Identicode now released … and updated!

I recently released my latest app which is the app equivalent of the ‘Identicode” blue/red code translator in the TV Century 21 Magazine. Not only that but I forgot to post the launch and now I’m sending an update to Apple already!

I was a big fan of Thunderbirds as a kid (and as an adult too!). Not only that but always watched the puppet shows Captain Scarlet, Joe90 and later the live action UFO and Space 1999 too.

Gerry Anderson seemed to understand just what some of us kids loved – SciFi, spies, fantastic technical wizardry, evil baddies, secret agents, clever machinery, fun stories and great characters. The quality of all those shows has endured to this day.

I came across the site Yootha (now it seems, sadly defunct – but try using the Internet Way back machine) which has high quality PDF collections of an amazing number of comics for very reasonable prices – Battle Picture Weekly, Buster, Countdown, Eagle, Whizzer and Chips to name a few. Not only that, but they have brilliant US comics too – The Twighlight Zone, Star Trek, Amazing Stories, Analog SciFi and more. It’s a grown-up’s childhood treasure chest! 🙂

Having bought their TV Century 21 comic collection and started reading I was aware of many references to Identicode. It was a coder and decoder supplied with the first issue of the magazine and subsequently available for a 1/- Postal Order if you missed the first issue. Here’s what it looked like on the outside:

Identicode

I never had one myself as a kid and I had a look on eBay only to find that there was one for sale for £900 and another had just been bought for £78! Phew! I couldn’t send off my 1/- but being an iOS developer I thought I’d write one for my own use and for any other fans out there who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for one on eBay assuming that there was still one there to buy.

The result is the Identicode app which does everything that the original card and paper one did and a bit more. You can copy and paste, it flips between blue and red codes, it encodes and decodes and makes some fun sounds too!

P.S. I reckon that the alphabetic translation modules are working perfectly but I discovered a flaw in the arithmetic circuits of V1.0 which have been repaired and incorporated into V1.1. If you discover any other faults be sure to let me know like a good agent would …