Acey Deucey part 2

Just a progress report. Did mockups of screens on a whiteboard, then started moving them to IB. Instead of just downloading some casino table background from iStockphoto, spent an hour making it from scratch in Gimp. Found an example from somewhere on how to flip a view with that cool 3D effect (UIView setAnimationTransition). Spent more time than I wanted in trying to support retina display (the higher res new iPhone). Decided not to make a reusable playing card class, instead I'll just deal with UIImageView objects directly. Had funny moment where I realized there are playing card values between 1-14, but only 13 different cards in each suit. How is that possible? Ace is 1 and 14. Of course.



Stuff I feel unsure about
- How to structure the whole program, where should the game itself be? Maybe look at examples for inspiration.
- UIImageViews provide some way to offset the image, right? Right? So I can just have one huge image that has all the cards. (edit: UIImageView seemed to have no such property. Yikes, UIImage docs say to avoid images larger than 1024x1024 and mine is currently bigger.)
- How do I change the tab bar texts for tabs?

Stuff I realized I need:
- Default.png for quick launch.
- May need icons for tab bar tabs.
- One image for front of card and one of back to animate transition between them. So need to move them together too.
- Maybe there should be a white outline in where the cards are supposed to go, just like on a real casino table.

Weird aspirations:
- It would be cool if there was a background casino atmosphere sound, kind of like the background theme in "shufflepuck cafe".
- It would be awesome if the background "audience" made some amusing comments about the situation in the game. Like if you bet a lot when the odds are really bad someone would whisper "I can't believe he didn't fold!". Or if you reach some high dollar amount you could get flirted on. But all of this kind of subtle.
- It would be good if the cards casted a shadow (and of course were a bit higher too) while they are being dealt.

Acey Deucey

Decided to make a card game from an old Atari BASIC games book. It's called "Acey Deucey" (not to the backgammon-like game), "In-Between" or "Sheets". There are many variations to the rules, but I'll go with exactly the simple rules as in that BASIC program. You are initially dealt two cards, then you bet and after that one more card is dealt to you. You will win the amount you bet if the value of the third card is between the two cards that were dealt to you and lose if it wasn't.

To make things simpler, Ace always means 14. "In between" means strictly in-between, not equal. Stuff that's on my mind now about this:

- Where to get the card faces. I think there was some free set. Ah here it is. If I understand correctly, it is free even for commercial use (I might want to try AdMob just for fun).
- Card animation should be slide in + flip. Flipping should be that "pseudo 3d" flipping if possible (compress horizontally), but how to do it? At least two options, UIViewAnimationTransitionFlipFromRight (or something similar) to switch between views, or use OpenGL (Mixing UIKit with OpenGL)

iPhone dev 21

Got the flashlight app running on my iPod. Now how do I submit it to the app store?

"If your app doesn't do something useful or provide some form of lasting entertainment, it may not be accepted."

Oh.

"If your App looks like it was cobbled together in a few days, or you're trying to get your first practice App into the store to impress your friends, please brace yourself for rejection. We have lots of serious developers who don't want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour."

Blush.

iPhone dev - provisioning profile

Doing all of the certification magic again. Last time I did it I didn't really leave myself any helpful notes, but this page was really helpful about it. Biggest gotcha was that the dev portal "Provisioning Assistant" doesn't work on Chrome. It seems like it does, but just fails at creating the provisioning profile.

And what is a "provisioning profile"? From Apple dev portal: "A Provisioning Profile is a collection of your App ID, Apple device UDID, and iOS Development Certificate that allows you to install your application on your device."

Flashlight app works

You turn on the app. Screen goes white. That's it. Now, how do I get this into the store?

iPhone dev continued after 2 year hiatus

Exactly two years ago I got an iPhone and a mac to develop apps with. I was making good progress on an iPhone game, but then I accidentally scratched the surface of the phone with a key in my pocket, and it stopped working. Somehow I lost motivation to develop for it after that, even though I did get a new iPhone some time later. Now I want to give it a try again. I want to get the easiest possible minimal app into the app store, just to lift my spirits. I want to browse the store and look at it while thinking "I made that (crappy app)". With "minimal" I mean really minimal, it has to be the simplest thing that could possibly pass the review process, so that means a flashlight app.

I want the app to display a white screen when turned on. That's it. It won't even have a way to turn the light off, because that would be more than is strictly necessary. I'm not sure if I'll be required to put some kind of credits or explanation with the app, or will just a white screen suffice. At least I'll need an icon. Or could that be just a white rectangle? For name I could go with something like "Quick Flashlight". In the explanation I should say that it really doesn't do anything at all except make the screen all white.

Discovered it is possible to travel to Antarctica and North Korea. You can also get Master's Degree in Greenland (150 students).

Beefed up my backups after hearing the horror story of how Coding Horror lost their data.

Ahh, my first solid state disk. Not the leet Intel one, but a cheapo one about half the performance off ebay. Still, even half the performance of Intel's SSD beats any traditional drive. So wonderful to get rid of all those periods when the computer is doing nothing except just crunching loudly.

