Goodbye, Pokéject

When Windows Phone 7 first came out, I immediately started looking to use the new development tools to create an application. Pokémon Black and White were out around the same time, so I figured creating a Pokédex-like application would be a good idea.

pokeject

Unfortunately, not much over a year later The Pokémon Company International went after a number of the Pokémon apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone. They asked Apple, Google and Microsoft to remove the offending applications from their respective stores. My app was included*.

Eventually, The Pokémon Company International released their official Pokédex applications for both the Nintendo 3DS and iOS. (at time of writing, there is no official app for Windows.)

pokedex-ios

The Pokédex app for iOS has a different focus from my app, aiming directly at listing out all the information rather than focusing on checking off the list (though you can use it this way using tagging). This is great, as the information contained in the application far outweighs the data I managed to collect for use in Pokéject. Including some rather cool 3D models.

pokedex-3ds

Personally, I believe the 3DS version to be a lot weaker – the user interface is pretty horrible looking, and I found it a lot harder to navigate. The biggest complaint is the lack of ‘multi-tasking’ on the 3DS. I would like to be able to check off my Pokédex as I play my game. This isn’t possible when both are applications on the same machine.

I thought about reviving Pok̩ject as web application, going as far as porting a large amount of the source code over to ASP.NET Рhowever I recently started using the iOS version Рwhich contains much more data Рand decided it would not be worth the time investment.

So this is the end of the Pokéject project. It’s been fun, but the official versions contain way more information, I suggest people use them moving forward.

* A recent check shows that there are still a number of Pokédex apps in the Windows Phone store, though the most popular and best presented ones were removed long ago.