AutoJournaling with VoodooPad - moving toward Interruptible Programmer Nirvana

Since I read the Interruptible Programmer, I’ve been trying to do a better job of handling interruptions. Well, specifically to reduce the effort it takes me to get back to where I was before the interruption happened. I and switch to a new task very easily, but my brain isn’t wired to get back to where I was, leading to much frustration (and lots of misplaced coffee cups that happened to be in my hand when I started answering a question when I was away from my desk).

360iDev Impressions - Overview

I got back last night from the latest 360iDev conference (my first time to attend). I had a great time and learned a lot, but most importantly, it provided a lot of motivation I really needed to keep working on my apps.

I went through my notes to reinforce my memory while it’s reasonably fresh, so I figured I might as well post my notes. Pre-conference class notes start here, and continue to Monday, Tuesday and Yesterday. My notes on the GameJam start here.

360iDev Impressions - Day 3

Day 3 started an hour later (to give us time to recover from the party or the Game Jam or (for some crazed souls) both). We went through a review of the people that wanted to present their apps. Lots of very impressive accomplishments for such a short time.

Next, I went to Brandon Alexander’s talk on Interface Builder. It was a rough talk (like Time Burk’s the previous day) because there were obviously some Interface Builder experts int he audience, as well as some people who don’t seem to have ever used it before. I learned about creating new classes in Interface Builder (which will save me some time), and he talked a little bit about Internationalization and did a helpful example on tableviews. A lot of the class ended up being review for the people that didn’t raise their hands that they’d used IB before, though.

360iDev Impressions - Day 2

Tuesday opened with a informative panel that covered a bunch of issues including the upcoming Mac App Store, and Android vs. iPhone development.

Then on to Tim Burks’ Get Your Head in the Clouds talk. I learned about a lot of really cool tools I hadn’t dealt with, especially ASIHTTPRequest, which I think I will find a lot of uses for. Tim was very prepared, but it was at times a difficult talk, as he got questions ranging from subtle differences between Heroku and AppEngine to “What is this Amazon S3 you keep mentioning?”. It’s really hard to speak to an audience of just widely ranging needs and skill sets, but he did so admirably well.

360iDev Impressions - Day 1

Monday morning, David Whatley did a great keynote that was based on this video. He talked about what happened at his company when he instituted a Results Only Work Environment. It was very interesting, and ended with this. Which is the coolest way to end a keynote, ever.

I started with Tom Frauenhofer’s Cocos2D class, which is probably the class in which I learned the most the whole conference, but that’s largely because I had never touched cocos2d before, so I had a lot to learn. Tom was very organized, and taught us enough that I managed to actually write a game prototype 36 hours later.

360iDev Impressions - Day 0

The first class I took was Kendall Gelner’s Advanced Debugging class. It was really, really good. I learned about using the Mac “User Interface” instrument to record and play back simulator events for debugging and how to create custom instruments with DTrace. It was a well organized, very useful talk.

Sunday afternoon I took Saul Mora’s Unit Testing that Doesn’t Suck class. It didn’t go as well. The class was predicated on the attendees having GHUnit and MacRuby, and the hotel WiFi completely failed under the load (and not for the last time during the conference). We learned about some of the cool utilities in Saul’s GitHub account, but the class didn’t manage to reach its full potential because it took us so long to get the software prerequisites installed.

The Sky is falling!

Movie code starts !

Movie code ends !

Or at least the aliens are.

1. Get a cocos2d hello world screen showing the big blue ball royalty-free NASA supplied image

2. Get a quick sprite to be the bad guy on the screen.

3. Cover the world in an opaque block when screen is touched and restore it when touches end

4. Make the alien move.

5. Make the alien able to collide with the block.

6. Make the game over popup if the alien collides with the world while the block isn’t up.

   Published at November 10, 2010 ·  1 min read

Talking to Myself

I’m going to keep writing updates to RapidWeaver locally - Although I have no idea when I’ll have enough bandwidth to actually publish them.

Kinda takes the fun out of it.

In any case, I have the ship moving (until it hits the bottom of the screen). It’s at least looking more like a game now.

Next up: Conveyor Belt