TaleMe’s tale

Lior Pollak, 14, develops a game for the App Store.

By PATRICIA CARMEL
Lior Pollak521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Lior Pollak521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Not so long ago, the mere idea of making an international call from a train trundling across the British countryside would have been considered impossibly futuristic. Today, that call could conceivably include the transmission of a video clip, photographs, text messages, and an audio and video conversation. Important data, our favorite music and reading material are increasingly relegated to the memory of our mobile phones, iPods and tablets.
But what has been a major transition in lifestyle for an expanding community of advancing years simply represents the norm to those born into this world in the mid-1990s. Even the way in which today’s teens express themselves is uniquely 21st century.
“I used to play this word game with my friends with pen and paper, and I thought it would be a totally awesome social writing experience to import it into the digital world,” says Lior Pollak, who, at 14, has just developed and uploaded his first game app to the iTunes AppStore.
In the pen and paper version of the game, a player writes a sentence, then folds the paper so that only the last word of the sentence is visible to the next player. The second player then writes a new sentence beginning with the last word of the previous sentence.
This continues among all the players for an agreed number of sentences, after which all the sentences are read out in the order in which they were written, generally to the amusement of the players involved.
“The same rules apply in the digital version of the game,” says Pollak, “only sentences are keyed in on our iPhones and the story you get at the end of the game can be posted to Facebook.”
Pollak is the eldest of three children, a talk and lanky boy who began speaking English well at a very early age, another consequence of Internet culture. By the second grade, he was reading Harry Potter books in the original English.
Pollak was attending computer science classes at his school in Ramat Gan and had acquired a solid foundation in basic programming procedures, when the idea to create a virtual version of the popular game came to him. To ensure that his application would be compatible with the iPhone, he dedicated weeks of his summer vacation to learning Objective-C, a programming language that is specific to the device.
“There were a number of problems at the beginning,” he tells me. “I really learned how to write the code while actually working on it. I had to understand all aspects of this language, why this paradigm and not another, and all the different methods, functions and routines.”
It took about three months for him to complete the first version of the game, but then his mother, Dalit Ron-Pollak, insisted that he test it on his friends’ phones before submitting it to Apple.
“My mother is a quality assurance manager in a hitech company and she wrote a number of tests for me to perform on my friends’ phones.”
At first, the game simply did not work – and Pollak had to rewrite the code twice more until it did.
“During beta testing, it crashed on my friend’s iPhone 4 because of an authentication problem.
And then I had to redesign the interface, because the user experience was not very intuitive.” Finally, after thoroughly testing the game on different versions of the iPhone, it was time to apply to Apple to upload the game to the App Store.
Pollak explains how it works: “First of all, you need to create an account on the Apple website, and then you pay $99, which gives you the right to upload as many apps as you want for the duration of one year.
“I had to email my ID number and my passport number, and that’s when they realized that I’m under 18. According to their rules, the account has to be in the name of an adult. So we had to go through the whole process from the beginning. First of all, my mother called Apple in California to get a refund and then we had to translate and notarize my mother’s documents, ID, passport, credit card. It took about a month and a half to complete the whole registration process.
“Once registration is complete, you just upload the code to the site. Apple is known for having extremely strict guidelines when it comes to its apps in terms of interface, the time it takes to launch, use of proprietary elements in your design, things like that.”
Pollak will never forget the day Apple informed him that his app was accepted. “Here I was, 14 years old, and I was part of the adult world. There is no way I can truly define my feelings at that moment except to say: well, it was awesome.”
To date, some 1,500 customers from all over the world, including Israel, the US, the UK, Colombia and China, have downloaded TaleMe from the App Store.
In the first few months, the game cost 99¢ but Lior has now decided to allow it to be downloaded for free, to expand the range of his audience.
TaleMe can be played on an iPhone, iPod Touch or an iPad, all within the same session.
“The kids at school played it a lot at the beginning of the year, but I’ve noticed they’ve been playing it less lately. Kids go through a number of trends but I’m happy that I’ve received lots of messages from customers from abroad, who are using this app and who report that they are having fun using it.”
In addition to planning another game to follow up on his current success, Pollak is currently involved in the design and development of a device for disabled people in a competition sponsored by Eshkol Payis.
The proceeds of the winning device will go toward the building of an auditorium and laboratories in schools.
No one knows how the technological world will look even 10 years from today, but it would be safe to presume that Pollack will be playing an active role in its development. This century, as he would say, rocks.


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