The iPhone app I’ve been coding up is coming along pretty well. Tossing myself into the iphone platform has definitely been a trial by fire, but I guess that’s the only way to learn. In the next coming week I’ll post up some pics of the app as I get closer to a finished product.
I’ve been spending the nights of the past few weeks throwing myself into coding for the iPhone. I thought I’d start out simple working on a weather-type application or at least I thought it was simple. My application design apparently requires me to use some of the more complicated UI pieces on the iPhone. I’m still trying to get my head around their architecture and having to write this stuff in Objective-C isn’t helping. I’m really familiar with C/C++ and even C#, but Objective-C is really throwing me.
Ok, I don’t want this post to be nothing but whining, so I’ll mention the good stuff. My tableviews are working correctly and the navigation controller seems to be passing the subviews like they should. The mapping portion of the application has been driving me insane, but now everything is scrolling properly and the image isn’t being hidden by the navigation bar anymore. Yay! I did have to hack in a pixel offset because for the life of me I cannot find where to get the height of a default UINavigationBar object.
I’ll post more updates as the application progresses.
I picked up a 4GB Zune earlier today. I’ve been messing around with some XNA stuff on the PC and Xbox360 and wanted to try some things on the Zune.
So far the interface seems pretty limited and the screen exceptionally small.
The NASCAR09 game is done and I got some needed vacation time; yay for relaxing. In about two weeks the game will be released and everyone will finally get to see all the changes made this year. Anyone wanting a sneak peak can grab the NASCAR09 demo from Xbox LIVE Marketplace right now. I downloaded it at home and had my dad drive around Daytona. He didn’t crash once, so the car is definitely handling much better.
Well, relaxing the weekend and back to games on Monday.
I’ve been thinking about trying to make the trip out to GDC this year. It’s been almost seven years since I’ve been and I miss the fun of seeing everyone. Unfortunately there’s no way I can get work to pay for the trip, so I’ll have to see if I can get the money together to make it; if not, there’s always next year.
Lately I’ve turned my attention to the “casual” genre of gaming. I’m finding myself playing more games that take up maybe a few minutes at a time and don’t require a huge amount of dedication. With my kids pulling me every direction, there’s never enough time anymore to give RPGs the time they really deserve. Random flash games though? Plenty of time to play a little bit when I can grab the time.
I’m thrilled to see that a whole new market is opening up in this area; unfortunately, a lot of larger companies are jumping into this arena making it difficult for smaller more innovative developers to compete. Capitalism at its best though, we’ll let the market decide.
Well, the holiday vacation has started, got a nice week off before the kids got out of school. I’m going to use my remaining vacation time to work on some of the little code projects I don’t really get a chance to touch most of the time. Hopefully I can come up with something kind of fun.
The Advanced XNA book has to go by the wayside though. I realized that I don’t really have the time to work on a third book and some conflicts came up.
This weekend I spent a little bit of time on the website and added a few links to the right-hand nav bar and a new section called Published Works. In these pages I’ve included all the projects I’ve worked on over my career in the games industry. Of course, more will be added to the list as the projects are completed.
I’ve sent off the proposal for the XNA book as well as an initial writing schedule. If everything goes well, I should be started on the new book in the next week. I’m pretty excited since it gives me a great opportunity to dive back into XNA.
If anyone has any suggestions as to what they might want to see in an advanced XNA book, please let me know.
Looks like I’m going to be writing an advanced XNA book in the coming few months. This one is going to follow the model set by the Game Programming Gems series with each chapter focusing on specialized techniques that can be easily incorporated into game projects. I’m still coming up with the list of topics but so far it’s about 90% of things that people haven’t really covered yet.