Chesstris

The iPhone Developer’s Library App (appstore link) contains an great set of e-books that any cocoa developer would be proud to have on their phone: Programming in Objective-C 2.0, by Stephen Kochan, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, by Aaron Hillegass, and The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK, by Erica Sadun. There can be no question that this is a great selection of books, so I focused my review on the e-book reader itself, which contains some bonus features for developers that make it really shine.

Unfortunately, some of those features can be a bit difficult to figure out at first. When I launched the app, I expected to see a menu or a help button. I think this reader in particular could even have given me a brief tutorial when I first launched the app. Regardless, there is a help screen, but you have to get all the way into reading a book before you can get to it. Click into the book you want to read, then click past the table of contents, and only then you can tap the center of the screen to bring up the menu. From here the Q&A style help screen is accessible by touching the question mark icon in the upper right. I know I wanted to read this first.

Once I got started actually reading one of the books, things were pretty much as I’d expect from any e-book reader. The main exception to this is that clicking on an image, a link or a bit of code requires a touch-and-hold method. This is indicated nicely with a sort of shrinking border around the item you are selecting. I think this was probably implemented to avoid accidentally opening something when you meant to page forward through the book, but I found myself avoiding those types of things instinctively when touching to turn a page, so I think it would be nice if that was configurable someday. I also found the length you have to hold before one of these opens (two, maybe three seconds) seems a bit on the long side.

Speaking of configuration, the settings screen has three different tabs full of configurable items, but still somehow felt bare to me. Most of the settings were on the “Appearance” tab, which consisted entirely of color options, but I missed the ability (common in e-book readers) to simply reverse all the colors to view white text on black instead of the default black on white.

I was pleasantly surprised to note that clicking a link opens a browser page without leaving the app, but still gives you the ability to open the link in safari. Clicking an image opens the image in what might also be Safari for all intents and purposes, allowing you to scroll and zoom in a recognizable fashion. Clicking on a bit of code opens the much-touted “code view”, which I found to be a very nice addition. Essentially this allows you to scroll and zoom (via a text-size slider) a given piece of code. You can copy and paste the text here, but more practical is the ability to email it to yourself for use on your mac.

Now I’ve got a lot of reading to do.

Been meaning to post a link to this waffle tetris image for a while now, and just hadn’t gotten around to it:

Then I just saw a geeky video game tattoo (on twitter, of course) it just occurred to me to search for tetris tattoos. I found a nice collection of them over at Geekologie, and ended up doing my own googling as well. Here are the ones I found not on that link:
and

This is not news, but I watched this lego tetris vid for the first time tonight:

I discovered this iPhone game BoXiKoN only just yesterday. I don’t think this one was out when I did my roundup of games that use tetris pieces before. The game description says it has been a successful PC game for years, but this is the first I’d heard/seen of it. It’s not limited to tetris pieces, but it’s a very solid action puzzle game nonetheless. I’m now following the dev’s twitter account.

Finally, there are some really great tetris webcomics over on Geek’s World. I didn’t discover these until late in my tetris tattoo searching, so I have no idea if there are other Tetris comics out there. I’ll put that on my todo.

A few weeks back, I upgraded to Snow Leopard, and noticed I no longer had the option of choosing 2.0 through 2.2.1 as my active SDK. I was starting a new project, and didn’t worry about it, thinking I’d figure it out later.

Well, now it’s later, and I spent the last hour or so figuring this out, so I thought I’d post it here in case someone else finds this helpful.

In the apple dev forums, I found a couple of people suggesting you need to re-install the old versions of the dev tools, then move my Developer directory, and re-install the latest tools. This seems silly, since I still have the “/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS2.2.1.sdk” directory. It’s possible this suggestion is in order to get the old version of the simulator, although I’m not entirely sure why you’d want to have that.

Another helpful commenter said “Base SDK does not set compatibility. It sets your available feature set. The iPhone OS Deployment Target build setting controls compatibility. Set it to 2.0 or 2.2.1 to allow your app to launch on earlier OS versions.” That made much more sense to me, but I couldn’t immediately find the “iPhone OS Deployment Target” setting in my project settings. I did have it though, it just wasn’t showing up for some reason. When I finally searched for IPHONEOS_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET it showed up, and with a handy dropdown full of old SDK versions.

As anyone who knows me well can tell you, I’ve been a prolific juggler at various stages in my life. I was president of the Juggling Club at the University of MN for about 2 and 1/2 years, and I’ve juggled on and off for at least 17 years now. That’s the main reason that I tend to pick up any new juggling and/or circus related games that appear on the market. They’re usually terrible, but I have a small collection, for various ancient consoles mostly, and now, increasingly, for the iPhone.

Read on for some mii juggling in Wii Fit Plus, and some iPhone mini-reviews. Read the rest of this entry »

I just want to rant about this for a second, as I did in the comments over at toucharcade’s excellent article about Imangi’s talk at GDC Austin.

