This is part of an ELC Tech Network

Look Familiar?

Ok, so I was perusing the App Store the other day to stumble upon this gem of an application. See the screenshot below.

screenshot_01

If you have been on iCodeBlog before, you might recognize this “game” from a tutorial that I wrote about writing an iPhone game (link).  One thing to note here is the company name is BlaBlaIncTech (not iCodeBlog) meaning I did not submit this nor did I give permission to do so.  I find it interesting that someone has the guts to take a tutorial on iCodeBlog and submit it to the app store unmodified.

Not only was this VERY basic code meant to teach simple concepts, the graphics are absolutely atrocious as they were hacked together very quickly in Photoshop.  I actually find this quite hilarious that this guys expects me not to find out.

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I wanted to highlight some of the great features noted by the “developer” of this application (Seen in the feature section of iTunes).

  • “It’s basic game design makes it a fun game for someone that doesn’t play alot of games” – WOW, emphasis on the BASIC.  This game is fun for no one as it sucks! It was meant as a teaching tool moron!
  • “Great Quality” – Are we looking at the same game?
  • “Easy (So easy your grandma can play)” – If you have the same taste in games as your grandma, you probably don’t own an iPhone.
  • Almost no crashes” – hahahaha this is the best one. The keyword here is “Almost”.  Well, that does it, I’m sold!

So, if you want to scoop up this rad game, the link is here . I almost will pay him the $.99, just to make fun of him in the comments section.

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76 Comments

  1. Posted July 9, 2009 at 8:25 pm | Permalink

    iPhone game tutorial from iCodeBlog compiled and submitted to the iTunes App Store as a paid app.

  2. AC
    Posted July 9, 2009 at 8:27 pm | Permalink

    Hahahaha, look at Social Butterfly. It’s 11 webapps shoved in a UITabBarController, with a thick layer of atrocious grammar on top.

    The description is the best part. “The interface that your used to.” First of all, my used to? And secondly: of course it is, you moron, it’s the mobile version of the same fricking site

    And there’s only one review, which seems to find the app absolutely fantastic. The fact that the reviewer’s name is blablakrap is completely unrelated :)

  3. Posted July 9, 2009 at 9:21 pm | Permalink

    Now I see why Apple has been behind in approving apps! When you have 10000 tennis apps to publish, it takes time! ;)

  4. Posted July 10, 2009 at 12:02 am | Permalink

    Haha, I post something like shame on you and a poor bad life in their forum and got a mail a few minutes before.

    Hello lny ,

    Uhh Ohh it looks like you have used profanity On our site Please dont let this happen again!

    3/5 warnings!

    http://blablainctech.webs.com/

    Regards,

    blablainctech

    To unsubscribe from these mailings, click here: Please unsubscribe me

  5. Anon
    Posted July 10, 2009 at 1:57 am | Permalink

    I thought you might want to check this one out too…

    http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=320129469&mt=8

  6. Posted July 10, 2009 at 2:49 am | Permalink

    There are always going to be unscrupulous people out there, but I don’t think it should stop people from doing the right thing and offering examples and help. The only people who look stupid in this situation are the guys who thought they could release someone else’s tutorial code.

    I doubt whether they fully understood your tutorial code anyway, otherwise they would have taken the concepts and made a different game.

    I think you should turn the situation into a positive one and turn it into an open competition to see how many variations of your Tennis game can be submitted to Apple by different people (for free of course, with a link to your blog.)

    Or, why not just polish up the tutorial and release it yourself for free, just to teach them a lesson ?

  7. Posted July 10, 2009 at 3:03 am | Permalink

    You tutorials helps me and our team a lot. And you deserve a lot of thanks for that. We just figured it out that you site has some funny posts too. It was a great fun reading this post. However seems like Apple has taken down the game otherwise, I would’ve bought it… ;)

    cheers.

  8. MusicoLoco
    Posted July 10, 2009 at 3:29 am | Permalink

    The game has been taken of the store. I guess Apple noticed the theft, or the brat couldn’t take the thousands of spam messages that flooded his support board and called it quits.

    Peter Sheen will have a really hard time gaining back a decent reputation (if he ever had one). Let it be known, that anything that is created and distributed for free on the internet is still under copyright law protection, unless the author explicitly states it is in the public domain.

