Wednesday, January 4, 2012
My rewrite of Dungeonators is crawling along at a glacial pace. Mostly because I can only work a couple of hours a week on the project. But the iOS 5 way to manage memory with ARC (automated reference counting) is making the process far less painful than it was the first time I wrote my [...]
Saturday, November 5, 2011
For over 20 years we’ve been eating our own dog food in the software industry and it’s not working. For the uninitiated dogfooding means to actually use the product you’re developing. It started out as a radical idea at Microsoft and spread as a way to get developers to experience their customer’s pain. On the [...]
If you’re crazy like me you love reading really good primers on programming. Not just to learn about a particular language but to enjoy well written technical prose. (Yeah, I said I was crazy). Yesterday, I started reading Stephen Kochan’s classic Programming in Objective-C (original edition), which was published in 2003. What I like about [...]
I love how the new Xcode 4 shows you code changes side-by-side with it’s version editor view. But I had a little problem. I’m a subversion fan. Yes, I know, totally not cool. I keep this flaw a secret and I don’t force my preference on my co-workers nor do I tweet about it. I’m [...]
My first iPhone game, that might actually make it to the App Store, is just about done. (Not done done but almost ready for testing and tweaking.) With the idea that other people beside me might actually play my game I’ve started to do a very dangerous and high risk activity: Optimization! The all the [...]
If you’re writing almost any type of game, from a puzzler to a FPS to an RTS, tracking time is critical element of the game play. (Except for Angry Birds. You can ponder an Angry Birds level until your iPhone battery runs dry without penalty.) Cocos2d-iPhone provides several means for tracking time in your game [...]
I recently switched my development workstation from a MacBook Pro to a Windows desktop PC. Yeah, I know, I’m going against the trends but it’s a sweet machine I assembled myself based on recommendations from Ash. Immediately I ran into compatibility problems with Google’s Android SDK and the current versions of Eclipse (Helios) and the Java Developer [...]
I have to disclose upfront that I am more of an Agile guy than a Scrum guy. Which is to say I feel more at home discussing Agile in general than Scrum in particular. (I’m not even sure how to capitalize it–SCRUM or scrum?) Over the years I’ve made my peace with Scrum and as [...]
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
I love a good fable. The kind that Aesop used to write with animals acting out human morality tales. Of course, if you do the research, you quickly find out that Aesop didn’t write most (if any of the fables) we ascribe to him and like Shakespeare he probably never existed. I don’t let reality [...]
It still amazes me how a process created by engineers for engineers can make so many engineers so unhappy. I’ve seen all kinds of responses to Agile from engineers. Some are immediately enthusiastic. Others are cautiously optimistic. Many are amused and cynical. And some are down right hostile. Over time the responses polarize and the [...]