Custom dialog boxes are a must for any game. iPhone’s standard dialog boxes are fine for a business or productivity app, but in a game they look out of place. Users play games to escape from their everyday lives. Showing them the same exact graphic design that they associate with work and ordinary routine is a great way to subtly interrupt the immersiveness of their gameplay experience. We don’t want that, so we need to customize.
Cocos2d makes it easy to convert your drab standard UIAlertViews into glorious customized color dialog boxes. Above is an actual UIAlertView / custom dialog box transition from my upcoming iPhone game. Here’s how I did it. Continue Reading »
Popularity: 95% [?]
Posted in Tech | 
4 Comments » | December 13th, 2010
Android or iPhone? Which platform should I target first? iPhone, for now, though it’s close. Android cannot (yet) provide the same level of developer tools or paying user base, the Android emulator can’t handle graphics, and I already own an iPhone. I do expect that Android’s competitive position will improve significantly over the next few years, but it’s not there yet. Continue Reading »
Popularity: 33% [?]
Posted in Tech | 5 Comments » | October 6th, 2010
So I wanted to write a cron job on my Mac. Just run this script every day at midnight. Nothing fancy.
In standard Unix, this is one line in a crontab:
0 0 * * * /some/script
That’s it. Put that in your crontab and /some/script will run every day at midnight.
Naturally, I typed man crontab on my Mac to get started. Apple likes to make weird minor modifications to standard Unix commands sometimes. I found:
(Darwin note: Although cron(8) and crontab(5) are officially supported under Darwin, their functionality has been absorbed into launchd(8), which provides a more flexible way of automatically executing commands. See launchctl(1) for more information.)
More flexible, huh? I’m all about more flexible! Sounds good. Another well thought out Apple improvement, sweeping away 30+ years of Unix cruft at a stroke!
Not quite. Continue Reading »
Popularity: 19% [?]
Posted in Tech | 1 Comment » | February 1st, 2010
The iPad is #1 on Reddit Programming right now: a curious piece by Alex Payne. Payne says he is “disturbed” because “it’s a device that does little to enable creativity”; thus, the “tragedy of the iPad is that it truly seems to offer a better model of computing for many people – perhaps the majority of people.”
Payne’s conception of humanity is somewhat more disturbing. He is saying that all people can be, or at least should be, “creative” (whatever that means), and those who are not are somehow deficient as human beings. Nonetheless, the iPad so far has not impressed me. Continue Reading »
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in tech industry | No Comments » | January 29th, 2010
