I am 5 minutes into April 1st, and I discovered the first April’s fool already.
In the Google Play developer console, a button “Add new awesome application” appeared. This led through a series of funny dialogs. See the screenshots below.
Awhile ago, I bought a cheap android phone, the samsung galaxy gio. I liked the gio, because it has more pixels than other phones in its price range (320×480 rather than 320×240; it can now be bought sim locked for 110 euro or so). this makes it suitable for web browsing and other tasks. It is very small and lightweight, even for a mobile phone, so i could take it with me everywhere. The gio was all I expected, and had only one major flaw (at least, the version running android 2.2): it crashes a lot, often multiple times a day. After upgrading to 2.3.6 however, the crashes went away. I got so hooked on web browsing on the go, that I wanted to buy a device with a bigger screen. I could not decide what would be the best size, a bigger phone or a tablet. The problem with a tablet is that it is too big to take with you everywhere.
For my own game project, I needed to translate some AS3 code to Java. I could not find any software capable of doing this. Instead of doing all the boring conversions by hand (i.e. “function a():void” -> “void a()”), I wrote a simple converter based on regular expressions. It is very small but does a good job of automating the most boring part of the conversion process.
I converted my actionscript game Web Wars with it, and most of the code converted well. Afterwards, I spent most of my time fixing numeric type conversion problems (double-int), something that no shallow parser can do automatically.
See the source code below.
I recently bought a wacom bamboo tablet (the most basic one) and had to do a bit of research to get it to work on my Ubuntu Karmic (32 bit) machine and add pressure-sensitivity to Gimp. All drivers are supplied, but the version is too old to work with my new tablet. The installation procedure for updated drivers is not hard, but I did not find it clearly described anywhere.
While almost all modern mobile devices (mobile phones, that is) can handle HTML, it is a good idea to optimise your web pages to the small screen size and low bandwidth of a typical mobile device. So, you’d want two versions of your website: one for mobiles and one for normal computers.
I’ve been looking for a simple and fast detection script that detects whether a website visitor is on a mobile phone or on a regular PC. I tested several scripts against lists of mobile and non-mobile user agents.
Touch screen phones are becoming more and more common. Sales trends show that touch screens are really taking off since a year or two. This year we see the introduction of several cheap (€ 200) Android phones: The Samsung Galaxy Apollo and the LG GW620.
For both Android and IPhone, the primary input device is a touch screen. Only some Androids have a QWERTY keyboard, the others hardly have any buttons at all. I never worked with touch screens before, so I decided to try my hand at one.
If you have a single large SWF, you often want to produce a custom intro screen (such as a progress bar) while it is loading. This is possible in Actionscript 3, using a factory class, though I found the documentation rather obscure. Thanks to some blog postings and the Mochi API examples I found out how it works.
As an example I will discuss a simple “progress bar” loader that can be plugged into any actionscript class.
Now, for something completely different. I’ve been working with the PIC series microcontrollers. These are versatile devices, which can, for example, drive a TV input directly, using no more than a couple of resistors. The PIC acts as a video chip (GPU) as well as a microprocessor.
Up till now I managed to avoid compiling a main class that was inside a package. When I did it the naive way, I got this error:
“a file found in the source-path must have the same package structure”
Sounds familiar? It does to many flex users. I found a lot of questions about this error but no answers. After some trial and error I found the answer. Note, I use flex 4.0.0 here. Other versions may have somewhat different command line parameters.
The Kongregate gaming community is an interesting place for gamers and game developers alike. Kongregate is basically community driven: by rating games, the users decide which games will gain more exposure and which will become buried and forgotten. This means editors have less work sorting out the loads of uploads and inevitable crap that arrives at their site every day. I’ve been happy with the constructive reviews that I get from Kongregate members. It’s better than, for example, Newgrounds. however, there seems to be some things wrong with the rating system. That’s not a good thing, as the whole site hinges on the rating system. I’ll try to illustrate.