#Enigma simulator franklin heath limited android
#Enigma simulator franklin heath limited code
#Enigma simulator franklin heath limited free

The app is available now on the Android Market, and we already have a couple of paying customers and a nice review, so that’s a good start! Accompanying documentation is available on our wiki, and I have a long list of potential features that didn’t make the cut for the first release. At least 50% of the proceeds will go to the Trust and, if we ever reach the point of recovering our development costs, we will look at increasing that percentage.

It’s not expensive (just £1) so I hope a good proportion of the users will take that option as it’s in a good cause. We’d already decided to include in-app advertising as a possible way of recovering some of our development costs, so we decided to also include a payment option to allow people to turn the ads off and at the same time donate to the Trust. I’m a big fan of the work being done by the Bletchley Park Trust to preserve the historic code-breaking site, both as a memorial to the great work done there and as an educational resource. As I’d been investigating security measures to protect in-app payment transactions from tampering on Android devices, I started thinking about whether in-app payments could be taken advantage of in the Enigma simulator. Had I known then that it would take 2 months of days off, evenings and weekends to do I would probably have thought twice!Īnother overlap with the client work I’ve been doing is the area of in-app payments. I decided to go ahead and give our Enigma simulator a proper, realistic UI, add features to do more than the currently available apps, make better use of the extra space on tablets and publish it.

#Enigma simulator franklin heath limited free

One was a decent quality paid-for application, the other was free but poor quality (with logic errors and a hard-to-use UI) and neither took good advantage of the extra screen space on a tablet. Looking on the Android market, I found two Enigma simulators already available. Given the touch UI of Android, it occurred to me that a good enough simulation could be a useful educational tool, perhaps put alongside museum displays on a tablet computer to give people something of the real feel of the machine.

These days, with auction prices of the machines topping $200,000, they’re all locked away behind glass. Back when I first wrote the logic of the simulator, there was a real Enigma machine out on a table at Bletchley Park that you could physically use and experience what the real operators in World War II had to do. Having spent a couple of days on it, I had it running with a rudimentary UI and was familiar enough with the Android SDK to put the Enigma project aside and concentrate on the paid work, but I did still wonder if something useful could be done with the code.

#Enigma simulator franklin heath limited code

When I joined Lutris in 2000 I was new to Java (after 15 or so years working with C on U NIX™) so I wrote an Enigma simulator in Java as a learning project (it was related to security, a good way of getting to grips with object orientation, and fun!) I hadn’t used the code in over 10 years since, but I dusted it off and got it running on Android to get familiar with the new environment. This started when I was asked to do some prototyping work on Android by a client last November I hadn’t done any programming on Android before, but I was familiar with Java from my time working on Enhydra Enterprise at Lutris Technologies.