June 2011
2 posts
1 tag
From LUA to JSON
I was planning on writing an article about how to integrate LUA into a game using iPhone Wax. This is how I wrote the AI for iBots Launch and how I wrote the first prototype of Chicken Pox. There were a few advantages to this strategy but I think in the end there were a lot more disadvantages. So this is an article on why I’m not using wax or LUA any more.
Why use LUA anyway?
I’m...
1 tag
Free as in Ads
This is my second post in the idevblogaday series and it’s going to be a short one because I’m at WWDC and I’m writing this post at the NGMOCO night of meat!
For those who caught my last post in the series you’ll know that our iPad game iBots Launch has been getting less than stellar sales. After a decent initial peak the number has fallen to roughly 10 sales a day.
So...
May 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Automate your iOS projects with rake
Rake is make for ruby, but it’s so damn good I use it on every project no matter what language i’m in. Ruby is the perfect glue language for getting stuff done and Rake makes it easy to write a set of tasks for each project. It’s also convenient because it’s already installed on Mac OS X!
Today I’m going to show how we can create tasks to build spritesheets from...
2 tags
The development of iBots Launch
I’ve spent the last 10 years as a web developer. My partner in crime (actually graphic design) is a lawyer. What the hell were we doing creating an iPad game!?
I’d wanted to make games since I played King’s Quest when I was 12. My first “game” was a double dragon remake for the commodore 64 with ascii graphics. My older brothers thought it was hilarious. When I got...
April 2011
3 posts
4 tags
The Wizard strikes again!
Continuing my quest for automating everything via the command line I present to you:
The Wizard of Xcode!!!
I extracted the build tasks I use on iOS apps into a handy library and dsl you can use in your own Rakefile. This will let you set up rake tasks to build your app, create ipa files and publish to testflight.
Looks something like this:
$ rake -T
rake build:debug # Build...
1 tag
iBots Launch Launches!
After about six months of hard work, sweat and tears I’ve finally let loose the iBots!
iBots is unique in that it’s designed specifically for the iPad and as a (mostly) two player game. It’s been compared to pong, air hockey and speedball but it’s most influenced by an old arcade game called Windjammers.
I’ll be posting updates on the game’s progress and...
March 2011
0 posts
Introducing the Wizard Of Dev center
I’m slowly getting around to easing the pain of managing beta testing iOS applications. TestFlight has made one part of that process really nice and easy but currently there are a few friction points. One of those is creating a build and submitting it to TestFlight which I have a Rakefile for. Another part is managing the device list on the Apple Dev center.
Previously this involved going...
January 2011
1 post
2 tags
Write your cocos2d game in Lua!
Yep, screw objective-c. With iPhone Wax it’s now super easy to get Lua going in your IOS apps. I’m going to write more about how this works in the future, but right now I’m just going to link to my example app on github.
http://github.com/snappycode/cocowax
Here are the interesting parts:
main.m
wax_startWithExtensions(luaopen_wax_http, luaopen_wax_json, luaopen_wax_xml,...
December 2010
3 posts
1 tag
Auto packaging iOS apps for wireless install
First of all, a big thanks to Vincent Daubry for figuring out how to do this!
So it turns out in iOS 4 there’s a new way of distributing your apps. They put it in for enterprise deployments but we can use it for getting our apps out to beta testers. Basically it lets people click a link on their iOS device which installs the app directly on the device without having to worry about...
Filmography 2010
Great mashup of some of this years films:
I thought it would be cool to get the imdb ratings for each film. I wrote a ruby script that uses mechanize to scrape the list of films from here and imdb_party to grab the ratings.
Anyhoo, here are the results
November 2010
2 posts
1 tag
October 2010
4 posts
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
September 2010
4 posts
Opening the flood gates
Wow. I have to say I’m quite surprised by the response I got to my post yesterday. It was written in frustration, kept under wraps for four months and lived it’s life on the edge of the post button and the trash can. I expected 10 friends to read it.
At the time of writing it’s racked up 46,840 page views, 210 comments on hacker news, 419 comments on reddit and a lot of tweets....
1 tag
Leaving .net
We are, as software developers, in various states of alone-ness.
A company I worked at once had been operating for years under the assumption that it was OK for software to take months to integrate and deploy; they had never heard of continuous integration. They thought it was normal to rewrite your application from scratch every 2 years; they had never heard of Test Driven Development or...
August 2010
1 post
“We live in a world operated by science and technology. We have also arranged...”
– Carl Sagan
June 2010
0 posts
Rails json date format
The default rails json date format doesn’t parse in javascript. You should be able to tell ActiveSupport to not use the standard one like so:
config.active_support.use_standard_json_time_format = false
but I couldn’t get that to work so I duck punched the DateTime class like so:
class DateTime
def as_json(options = nil)
strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
end
end
That...