Ex Apple designer & autocorrect creator develops game app 'Up Spell'

Former Apple software engineer and designer Ken Kocienda has created his first iOS app, Up Spell. Ken's work included the original iPhone and the development of touchscreen autocorrect. The fast-paced, fun word game challenges users to spell all the words in two minutes and uses a lexicon of words Kocienda built to allow for the inclusion of proper names. A portion of app revenues are also being donated to a local food bank.

Kocienda says he had never before made a standalone iOS app. When he worked at Apple, all the code he wrote was integrated into a bigger iOS release. So when Kocienda got the idea to develop a game, he looked to obvious sources of inspiration: his past experiences with typing, keyboards and autocorrect.

The game’s lexicon was built first with the New General Service List to serve as its foundation. This was followed by weeks of writing small programs to generate lists of candidate words - like, by adding an “S” to existing words to pluralize them, for example. And hours more were spent scanning lists to choose the words to include.

Kocienda says he also wanted the game to be fun, and personally found it frustrating that other word games wouldn’t allow proper names. So he built his own list that includes thousands of proper names, then added to it more slang and contractions to expand it even further. That means gamers can spell a word like S’MORES, which involves an apostrophe, for example.