You always remember your first love... This was my first iOS app and, quirky as it was, it will always hold a special place in my heart. Written and designed at what might have been the high water mark of skeuomorphism on iOS (actually "iPhoneOS" at the time!) I decided on a chalkboard theme for all screens except actual gameplay.

Rhymo was written by myself and IBM coworker, Dan Lee, in ObjectiveC and heavily used a framework called Cocos2D to handle most of the UI and game aspects like timers, scoring, and animation. We started writing the app before ARC was introduced to ObjectiveC, but published the app after. You can imagine our joy as we swept through the app code removing all the explicit retain and release calls.

Rhyming was performed on device using a secret algorithm that I'll never divulge, but that you can probably figure out. It's like a magic trick - amazing until you know how it is done ;)

There was a paid $0.99 version and a free version that was supported by Apple iAds.

Rhymo was released to the App Store in November of 2011 and spent several years there. It was never very successful in terms of app downloads or revenue. I kept the app maintained for a few years until Apple started making iPhones with new screen sizes and shapes, which the app did not natively support. The app limped along a little longer, until it became more effort than it was worth, and was removed from the App Store in January of 2019.