There's a common question in the mobile games forum of gamedev.net: "How can I make a game for iOS only using Windows?". The answer to this is either (1) you can't or (2) write your game to Marmalade or cocos2d-x on Windows and then when you are done get a friend with a Mac to let you register as an Apple developer, build under Xcode, and submit to the App store. I always say (1) is the serious answer and if you are unserious, or want to develop a really simple game, then go with (2). Basically I say this because you need to run your game on a device frequently and early, and I'm seeing the truth to this now.
Now that I have Syzygy running on a device I'm seeing issues with input which are artifacts of running on an iPad. The prototype implemented mouse input as a stand-in for touch input. It turns out touch screens and mice aren't the same thing. The game plays on the device, but when you drag tiles your finger is in the way of the tile visually. You can't see the tile you are dragging -- this seems like it wouldn't be a big deal, but it kind of is. ... this sort of thing is the reason, in my opinion, that if you are not testing on a device during primary development then you are not being serious... (However, I'm under the impression that you need a Mac to even deploy to a device; there was a thread on Gamedev in which someone was saying that you can deploy to an iOS device from a PC, so YMMV...)
So not sure what I'm going to do about this, I'm thinking of making the tile the user is dragging larger and offset upper-leftwardly while the user is dragging it. The problem with this is to make it look nice I'd have to have large versions of all the relevant art and some of it I don't even really remember how I rendered in the first place...
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I like that you are sharing the lessons you learned. I thought writing apps for non-iPhone would be the same as writing foe and iPhone. It was not. You have to take into account all of the different screen sizes out there when not on an iPhone.
I like the idea of showing an enlarged version of the tile.