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Android Developer Challenge
Google has announced the second Android Developer Challenge and I’m seriously considering taking part. They have ten different categories with three attractive prizes each and one overall category with three even more attractive prizes. Given the facts that there were only 1788 submissions last year, that I have already gathered some experience in mobile device development and that I do work with several Google APIs for my freelancing job I consider my chances not too bad. Idea, anyone? ;-)
On The Job on sale
If I had known this earlier. Currently, On The Job is on sale for 50% off on mupromo.com. I already mentioned this software in a recent post on software I use. If you’re doing freelance work on your Mac, have a look at that one.
ELFrun available
On 12/3/2008
In Game Development, Miscellaneous, Personal, Software Engineering
With 8 Comments
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ELFrun is available in the AppStore. Just follow this link.
And now, dear colleagues, please spread the word! Feel free to use one of the shots mattin posted and do some advertising. Greatly appreciated!
ELFrun is coming to your iPod/iPhone
Since mattin has let the cat out of the bag, here’s what we’ve worked on in the past weeks.
Head over to dermattin for more.
Crunch-time
I didn’t talk to my girlfriend very much lately. I didn’t read many blogs. I didn’t watch any movies. I didn’t breathe much fresh air. I didn’t use my PC for anything more than listening to music or fetching mails. I didn’t sleep much more than four hours the last two weeks or so. I neither wrote a single line of code for DVW nor attended the last sechsta sinn team meeting. I have a new game on my desk right next to me but I didn’t even bother to install it yet. I get asked whether I’m sick because I look like a zombie when I creep around the office in the morning at noon. I currently drink so many energy drinks that my heart beats heavily when I finally try to get some sleep (so eventually I don’t get any). I’m sitting here with the MacBook Pro on my lap, big headphones with music on my head and two separate headphones in my ears, one connected to the MacBook and one to an iPod. I wrote about 15000 lines of code in the last eight weeks in my spare time, and there’s a deadline coming so close so quickly that I fear I will hit me like a bullet train.
It’s crunch-time, baby.
iPhone NDA dropped
Apple has dropped the iPhone NDA for released software. I guess now I need to release something really quick in order to be able to discuss iPhone development in detail and publically, right? So, you get what that actually means? It seems now that they cannot protect their stuff as much as they wanted, they at least want to make sure that people discussing the stuff have paid for the developer program first. As it seems, “released iPhone software” refers to the SDK itself, not released products in the AppStore. At least, this is what everyone else seems to think.
I am now a registered iPhone Developer.
On 9/21/2008
In Game Development, Hardware, Miscellaneous, Personal, Software Engineering
With 1 Comment
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Plus MacBook Pro owner since Saturday. Plus soon to become an iPhone owner. Plus a bit confused by Objective-C syntax already.
New DVW screenshots
On 8/15/2008
In Game Development, Miscellaneous, Personal, Software Engineering
With 2 Comments
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digitalbreed framework
I am getting dumb of writing the same code over and over, so I am finally in the process of setting up a C++ framework with core functionality I use in almost every project: macros (e.g. assertions), helper functions (e.g. pattern matching), serialization, virtual file system, XML support,… Some of the stuff is extracted from what I wrote for DVW, the VFS and XML stuff in particular.
I am thinking about writing more articles on this, like I did for the serialization part. Let me know whether you’d like to read more so that I can estimate whether it’s worth the effort. I would start with the VFS and head over to XML support.
A bugfixed Bookmarks Displayer Widget
I upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1 today due to some major security issues (German link) and was reminded that one of my widgets was not working correctly. Nathan Oliphant wrote this widget to display bookmarks in the sort order of the users choosing. Unfortunately, it had two minor bugs which 1. caused changes not to be made persistent correctly with recent WordPress versions and 2. broke proper sort order selection. I fixed those bugs and added optional support for Ozh’s Click Counter plugin.
Again, here’s a direct link for your convenience, tested with WordPress 2.5.1:
Nathan Oliphants Bookmarks Displayer Widget (rename to .PHP after downloading)
MyBB Registration eMail Check
Today, I wrote a simple MyBB plugin, Registration eMail Check (RMC). The plugin first verifies whether the email has a valid format, then compares the email host with a number of hosts which were explicitly disabled by the administrator (the plugin comes with a decent list of well-known one-time address providers), and finally tries to communicate with the corresponding mail server in order to verify whether the address actually exists.
I wrote the plugin for two reasons: First, because I wanted to prevent automated bot registration with non-existing email addresses. When I look through lists of users waiting for activation I find an ever growing amount of accounts which were obviously generated automatically, using non-existing email addresses. Second, because I don’t want people to use anonymous one-time email addresses when registering in forums where a certain mutual trust is mandatory.
Here’s version 1.0 for your convenience, tested with MyBB version 1.2.12:
RMC – Registration eMail Check 1.0 for MyBB
New book review
I added a new book review on JBoss Seam – Simplicity and Power beyond Java EE.
Free Developer e-Books
Christopher sent word that entwickler-press.de offers 24 free German developer e-Books for download in a virtual Advent calendar. Here’s the full list:
Electively serialize to/from XML or binary
I started several projects during the development time of DVW and eventually none of them came to an end (yet) in favor of DVW, so I thought I could share some of my findings. I wrote a little tutorial about how to electively serialize to and from XML or binary respectively. I would really appreciate comments and criticism.
DVW Teaser Video released
Without further ado, here is our cut-together of Dusmania 9.0 scenes plus original ingame footage plus official soundtrack tunes. Enjoy.
Seam is going to be big
Months ago, I started a little sparetime “Web 2.0″ project together with two coworkers. My main interest was to enhance my JEE knowledge and to get to know a new framework. I was unsure whether to go for Struts Shale or JBoss Seam and decided for the latter. Today, I’m confident I took the right choice. JBoss and Exadel joined forces and open-sourced Exadels RichFaces library under LGPL. If you don’t know what RichFaces is, have a look at the live demo and you may understand my excitement. Since Seam is meant as a competition to .NET, this is another important step for the guys around Hibernate and Seam founder Gavin King. Really looking forward to playing with it tomorrow.
Usability issues
Did you ever think about why your mouse pointer becomes a hand if you hover a link but not if you hover a
? I don’t get the difference.
Setting up SVN and Trac
I’m using Subversion and Trac for several projects and I always thought that I should write down my workflow to set it up. This time, I did, and I’m sharing it with you. It’s probably not the best way, but it works for me. I will not cover the prerequesites here, like installing Apache 2 with DAV and SVN support or installing Subversion and Trac.
The subversion server is on a Linux box while the client is a Windows XP machine with TortoiseSVN as the SVN front-end.
Adapter Pattern applied
When you’re applying an Adapter Pattern, you’re generally grappling with classes and method signatures. I just had to deal with packages and package visibility in Java where I found the Adapter Pattern to be an interesting solution.
I was accessing a class A in a package com.example from the outside (an RMI call). The method I called had to return an instance of a class B in a subpackage, say com.example.sub, which in turn had to access a class C in package com.example. The trouble with class C was that it had only package-visible methods so that I could not call them from class B which was in a subpackage. Exposing C’s method to the public wasn’t desireable at all, so changing the visibility wasn’t a choice.
I wrote an adapter class in package com.example which had publicly visible methods but a package-visible constructor. Now I was able to instantiate class B in class A and provide an instance of my adapter class which in turn received a reference to class C and then delegated all calls to C. This way, I didn’t reveal C’s methods to the public, since my adapter class could only be instantiated in the package of class A, com.example.
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