Aether - Press Kit

Hello writers and reviewers!

Thanks for taking the time to check out Aether. I know there’s not a huge amount to write about, but sometimes you just want to see a small thing well executed.

Background

I’ve been an avid Pokémon player for almost as long as I can remember. I think I was 6 or 7, when I received my first GameBoy Color and Pokémon Yellow, and instantly got hooked into that world. I stuck with it through the Sapphire and Ruby games. I didn’t own a Nintendo DS when they arrived on the scene, so I stopped playing for a few years, until Sun and Moon launched. In the mean time, a new Pokémon type was introduced: Fairy. And I’ve never been able fully internalise its various strengths and weaknesses. (You could say I struggle to “cache them all” in my head.)

I frequently find myself google Pokémon type matchups, and inevitably spawn a much of tabs I forget to close, and I realised that an app might be a nicer approach to this, and would save typing out the names of each type every time I need to check it’s chart.

I looked on the App Store, and found the available options pretty lacklustre, and figured, hey, that seems like something I could build in a weekend (in turned out to be a little more, but not much more).

And so Aether came to be.

The Name

I always like to pick an interesting, relevant name for my projects, and so I did some digging on things like Rock, Paper, Scissors (Rochambeau was my favourite name before Aether), things like Game Theory and balancing (Libra?), before exploring our early scientific understanding of the elements. Earth, water, fire and air (long ago the four nations lived in harmony…) were considered the fundamental building blocks of nature, and I liked the obvious ties to the Pokémon types.

Aether was considered the fifth element (no, not Love), representing when the stars and heavenly bodies were made of. It’s a cool word, and has a nice tie to the item in the Pokémon games, Ether, which is used to restore your Pokémon ability to use attacks after battle.

The App

If you’re familiar with my main app, Obscura, you can probably tell that I’m a big fan of dials as an interface element. They’re both a fun and efficient way to present a long list of options to the user. Combined with the iPhone’s haptics, they’re very satisfying to use.

So Aether is composed of three dials, one for the type of the offensive Pokémon’s move, and two for the type of the defending Pokémon (many Pokémon are dual-type, and both go into calculating the effectiveness of a move against them). You can also hide the second defending type if you just want to see single type matchups.

At the bottom of the screen the effectiveness is displayed.

It’s pretty straightforward, and there’s not much more to it than that. The app supports Dark Mode, Dynamic type, and has both a light and dark App Icon.

Details

Price: $1.99 US
Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/aether-poke-type-guide/id1667532230
Marketing: https://www.benricemccarthy.com/aether/
Me: https://www.benricemccarthy.com, https://mastodon.social/@BenRiceM