-
Quick Project: Asteroids with SpriteKit
After an extremely long hiatus from my Shoot 'Em Up project, I was itching to see what was new in the world of iOS game development. Discovering the new SpriteKit API, I just had to give it a try. So I put together a quick version of Asteroids over a... -
2^n: A silly 2048 extension
Last week, I got hooked on 2048 after playing the Doctor Who Edition obsessively on my lunch break. Unnecessarily excited with the powers-of-twoness of the game, I forked the code and let you play a slightly bigger version (or two). I call it 2^n. Because 2048/4096/8192 was too hard to read. It doesn't... -
What a Difference a Frame Makes
This afternoon, I was walking past a construction site and did a double take. Part of me could swear I'd just walked past a mirror, but hadn't seen myself in the reflection. After a brief moment of vampire-based self doubt, I stepped back a few paces and saw this: It... -
GOG - A Video Game Nostalgiagasm
As any mobile video game developer from the first wave of smartphones can tell you - a small group, but a proud bunch - nostalgia sells. So if you were a PC gamer in the 90s and 2000s, GOG.com might be right up your alley. I'll admit, I'm not a... -
App Review: Level Money
Your spending allowance, and that's it. I hate budgeting. Compartmentalising my spending into arbitrary, inflexible ring-fences I can't possibly stick to has never seemed to work, for some reason. Luckily, someone's come up with a budgeting app that doesn't actually require much budgeting. Level Money is a new money management app for iOS... -
How to Configure Laravel on MAMP
Laravel is a powerful framework to speed PHP web development, MAMP is a handy GUI to allow quick and easy testing of websites on OS X. Smash them together and you get quick and easy web development on OS X. My work at Spotflux has recently involved a lot of... -
Where the heck have I been?
Shockingly, it's been over six months since I last posted to this blog. But this isn't because I've been lazy, uninspired or disillusioned. I've just been extremely busy through a combination of a new job, moving abroad and getting caught in a hurricane. In April, I took a new job... -
iOS Shooter Project Part 5: Choosing APIs
As great as the iPhone SDK is, it wasn't designed specifically for games, so a mini industry has sprung up to provide game developers with APIs and tools to make their lives easier. So I'm going to raid the repositories and see what I can use for my project. Admittedly,... -
The Importance of Locale Knowledge: Or how to avoid breaking stuff in Turkey
Sometimes, the little quirks and abstraction fails of a programming language can mess things up in really subtle and specific ways. Especially when it comes to localization. I spent most of last week wracking my brains over an oddly specific bug in our product. Namely, when you installed our server... -
PHP Snippet: Find the next 2nd or 4th Wednesday
I've recently taken on the job of running the Phoenix Speakers website, so it's high time I brushed up on my PHP. First little job: automating the "Next Meeting" box. Phoenix meets on the 2nd and 4th Wednesday of each month. So we'd get something like the following mapping (dates...
subscribe via RSS