    Peter Sheen and his crappy company are in my ‘Not Cool’ list from now on.

  9. lil
    Posted July 10, 2009 at 5:36 pm | Permalink

    Seriously… what’s going on here? Here’s another! http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=314866967&mt=8 Brandon, I think from here on out you have to copyright any source you hand out here. :(

    ~t

  10. BlaBlaTechInc forum sign-up
    Posted July 10, 2009 at 7:27 pm | Permalink
  11. Posted July 13, 2009 at 3:10 am | Permalink

    Apart from the app, his website has also disappeared…

  12. Posted July 18, 2009 at 12:59 am | Permalink

    Don’t sweat the small stuff, I recommend. You were never going to sell that app, the thief is never going to make any money, and your *real* code/apps are beyond such people’s reach anyway.

    Usually by the time biters have bitten the edge has moved onward.

  13. Posted July 18, 2009 at 9:27 am | Permalink

    Hi,

    I’m currently doing your tutorial on iTennis and read about that guy who published it in the AppStore.

    I was taking a look at the AppStore to see whether the stolen App is still online, which it isn’t.

    But I found a game called “iTennisGame” by some guy called Khalid Shaikh which looks strikingly similar to iTennis…

    Maybe you want to double check that as well.

    Oh and thanks for this great tutorial! Keep up the good work!

    Cheers,
    Georg aka Odiesoft

  14. Posted July 30, 2009 at 3:40 am | Permalink

    I can’t find the app in the store anymore, their website is “under construction”, the post and forum mentioned above is no longer available… Seems someone left town in a hurry!

    And now, if you would please excuse me: I have some apps to build and sell. One is a shopping list with SQLite, another is a Twitter client, a third one is about saving users settings… Uhm, lets see, what else did Brandon teach us here that we can steal… ;-)

    Keep up the good work Brandon!

  15. anonymous
    Posted July 31, 2009 at 12:57 pm | Permalink

    This is really crazy. Not only does the person take your code exactly and out it on the app store, but he leaves out the splash screen :) . He could have given you at least a little bit of credit.

    And have you seen his website??? He’s using webs.com for a free site!! And the support email is using gmail!! How could he expect to make money if his potential buyers see how much money he invested in his company (which is none).

    But it is good he has taken it down now. R.I.P. for the iTennis rip-off.

  16. Posted August 9, 2009 at 1:08 pm | Permalink

    Pooooor baby! me meme mmememmem memem em !

  17. davee
    Posted August 13, 2009 at 10:00 am | Permalink

    Ah, the grand old Microsoft marketing model at work.

    Look out Microsoft, the hounds are nipping at your heels.

    lol

  18. xD-Dunce
    Posted August 26, 2009 at 10:43 am | Permalink

    http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=322562866&mt=8

    looks like another rip off.

    They didn’t even change the colour of the net’s shadow. its still pink!

    Just thought you might want to check them out.

  19. @ColouredBoxMobi
    Posted October 9, 2009 at 4:14 am | Permalink

    @EMILIAN WOOD

    LOL YOU NEED TO BE REMOVED FROM THIS BLOG WITH A COMMENT LIKE THAT GIRL

    Brandon put time into his tutorial regardless of copyright inifringements. I think you should given him 99 cents for every iTennis download.. hahaha

  20. Posted November 25, 2009 at 10:44 am | Permalink

    I was looking on the app store for the company “BlaBlaIncTech” and I found three twitter apps by this “dev” all claiming to be the fastest ever. Anyway the one kind of resembled the turorial.

  21. Andy Zimmerman
    Posted December 23, 2009 at 10:50 am | Permalink

    Hi. I was wondering if I could use your coding and images but yet say in the description, comments in the code, to apple that you created the original code and images? I will make it free (unless you want it to cost money).
    Tell me what you think,
    Andy Zimmerman

  22. manicaesar
    Posted December 28, 2009 at 12:36 pm | Permalink

    Once again someone has used your tutorial: Search for Pong MMX game… But this time it seems, that the developer added some ‘more’ funcionality ;)

  23. ashish
    Posted January 18, 2010 at 3:30 am | Permalink

    There should be some agreement before downloading the tutorial code. So that any illegal piracy or steal can be prevented and and case can filed easily against the culprit.

