“A great leap in the dark” — Thomas Hobbs
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ARC Memory Management in iOS 5 and Cocos2d-iPhone 2.0
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…
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Personal Music Discoveries for 2011 (Thanks Spotify!)
One of the best parts about working at Spotify is being paid to listen to music. After all some has to do the quality assurance! Actually, our QA guys and gals do a great job… but I can’t help myself 🙂 This year I’ve spent a lot of time with my old favorites, recapitulating my…
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Dungeonators Battle UI Redesign
There is nothing quite like real user feedback. The Dungeonators game that I started coding about a year ago has been through several design iterations. Before I wrote a line of code I mocked up the whole UI and tested that on my friends and kids (paper prototype, an honorable UI design tradition). And with…
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Sprite Playground
I wrote a little Cocos2d-iPhone test app and committed the project to GitHub. (Like every dutiful hacker should.) You’re welcome to download the project and fool around with the code. My goal was to figure out how to create a composite sprite, make sure it could respond to touches, and rotate and move it round…
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Cocos2d-iPhone Sprite Rotation to an Arbitrary Point
I had some time during the Thanksgiving weekend to work on Dungeonators. I’m hoping to get an upgrade out to the App Store soon. One thing I needed //TODO: is refactor my rather poor implementation of rotating a sprite to face another sprite. My original code worked ok, in a roundabout way, but was ugly…
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When Dogfooding Fails
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…
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Dungeonators iPhone Game Released in the App Store!
Writing a real game, from scratch, in Objective-C, with original Art and sound effects, took a heck of a lot longer than I imagined. Even with the help of the Cocos2d-iPhone framework! You can find it here: http://bit.ly/rkZvCJ Here’s what the sprite atlas looks like (formatted by Zwoptex) … And here are some stats: 28…
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Invalid Code Signing Entitlements
Finally after 11 months I submitted my iPhone game, Dungeonators, to iTunes Connect for inclusion in the Apple App Store. I’m planning on giving it away so the “warcraft meets angry birds” funs is accessible to everyone! I hope it passes Apple’s review process 🙂 It took several attempts for me to get to “waiting…
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Why Engineers Should Win
If you accept my argument that engineers generally don’t win arguments because they tend to rely on reason instead of rhetoric (even if you don’t accept my example that spam is preferable to junk mail) then you’ll be glad to know I have a prescription for engineers that will help them win arguments. But before…
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Why Engineers Never Win
Our world is full of bad decisions based on convoluted logic in service of irrational preferences. A great example is people who drive into NYC every morning to get to work. Why people sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic for hours polluting the air, wasting fossil fuel, and developing hypertension inducing road rage is beyond me. Another…
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