Regression

Mines 2.0.1 has been out for a few days, and while it's seeing an extraordinary number of updates—almost 29,000 as of yesterday—it's also seeing some pretty nasty App Store reviews. For one thing, there's still a bug or two I haven't chased down; the timer still disappears every now and then, which is apparently pretty annoying, and, more significantly, some people really don't like the expanded, scrolling board. Over the year or so I've had a bigger board on my own copy of Mines, I've gotten used to it, and learned to pan around, scanning for areas I might've missed, but it seems that's not an easily picked-up pattern. Part of what made the original Mines good was its simplicity: everything gameplay-related was present in a single screen and required no gestures more complex than single taps. The scrolling board has broken that, badly, and I'm working on a fix.

First, I'm removing the bottom two rows of mines so that the only scrolling, in portrait mode, is horizontal; second, there'll be a switch in the menu to disable the expanded board entirely. I'm also nixing the "remove ads" in-app purchase; over the last three days of 2.0.1 being in the wild, exactly one person has hit that button. I took care to make the ads unobtrusive, so I suppose everyone else is just dealing with them.

Also, I'm adding, as per many peoples' request, adding a "number of mines left" view; it looks like this. You can tap the view to switch between seeing the timer and the remaining mines.