  24. Posted March 30, 2010 at 4:55 am | Permalink

    OMG! Why an earth would they copy your app. And second of all, why an earth did Apple accept this app in the first place, it looks crap! (No offence just saying…. the obvious). I cant believe someone would be so stupid as to copy and obvious app and not even bother changing that design even the slightest bit!

  25. Posted March 30, 2010 at 5:14 am | Permalink

    What a complete and utter DUMBASS!

  26. johnmabassa
    Posted July 23, 2010 at 4:12 am | Permalink

    iCodeBlog was the first tutorial site that I referred when i started learning iPhone. Its sad to hear that someone lifted the code …….. nyways don’t stop putting in new tutorials.

    -John

19 Trackbacks

  1. [...] sure to read Brandon’s firsthand account of the imposter iTennis app over at his web site. We guess our only question to Apple is … do nice guys finish last? Technorati Tags: [...]

  2. By iWyre on July 9, 2009 at 1:07 pm

    [...] Perils of Helping Others by admin on July 9th, 2009 Kind of a sad blog post by Brandon of iCodeBlog.com, a site with many iPhone coding tutorials. When you share information [...]

  3. [...] revealed the theft through iCodeBlog yesterday, and Jonathan Siegel got in touch with us regarding the situation. As [...]

  4. [...] revealed the theft through iCodeBlog yesterday, and Jonathan Siegel got in touch with us regarding the situation. As [...]

  5. [...] revealed the theft through iCodeBlog yesterday, and Jonathan Siegel got in touch with us regarding the situation. As [...]

  6. [...] revealed the theft through iCodeBlog yesterday, and Jonathan Siegel got in touch with us regarding the situation. As [...]

  7. By iWyre on July 9, 2009 at 8:06 pm

    [...] revealed the theft through iCodeBlog yesterday, and Jonathan Siegel got in touch with us regarding the situation. As [...]

  8. [...] revealed the theft through iCodeBlog yesterday, and Jonathan Siegel got in touch with us regarding the situation. As [...]

  9. [...] revealed the theft through iCodeBlog yesterday, and Jonathan Siegel got in touch with us regarding the situation. As [...]

  10. [...] revealed the theft through iCodeBlog yesterday, and Jonathan Siegel got in touch with us regarding the situation. As [...]

  11. [...] iCodeBlog via TUAW [...]

  12. [...] revealed the theft through iCodeBlog yesterday, and Jonathan Siegel got in touch with us regarding the situation. As [...]

  13. [...] revealed the theft through iCodeBlog yesterday, and Jonathan Siegel got in touch with us regarding the situation. As [...]

  14. By Macgasm Podcast #155 | Macgasm on July 26, 2009 at 12:02 am

    [...] this episode, Josh discusses intellectual property theft on the App [...]

  15. [...] iCodeBlog » Blog Archive » Look Familiar?. Bookmark and Share Techetto: [...]

  16. [...] There are many ways applications can be made more social by including Twitter.  For example, you could make the application auto-tweet when you unlock a special item in a game, or beat it.  This lets all of their friends know they are playing your game and in turn gets you more exposure.  You could also use this as an idea for creating your own Twitter client (don’t just submit my tutorial to the app store). [...]

  17. By Forums Are Back! | Iphone Study Blog on September 4, 2009 at 9:01 pm

    [...] I will do my best to keep up with them (as I have tended to neglect them in the past).  Just, please don’t write posts like “Would you make a tutorial about creating an online craps game that allows user chat”.  I will not write your programs for you.  I guess in some users case I already have. [...]

  18. [...] Kind of a sad blog post by Brandon of iCodeBlog.com, a site with many iPhone coding tutorials. When you share information in tutorials the way Brandon does, you have to expect people to use that information. But you expect them to use that information to learn and improve their skills so they can go out there and do cool things. It’s a gift of knowledge intended for people who want to learn. You don’t expect them to take your work and publish it as their own, however. [...]

  19. By Forums Are Back! on April 15, 2010 at 12:27 pm

    [...] I will do my best to keep up with them (as I have tended to neglect them in the past).  Just, please don’t write posts like “Would you make a tutorial about creating an online craps game that allows user chat”.  I will not write your programs for you.  I guess in some users case I already have. [...]

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