Been thinking how to use the community of Coolest Friends to start something else. I was thinking of a video dare site, where you get points for shooting vids where you do certain tasks. For example one dare could be "stand on one foot for a minute" and if you post a video where you do so, you would get some amount of points. Of course there would be a visible leader board, and you get more points the more difficult a task is, possibly determined by how many people did it.

But I feel a bit exhausted. After doing some "small" projects like this, I realize they always balloon from the "I bet I can do it in a week" to "3 months passed and I'm STILL doing this?".

Traffic to Coolest Friends doubled. I have no idea why. It seems to come uniformly from profiles and homes. I noticed a slight dip before. Maybe it was somehow down and now all those people who couldn't visit, are coming back in order to get their daily increasing bonus? I have no idea. I really need to get into making updates to this app, but keep putting it off. For the moment, thank you whatever random effect for doubling my visits.

Finnish independence day. Celebrated the eve by being bored and then sleeping early to fight the boredom.

Quiz app seems dead. 133 visits yesterday, compared to 600 on the first day. If I don't do something to make it work soon, there won't be anyone around to spread it.

So which of these important tasks am I doing? Neither, instead I am trying to get particle-based water to work with HTML canvas tag.

Upgraded Mac Mini RAM to max 3GB using a cheese slicer to pry open the cover. Learned a trick to do modular arithmetic faster. What is 25 in mod 7? Find x such that 25-x is a multiple of 7. X is 4, so 25 is congruent to 4 mod 7. Now for positive values you could just do without that, but it gets useful with negative ones. What is -25 mod 7? Find x such that -25-x is multiple of 7. Closest multiple is -28, so x = 3. -25 is congruent to 3 mod 7. Helps with exercises about computing inverses of matrices in Z₇.

Winter came. Strangely on time for December to look so christmasy. Unity engine seems fun to play with, reminds me of good old Amos 3D days. Maybe I could make some Assembly gamedev entry with this. Coding should be fun. Modding with source engine isn't much fun, because you have to wait minutes to see your changes take effect. With Unity things change realtime as you change code.

Went to uni library and had a nice study session without distractions (aka internets). It's amazing what you can accomplish when Reddit isn't around. Seeing others immersed in their study is also somehow infectious. I think I'll try it again tomorrow.

Change may have increased the likelihood that a user completes a quiz. Difficult to say yet as the "improvement" is still within just random daily fluctuation.

Had a private burst of anger at my math teacher. I failed his course and would like to blame that on his teaching style totally lacking any passion. I've tried to avoid attending the class, every time I leave being less motivated by the subject than when I came in. It's just a basic linear algebra course, which is very very useful and could be presented in an interesting way, but it feels more like attending a funeral. So I stayed at home and tried to study the things as a list of contents got updated to his homepage. But then in the exam (which he had scribbled by hand and xeroxed barely legibly) there was a question which wasn't mentioned on that list, and I failed just barely.

I had studied for that class every day for about two months, but not exactly the things that were in the exam. I got upset enough that I dropped studying math at all for over a month, but now I'm getting my self esteem back just enough to try and continue.

Released update to Mixi quiz app. If it will only improve goal completion by a few percent, that might be enough to turn it from decline to growth. Natural Selection is the most brilliant PC game ever created.

Productive day.

Managed to remove the most failure prone iframe, things are much speedier now too. The app works on three social networks, Mixi, MySpace and Facebook. Most users are on Mixi and I think I will drop the other versions if they start to feel like work to maintain. Did some successful soldering on an electronics kit. Dubai causing stock markets to fall.

Iframes all the way down

In an unproductive slump, to break out of it decided to rewrite parts of the failing quiz app for Mixi. Was a mistake to use iframes so much, sometimes some people are seeing nothing when I try to show an iframe. The app itself is already an iframe, so that's an iframe in an iframe. At one point to show an image upload widget, I have an iframe in an iframe in an iframe.

Today's lack of productivity brought to you by Adobe Flash CS4 and Sampo Bank

Spent much of today staring at the beach ball of doom (a spinning cursor you see on a Mac when things are über slow), Adobe Flash CS4 editing interface is reaaally slow. I am trying to learn how to export isometric graphics from Blender for use in a Flash-based game. I have source files that I am editing in a separate editor, because I can often type faster than CS4 can read my typing, and it will sometimes do nothing for what feels like forever. Not productive.

Computer is Mac Mini, 1.84GHz Core 2 Duo 1GB. Decided to upgrade RAM to max 3GB and switch to a solid state drive. Upon attempting to pay for said drive, web bank wouldn't work. Stalled at "Starting Java..." with a (lack of) progress indicator not quite unlike the beach ball of doom. HD on another computer apparently has bad sectors, so switching that to an SSD as well. Tried to relax from all of this by doing some soldering on an electronics kit, but discovered soldering iron wall plug doesn't fit (ungrounded vs. grounded socket).

Boston

Went to Boston to attend Global Entrepreneurship Week, made new friends. Mike and Val are a fun couple, they are both into demoscene. Showed us around MIT. Saw wonderful little machines (by artist Arthur Ganson) with no other purpose than to look interesting. Favorite one was called "solitude", where a machine with gears made of thin wire existed only to move a miniature man's head left and right.