed one plug-in (there are several to try), I quickly gave up and just added the code directly into the custom.php. Once the code snippet was in place, Google was able to recognize the page and our sites status changed to indicate that the tracking code has been detected on the home page of our website, and Google Analytics is aggregating the data to populate into your reports. So, starting today, we are hooked into the google analytic system and tomorrow we can begin to improve our online presence and strengthen our marketing efforts.

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