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 :)
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!
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?
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 ;)
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:
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:
ACTION_SEND actually can only handle one image attachment.
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.
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:
I used the ACTION_SEND_MULTIPLE intent, in order to send multiple attachments.
I made temporary copies of the images in external storage before attaching them to the intent.
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.
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:
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:
It's very important for SEO (search engine optimization) to have a meaningful blog post URL in your Blogger or Blogspot blog. Blogger will create a post URL automagically using the post title. So, if my post was titled "My post about iPhone programming", I would see a URL like http://blog.daveworld.net/2011/07/my-post-about-iphone-programming.html.
But sometimes this plan gets thwarted by the length of the title. In fact, if your title is over 40 characters, there's a good chance the URL will be truncated to something that is NOT satisfactorily search engine friendly.
For example, my last blog entry was titled "How To Follow More Than 2000 People on Twitter". You can see it here.
If you are using Twitter and are trying to follow more than 2,000 people, you may encounter the following message:
"Your account may not be allowed to perform this action. Try logging out and in again."
Do not despair. What you need to do is get more followers. When you reach around 1850 followers, then you will be able to follow more users.
So, you may want to unfollow some people you are following who are not following you back.
I use a tool called TweetAdder to help manage my Twitter followers. It helps me find users who are interested in my Tweets through targeted searches, and it also helps me unfollow users who are not interested in following me back.
How do you customize the favicon in your Blogger blog?
Very simple... in your template (Design -> Edit HTML), add the following 2 lines of code just before the closing </head> tag:
First, a little background. I love video games. I love making video games and I love playing video games. I grew up with the Atari 2600, Commodore Vic-20, 64 and 128, various iterations of Windows, now Mac and iProducts. I am a fan of all Robotron-style games, an avid lover of Centipede, and I was the guy who could make it all the way through Jungle Hunt (or Jungle King, if you prefer that version).
These days, with many jobs, a wife and 2 small kids, my gaming is typically limited to the family-friendly variety. So, this review is really geared toward those in a similar situation, looking for the perfect family-friendly console to complement their entertainment setup. Though my wife and I enjoy playing fighting games like Tekken, and I personally enjoy first-person shooters, those are not the sorts of games that are happening in our home. Realistic violence is not what we're looking for right now, period.
That's right, I've begun the process of porting my apps to the Android platform. I picked i Pwn UR Mom as the first one because it's fun and easy... I hope no one out there is particularly offended by Yo Momma jokes, it's just meant to be a lighthearted blast of entertainment ;)
I Pwn UR Mom is the obvious choice for Yo Momma joke lovers and a handy reference for Yo Momma scholars. Browse hundreds of hilarious Yo Momma jokes categorized for easy access. Sit back and listen to the jokes read aloud, lovingly narrated by Daveworld's in-house Stephen Hawking impersonator (sounds just like him, it's uncanny ;) Then, automatically text or email the jokes directly to your friends (jokes are auto-converted 2 text shorthand 4 Ur convenience!), or Pwn all your Facebook friends’ moms at once by posting the joke to your Facebook wall! I Pwn UR Mom!
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 :)
I really enjoyed making StarPod... it's got rockin' music and cool sound effects, colorful graphics and explosions, plenty of particle systems... it's not a "kid's game" like my previous couple of entries, it's actually a game that i enjoy playing :)
In StarPod, you are a spaceship being attacked by various types of space-dwelling shape creatures. Enemies include fiery squares, icebursts, insidious triangles, starburst caterpillars, and plasmapillars. You have 2 "D-Pad" style controllers, one on the left to move, and one on the right to fire (a la Robotron, Total Carnage, Geo Wars, etc...). Personally, this is one of my favorite playing configurations, I always like a good game where I can get into a zone of moving with one hand and unleashing destruction with the other.
There are two basic goals in the game... destroy lots of enemies for points, and stay alive as long as possible without using a Big Bomb. Every 7 seconds you stay alive without the BB, the points multiplier increases. So, the longer you stay alive, the higher your points multiplier will get. Once you use the Big Bomb or get destroyed, though, the points multiplier resets back to 1. When I play, I am focused on staying alive as long as possible, so I rarely use a Big Bomb... I have gotten the points multiplier up past 60x ;)
This game is fun on iPhone and iPad... on the iPad, the obvious benefit is that there's more D-Pad space, so you will have an easier time seeing on the D-Pad which direction it's pointing. Some players may find it a little tough during the first few plays to remember to keep your thumbs on the D-Pads, but once you do, you will (hopefully) be mesmerized and "in the zone".
There are a bunch of subtle features designed to keep the game mesmerizing and interesting, including:
- each starfield is created on the fly, and each star twinkles
- each enemy has a distinct spawn sound and a distinct explosion sound. the sounds are panned left or right according to the position of the enemies, and the explosion sounds' pitch is variable depending on the size of the enemy at the time of explosion
- each enemy type has a distinct strategy for getting to you, i wanted to make sure that "camping" in the corner would not be an effective strategy for the game ;)
- powerups, including double shot, triple shot, quad shot, and shields up the ante in terms of destruction unleashed
- if you are cornered, and if you have destroyed enough enemies, you can use the big bomb to blow up all the enemies on the screen and get a fresh start. this is particularly awesome when there are lots of different enemy types on the screens, because each enemy will explode one at a time and play it's sound... so you get a little custom concert along with the big bomb :)
Hi, Dave here. I wanted to take a moment to recap all the stuff I accomplished in March. My goals at the beginning of the month were to create as many new iPhone apps as I could, to improve my internet presence and networking, and to make progress on my music. Here's what actually happened:
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