From Zombies to Caching: Meet Smudgy Games

October 27th, 2011 by Cumbyrocks

When computer-game producer Edios - famous for titles such as Tomb Raider: Underworld and Batman: Arkham Asylum - closed its office in Sweden in 2008, it would have been easy for programmers René Højstrand and Alex Hartly to look for work at another gaming giant.

But they didn’t. With the quickly evolving smartphone market coming to the fore, they had been throwing around ideas of  ”making something for the iPhone”, making the decision to strike out on their own an easy one. And so, in late 2008, Smudgy Games was formed.

 

If you own an iOS device, you may be familiar with some of their games already. Zombie Nombie, a pocket-sized zombie head that you poke, spin and smack for fun, is my personal favourite.

 

While Smudgy Game is not yet a household name in geocaching circles, it may soon become one with the recent release of the company’s geocaching application, iGeoKnife.

 

I reviewed iGeoKnife at the beginning of the month and, being extremely impressed by the app, gave it 4/5 satellites.

René, the geocacher of the two programmers, had wanted a database-driven geocaching app for iOS since he took up the hobby in 2010.

“Being able to browse all ‘my’ caches offline on my mobile device, without first setting up filters in GSAK and exporting as gpx, is something I have been missing for a long time.”

With a number of geocaching iOS apps already on the market, the pair wanted to achieve something the other developers hadn’t.

“Being able to bring all caches in GSAK with you and access them in a fast and intuitive way.  You only have to deal with PQs when you work with GSAK. And when you want to go mobile you just copy your databases over.  That, combined with fast filtering and sorting is something I haven’t seen so far.”

But don’t mistake iGeoKnife as an alternative for GSAK. “iGeoKnife is more meant to be a GSAK browser plus some navigation tools. Our aim is to continue evolving the app and add features as we go along. But it’s not meant to replace GSAK, it’s more like an extra tool in ‘the Swiss Army knife’.”

One of the neatest tricks in the iGeoKnife set is its ability to automatically update you GSAK database in iGeoKnife. All you have to do is add the GSAK database file to iGeoKnife in iTunes and each time you sync it will be updated.

The custom filter settings

Like all good programmers, René and Alex haven’t finished developing iGeoKnife yet. In future, they plan to introduce the following features:

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Posted in Geotools, iGeoKnife | 3 comments

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