71² – The ramblings of two 30-something developers

1 Week Apps

Things have been pretty heavy over the last few weeks. Work has been busy and the very last edits for “Learning iOS Game Programming” have come in, plus working on Particle Designer 1.3.

To try and spice things up a bit, Tom came up with the idea of trying to create apps in just one week, start to finish. Tom has done a great job and created a couple of children related apps which you can see in the “Our Apps” page. These are available on the app store and are a lot of fun for young kiddies.
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Particle Designer 1.3 – Preview

I’ve just done a small video so show the remote control feature being added to Particle Designer for v1.3. We are working hard to get this completed ASAP and more details will be provided to a release date over the coming week or so.

We really think that being able to remote control multiple different devices to see what particles look like on each will help speed up the workflow of designing particles.

Hope you enjoy the video and the new feature.

Particle Designer v1.3 – Preview Video

Mike

New Readers Game – Lexagram

If you enjoy word searches then I think you’ll love Lexagram.

Do you like crosswords? Do you enjoy completing a challenging sudoku puzzle? If so, then you’ll love the three-dimensional challenge of Lexagram.
Lexagram is a word search where rearranging the game board is part of the challenge. Move letters around. Rotate rows and columns to reveal different sets of letters. But beware, each found word further limits your ability to rearrange the board.
With over one hundred game boards and nine levels of difficulty, Lexagram will challenge the problem solver within you.

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New Readers Game – Monster Melody Mash

I wanted to share another readers game today which I love. Jonathan at Tui Studios has created a great music mashup app called Monster Melody Mash.
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SLQ Downloads

It’s been a while since I put Sir Lamorak’s Quest on the app store so I thought I’d share how the downloads have been doing.

Apart from this blog I’ve performed zero advertising for SLQ which is most likely why the downloads have just been ticking over.
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I’m officially confused…(FIXED)

OK, I’m official confused now with an odd problem with Particle Designer. The rendering of particles is perfect as long as I apply a 90 degree rotation clockwise to the particle textures. Without that all the textures are rendered on their left side. THIS IS MADNESS.
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What can mobile/network operators do for you?

As a little bit of an off the wall question, I’m wondering what people would like to see mobile operators do for app developers.

Most of the time app developers don’t even need to really consider the mobile operator being used as they are simply carrying data and is transparent to the developer. Also tying your app down to an operator does in some ways restrict your reach to just those users on that network.
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Particle Designer v1.3 – Feature Preview

I thought I’d write a small update on Particle Designer v1.3. A LOT of work is going into this version and we are hoping you are going to really like it.

The GUI is getting cleaned up a little and we have added the ability to drag any image onto the device for it to be used as a background, so you can see how your particle emitter will look with blending etc. We’ve also redone the texture generation code internally as we found we had to handle issues with textures on ATI graphics cards.
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What does your rig look like?

One more thing….

I recently took a photo of my setup for a friend and I thought it would be fun to see what others setup looks like. I’ve posted by photo below and I’d be interested to see how you guys are set up :o)

Mike

So much to do…so little time to do it

There are just not enough hours in the day at the moment. My day job is not something I can drop in and out of as it needs my full attention, so my blog and development work is done in the evenings and weekends. At the moment there is so much going on I just don’t know where I’m going to get the hours from.

As well as reviewing the blog and forums we’re:

- Finishing Particle Designer v1.3
- Finishing a universal PD companion app called Particle Pod, more on that soon ;o)
- Prototyping a version of PD for the iPad
- Working on production edits for the book – “Learning iPhone Game Programming
- Recording the tutorials for the book
- Testing SLQ on iOS 4 and and books tutorials
- Checking out iOS 4 and its new API’s
- Pulling a list of new tutorials together

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