Community Corner
Mike Anderson is Tops
An application Anderson, of Montgomery, developed for iPhones and iPads is all play.
When Mike Anderson sits at his kitchen table and plays with a hot new app that he helped to create, it’s easy to see that he is in love. His fingers glide across his iPad screen to control a quickly rotating, spinning, twirling mass of colors.
“It’s the first flat out toy. There is no other reason for it,” he says about the Cosmic Top, an application that works with both Apple’s iPhone and iPad.
Cosmic Top is described as a toy top that buzzes with sci-fi sounds and glows with limitless, colorful shapes as you spin it. It behaves as a real top hovering in space, but it’s on your phone or computer—and you control it by touch.
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Anderson, 39, of Montgomery, worked for about eight months to develop the app with his friend, Jim Abbey, who lives in Florida. Anderson said they would Skype daily and when they weren’t contracting jobs (they are both computer engineers) they would spend the workweek getting it right.
“We tried to make something simple that adults and kids can use,” said Anderson, who took care of many of the fine details of Cosmic Top like the look and feel of it while Abbey handled the mathematics.
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In mid-December they submitted Cosmic Top to Apple and it was approved as an app four days later. Since being available online at Apple.com, Cosmic Top was featured as a “new and noteworthy” app and is currently near the top ten in the entertainment category.
There are over 330,000 apps for iPhone and 50,000 for iPad, so visibility is important. “It can be nerve racking,” Anderson said. Cosmic Top was listed on the main page of the app store for the first week and now he is trying to keep that momentum going.
Anderson, a former gamer, was thrilled when through an Internet search he found a YouTube video of a toddler playing with Cosmic Top on an iPad, all while sucking a pacifier. The “top” is easy to manipulate, so it is fun for any age, he said.
The physics behind Cosmic Top is paying off. Thousands have sold and good reviews are pouring in. “It’s unique,” Anderson says as he uses all ten fingers to make the three-dimensional circles go faster and faster.
Cosmic Top is available for 99 cents at www.apple.com and through www.coolbearstudios.com.
