November 4, 2008 at 11:00 am
I make a point to avoid talking about certain topics on this blog, including politics. This self-imposed rule comes despite a great interest in the topic. I avoid it for the simple reason that I just don't want to open up that can of worms here. Today, however, I wanted to make an exception to say a few words.
It was two years ago (give or take about a month) that I decided who I wanted to be the next President. For two years I've followed the news, watched the debates, and read the polls. For two years I've waited for this day, and today I stepped outside my apartment, walked the short distance to my polling location, and exercised my right to make an official, counted (hopefully!) declaration for who I thought should be the next President of the United States.
As silly or cliché as it may sound, all I can really think to say is this: I love my country.
October 16, 2008 at 10:14 pm
I was poking around my archive of posts (it's nice to occasionally look back and review what you thought about various topics in the past), and one thing caught my eye: the current design of my site has been live for about fifteen months. For me, that's actually quite a long time. The previous design lasted for five months, and the design before that lasted for eight months. So it's been around for awhile, yet I have no intention to redesign it again anytime soon. After more than a year, I'm still quite content with how the site looks. I've made a few small tweaks over time, and I'm sure I'll continue to do so, but the basic look isn't going anywhere.
I think it's the simplicity of the design. It has a bit of a unifying style to it (specifically: the colors gray and red and the font Helvetica), but then it pretty much just gets out of the way of the content. I like it.
October 1, 2008 at 11:23 am
I didn't see this coming. Apple has dropped the iPhone NDA, thereby making the world just a little bit better than it was yesterday. The oncoming unhindered exchange of code and information that is now possible without violating an NDA will be a huge benefit to the entire iPhone development community.
September 12, 2008 at 7:36 am
What happens when I get bored at work? I draw on the whiteboard. There are two albums posted, Whiteboard and The Last Supper, the latter of which is devoted to several photos of a rendition I did of The Last Supper.
August 21, 2008 at 9:43 pm
My tip calculator web app will be going offline on September 1. It was a silly little app to begin with, and in the event that you really do need a tip calculator on your iPhone, there's now native calculators on the App Store.
Plus, I'm very slowly working on something to improve my ability to support my apps, and I kind of need to lock down on which apps I really want to be supporting.
August 3, 2008 at 11:34 am
... is how easily it can be used to prototype algorithms. Check out this random dungeon generator I wrote in only about an hour. Works in Safari and Firefox.
July 20, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Check out the box art of Mega Man 9. I can't believe how full of win Capcom is right now. They're making a totally old-school Mega Man game, and even going so far as to deliberately create really, really bad NES-era box art. Capcom is making quite a gamble with this game, and I love it.
July 13, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Like many other people, I've been trying out many of the new iPhone apps. Here's my thoughts on some of them. You can click on the app names to go to their pages in the App Store.
Cubes come flying towards you, and you tilt the iPhone side to side in order to dodge them. Very simple, but well done. It's free, so what more could you ask for?
This game has become sort of the poster child of games on the iPhone. And why shouldn't it? It looks quite good, and its fit and finish is almost unmatched by anything else available right now. I've easily invested more time in this game than anything else I've gotten thus far.
That said, I do have one complaint: it's hard. Really hard. The controls take awhile to get used to, and the developers very quickly throw levels at you composed of narrow pathways with no rails. You get better at the game as time goes on, so you'll find that going back to past levels will be easier than when you played them before, but the developers keep the difficulty a few notches above where you often wish it were. If you like a challenge, this will deliver.
Now this one's interesting. It allows you to use the iPhone's iPod interface to remotely control iTunes on your computer or Apple TV. A remote control whose interface is cognizant of the content it's controlling: surprisingly novel.
There are, right now, about 17 different Sudoku games available on the store. I picked this one mostly out of an attempt to strike a balance between the reviews and the price. This one is probably not the best of the 17 available. The difference between pencil marking and actually filling in the box is ostensibly a single-tap versus a double-tap, but it doesn't seem to always quite work that way. More important, the game generates puzzles with more than one solution, which is strangely annoying.
It's not a bad kart racing game, except for one major issue: its framerate. When there's no other racers near you, it's great. When there's one, it's still pretty good. When there's two or more (like, say, when the race first begins), the game really starts to chug, and it becomes really hard to control. If they can improve the performance, I can see myself keeping it around for awhile. If not, it probably won't be on my phone much longer.
For the Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero fans out there, this is not a bad download at all. It would nice, though, if it had a visual indicator showing progress along the multiplier ranks and streak length.
This game is free? It's up there with Super Monkey Ball in terms of polish. It's also rather unique. It's a basic block-matching matching puzzle game, but with the added twist of being able to level up and gain new abilities like an RPG. Scrolling through menus can be pretty choppy, though, and there are a few bugs that make it appear that the game was rushed out in order to be in the store on the first day. The developers appear to be moving quickly, though, and many of the issues are fixed in the first update that should be arriving in the next few days.
Here's a fun one: a virtual keyboard. It comes with basic recording and playback functionality. It's great just to mess around in, and it'll really help me for times when I get a little melody in my head and want to jot it down without going through all the overhead of launching GarageBand.
So, that's just a bit of what I've been playing with over the past few days. Kind of hard to believe that in addition to all that I've been making significant progress with my own iPhone projects.
July 11, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Well, it turns out MobileMe wasn't the only Apple deployment this week to have a rocky start. The launch of iPhone OS 2.0 went really, really badly, with the iTunes activation servers hammered into oblivion.
In retrospect, I'm still impressed that Apple was able to choreograph so many projects to launch all at once. I'm not impressed with the apparent QA deficiencies in the .Mac/MobileMe team, and Apple most likely could have done more to scale capacity for the iPhone OS 2.0 launch.
Oh well, was fun to watch.
