A Maltese technology whiz and his German sidekick have put their heads together to create a puzzle game called Buttonia, which is now available for Apple's 75 million+ iPhone and iPod Touch users to download.
Curiously for a technology whiz who loves coding for mobile devices, Neville Attard, the co-developer of Buttonia, does not own a mobile phone.
"I don't like the concept of being contacted wherever I am," the 30 year-old told The Sunday Times.
Yet, he has been busy developing the game, which he describes as "simple yet addictive". The aim of the game is to turn on all the buttons in the least time possible. Each button flips its neighbouring buttons according to the icon on the button.
The concept was developed by Mr Attard's Malta-based German friend Sven Neumann back in 1996. A decade later he showed it to Mr Attard, who decided they should "polish it" and create a version online, which was launched in February 2007.
This got quite a few hits, especially from puzzle-hungry Japan, and when Mr Attard bought a second-hand Apple Macbook on E-bay last year, he paid the $99 fee to register as an iPhone developer and started playing around with the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK). He found it to be the most organised SDK he had ever come across, and used it to port Buttonia to the iPhone.
Mr Attard and Mr Neumann built the prototype in a few weeks but "polishing it" took much longer due to work commitments. When they finally felt it was ready, they sent it to Apple on March 15 and just two days later it was approved and ready for sale worldwide.
The game costs 79 cents to download from the Appstore, 30 per cent of which goes to Apple and the rest to Mr Attard and Mr Neumann, although taxes are deducted.
The game is targeted at users of all ages and is available in English and Italian, although Mr Attard said if sales were good they would start translating the game into other languages.
"Marketing an application when there are over 150,000 applications is definitely not an easy task. We need all of Malta to spread the word, especially on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter," said Mr Attard.
This is the first game the pair have developed for the iPhone and iPod Touch but Mr Attard is sure it will not be their last.
"You can be so creative with the SDK's capabilities. We have made our best efforts to develop this game, but we are still learning how the market behaves so we don't have any sales targets. We are using Buttonia as learning experience for our next project, whatever that may be," he said.
The game can be downloaded at http://itunes.com/app/buttonia, or for more information visit www.buttonia.com.