Now, I wasn’t there, and I haven’t seen Imangi’s talk, so I don’t know whether this sentiment was present there, or whether this came out in the article only, but in the article, it’s suggested that Imangi’s first game, called Imangi, was somehow less successful because it was “difficult to understand how to play”. This gives me a stomach ache for several reasons. My comment was as follows:

It’s important to remember that Imangi was a successful game, and one that totally launched their name into any sort of publicity or limelight. Sure, maybe it took some reading to understand, but at least it was an original idea (at least, I think it was at the time), and I think suggesting a game needs to be super simple in order to succeed is actively ignoring one of the contributors to their own success!

I actually read a similar sentiment in the latest copy of Casual Connect last night, and it really pissed me off. Many complex games are extremely popular and successful. I’d also argue that just because something takes more than a few seconds to understand that does not (nor should it) exclude it from being a casual game.

Maybe tonight I’ll follow up by going back and finding the stuff in the Summer 2009 Casual Connect Magazine that upset me, or even add some examples of of casual games that are not simple or immediately obvious how to play. (But of course examples of successful non-casual games that are difficult to understand are incredibly easy to find. Think Civilization, even the dumbed down iPhone version took me at least 20 minutes to figure out.)

I do remember that one article said adding keyboard commands was enough to relegate any casual game to failure. (What idiocy. Think Tetris, morons.)

Of course there are lots of contributors to success, and reaching a large demographic is easily one of them. I guess I’d just like to give the blithering masses the benefit of the doubt in the IQ department. Certainly there are some interesting games that require little-to-no explanation… but one of the reasons Harbor Master is one of them is that almost everybody and their mother had already played Flight Control, which came out first and uses almost exactly the same game mechanic! (I give Imangi a pass on originality on that one because Harbor Master is a better game for other reasons, I think, reasons that contribute to make it just original enough.)

I guess my point is less that simplicity does not equate success, and more that games that require more explanation are not inherently worse (or less successful). That makes for a less elegant blog post title. (And also less simple, but that’s not why I chose it.)

A new ActionChess update (1.1.5) is in review. Here are the changes in the update:
- Minor changes to help text across the board.
- New scheme for saved games. One save per game mode is allowed. You can return to the menu to save your game, so when you unlock a new game mode, go try it out right away!

If you’ve been paying attention, (and I don’t know why you would be), you’ll notice that the version numbers should all match now also. There was a discrepancy between all the various versions because I wanted to number things 0.1.x, but I’d launched with 1.0 (by default, I just hadn’t changed the string in my plist project file), and since apple only allows upward version number changes, I had been trying to mirror the “real” version number, but with one instead of zero. This is a silly little discrepancy, but I’ve given up and moved everything to 1.1.x to avoid confusion.

As I mentioned in an update to a previous post, I wanted to get “global high scores” and a new “Puzzle Mode” into this update, but both features are proving to be fairly time consuming endeavors. I do have some progress into both tasks. So far, I’ve finished most of the shell for puzzle mode (still needs some UI love, and there are a couple of bugs). I’ve also programmed enough puzzles in to figure out that this mode is totally worth the effort. It is harder to make puzzles than it is to solve them, but I should have some more progress made by this weekend. I’d like to launch the feature with 100 puzzles. I don’t know how realistic that is, but that’s my goal for now.

Here is an extremely belated note to let everyone who reads this website know about my twitter account. I’m username livingtech over there.

In related social networking news, I also started a page for ActionChess on Facebook. You can become a fan! (At present, this serves no purpose, but I may do contests or something with it in the future.)

I made this short presentation for my 15 minutes of fame at the local IGDA meeting last night. Enjoy.

I’ve finally gotten around to creating a gameplay video for ActionChess. It stars the finger (and iPhone) of my lovely wife Florence.

ActionChess Demo from Martin Grider on Vimeo.

Just thought I’d write a quick note to let you all know that the bug-fix-only release has hit both ActionChess and ActionChess Lite today. (Yesterday now.) I don’t think I’ll have the next update submitted until at least this weekend. I’m planning on at least one of the following features (but hopefully all of them) in the next update:

• A new game mode: Puzzle Mode
• Global High Scores (working with GeoCade)
• Multiple Game Saves (one per game mode)

Realistically, if I shoot for all of them (and I am), it might not be until the following weekend. But we’ll see. I’ll keep you posted.

Update (5-10): I may have been a bit ambitious guestimating two weeks for these three features. It’s been two weeks now, and I’m partway through all of them. I should finish the multiple saves tonight. Maybe I’ll push that to apple for approval before the other two, but I’m not sure yet. So far, I’ve got about a half-dozen puzzles for puzzle mode. It’s harder to make puzzles than it is to solve them, but I’m far enough along that I’m now confident it’s worth the effort. My only worry is that it may be difficult for me to make mid-level difficulty puzzles. So far all of them have been really easy, or really pretty hard. We’ll see. I’d like to launch the feature with 100 puzzles. I don’t know how realistic that is, but it’s my goal for now.