Sunday, April 1, 2012

Bunny's Easter Egg Hop n Drop, for iOS and Android


Easter is coming right up! Don't forget to keep the little ones occupied with this fun Easter-themed game!

Bunny's Easter Egg Hop 'N Drop is for iPhone and iPad, available in the App Store!

Bunny's Easter Egg Hop 'N Drop is also for Android, https://market.android.com/details?id=com.daveworldinc.hopndrop!


Happy Easter! Catch Bunny's eggs before they fall! Simple to play, challenging to master. Perfect for kids, perfect for the Springtime holiday.

Bunny's Easter Egg Hop 'N Drop is optimized for iPhone, iPad, and iPhone Retina displays. High score leaderboards use OpenFeint and Game Center. Features original bunny hopping music, composed and performed by me, Dave :)

Friday, March 16, 2012

Updating my cocos2d apps for the new iPad

Oy. When you make a cocos2d app for iOS, there is a boilerplate line in the App Delegate class... goes like this:

if( ! [director enableRetinaDisplay:YES] )
    CCLOG(@"Retina Display Not supported");


But, uh oh! New iPad is retina, too! I have at least 5 apps using that line of code. That makes the new iPad think it's in retina mode, so the display gets all messed up!

So here's the fix:

if(![AppDelegate isIPad]){
    if( ! [director enableRetinaDisplay:YES] ) {
        CCLOG(@"Retina Display Not supported");
    }
}

You can use your own "isIPad" methodology... I check for the height and width of the screen. Using this line, retina is not enabled for the new iPad, only for the other devices which support it... iPhone 4 and 4s. The next step, of course, would be to enable retina for new iPad and actually supply those double-sized huge graphics, but that's for another day.

And, even though I'm ready with new updates and have been for several days, only one of the 5 apps I submitted (Guess Your Songs) has made it through the Apple review queue... and that was after an expedite request ;)

You can find my iOS apps by searching for "daveworld" in the app store.

Any other snafus people have found getting ready for the new iPad? Any apps expected to misbehave on opening day?

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Guess Your Songs at GDC Play 2012

What a blast! Guess Your Songs hosted a kiosk at GDC Play 2012. It was in San Francisco at the Moscone Center... specifically, Moscone South, in the Esplanade Ballroom, March 6-8. It was a great way to showcase our music interest-based social gaming platform, Guess Your Songs... it was affordable for our little startup, and it was set apart just enough from the larger Game Developers Conference so that actually interested people were the ones to stop by.

Dave Schuman & Gary Moskoff
with Guess Your Songs at GDC
Dave and Lisa Oh
and the Yoshi shirt :)
http://ohlisa.com
And when I say actually interested people, I mean the sorts of people an Indie game developer wants to meet... investor and big-name company contacts. GDC Play turned out to be exactly the sort of venue where folks are looking to uncover the next great gaming phenomenon.

If anything, the thing the event seemed to be lacking was press. I suppose that makes sense, since there was the actual Game Developers Conference expo floor right across the street, not to mention Apple's big hub-bub about the new iPad.

And even without a huge press contingent, we managed to make it into one full video interview with the fun and talented Lisa Oh. Here's that interview:
We also scored a short video bit on NBC's TechNow with Scott Budman... the clip isn't posted online yet for that spot (as of the time of this writing). If you happened to be watching the 6:00pm NBC news on March 7th, you probably missed our spot that time you blinked... but we were there ;)

A few other reviews have popped up as well... for example, Guess Your Songs was recently featured as an iMore Pick of the Week, and popular blogger Dave Taylor wrote us a nice review on his site.

Here are some other photos from GDC 2012.

Were you at the Game Developers Conference?

What did you think? Did you make it over to GDC Play?

What's your favorite new game that's coming out?




Thursday, September 1, 2011

iBridalGown launched in Android Market as Freemium app



I've just completed porting iBridalGown to Android, and I'm really excited about it! It took a few weeks of day-and-night coding and testing, and at the end of that effort, I've been able to launch a great FREE Android app that serves a great purpose for women shopping for a wedding dress.


iBridalGown, designed by a bridal salon owner, puts all of your wedding gown details at your fingertips. It minimizes frustration and helps you enjoy your wedding gown shopping experience.

We embraced the Freemium app model for this version so that women everywhere can use iBridalGown, for free, to help organize their wedding dress searches. We also offer an additional paid in app upgrade to access premium features.

iBridalGown for Android is available for download from the Android Market:


iBridalGown for iPhone is available for download from the App Store:

Visit the iBridalGown Website and Blog at http://www.ibridalgown.com.


Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Android action_send multiple images

Android OS makes it really easy to share an image programmatically, using the ACTION_SEND intent. I had a situation recently, while porting my iBridalGown for iOS app to Android, where I wanted to send an email with multiple image attachments. As with most Android programming tasks, there were first a few snafus to overcome ;) A couple of the problems I was facing were:
  1. ACTION_SEND actually can only handle one image attachment.
  2. The images were saved in the "private" app directory (the one you get when you call getFilesDir()) , which is problematic when attaching images to emails this way.
  3. There are not many clients that respond to ACTION_SEND which can accommodate text/html content and an attachment, let alone multiple attachments
So, what did I do? Three problems, three solutions:
  1. I used the ACTION_SEND_MULTIPLE intent, in order to send multiple attachments.
  2. I made temporary copies of the images in external storage before attaching them to the intent.
  3. I made sure only Gmail would be launched, since it is the only app I found which can reliably handle sending text/html and multiple image attachments.
More details...

Monday, August 22, 2011

Android programmatic density independent pixels

I've been doing a bunch of Android programming lately, working on porting the iBridalGown iOS app to Android, so I've been using a lot of "dip" (density independent pixels) measuring in my layouts. For example, in a TextView, I might specify something like this in XML:

<TextView
      android:id="@+id/headertext"
      android:layout_width="wrap_content"
      android:layout_height="wrap_content"
      android:minHeight="48dip"
      android:textSize="24dip"
      android:text="My Dresses"
/>

But what if, within the Activity code, I want to change one of these measurements? There are no Java methods in the Android SDK that accept density independent pixels!

Well, here's how. Just multiply the size in pixels by a scale factor defined in the context's resources, like so:

float scale = context.getResources().getDisplayMetrics().density;
float size = sizeInPixels * scale;

And there's that. I hope it helps :) Please join the conversation with a comment.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

7 Funny Unattended Children Signs

Here are a few funny reminders to keep track of your kids :)

The Classic.

This time a double espresso and imaginary perks.