Tyree Apps

Carter's Coin Flip is as much an experiment in how to write iPhone/iPod Touch applications as it is an attempt to make a little money. Carter is an avid sports player and he came up with the idea. He also took the photographs while Dad wrote the code. Mom had the idea to add the screen which demonstrates the statistically random nature of coin flipping.

Carter’s Coin Flip has two views. The first view lets the user flip a coin by either tapping the coin, swiping the coin or making a flicking motion with the iPhone or iPod Touch. The coin will randomly become either heads or tails. Users can choose from one of four backgrounds by tapping on the background. In order to switch to a new coin, the user double-taps on the coin.

In the second view the user can choose a number of trials and the iPhone will calculate the number of heads and tails that appeared during the trials. The system also records the order in which the heads and tails appeared in order to demonstrate that the coin flip is truly a random event (i.e. you cannot use past sequences to predict what will happen next).

We have successfully tested 1,000,000 trials on an 8GB iPod Touch. We're sure there is a max value that will crash a phone.

In Version 2.0, we added an export feature to the Statistics mode. This will let you export the results of a trial as a CSV file which can be opened in any spreadsheet program. The export file represents each flip as either a 1 or a 0. This is done to keep the file as small as possible.

The coin images in Carter's Coin Flip are all sized proportionally to each other. In general, we choose coins that are interesting to look at or that represent something about their country. For this reason, we do not use Euros. All of the photos are taken by us of physical coins in our collections.

If you have questions or ideas for future enhancements please send an email to info@tyreeapps.com. The privacy policy for this app was last updated on 11 November, 2019.