There’s tonnes of blogs out there, so I only talk about the bits that other people have missed, or were too polite or inexperienced to cover. Often that means I’m the one pointing out the flaws (most people don’t want to write bad things. Screw that; ignoring the bad points […]
android
15 posts
Why do we need this? In a bizarre move, Google deleted the perfectly good SMS app from Android. Yeah. Hmm. Well, read this TechRadar piece for some thoughts on that. Sadly, Google’s corporate policy is that the consumer is always wrong: you’re not allowed to simply “use the app I […]
For the last couple of months, one of our dev machines has been literally incapable of opening a simple Android project. It crashes every time, on startup, while displaying the Eclipse logo: Re-installing everything had no effect. We tried everything, and the only thing that worked reliably was to keep […]
Tonight I lost 30 minutes because Google’s Android team still has the wrong links on the download page of their website. Every few months someone from their team copy/pastes the wrong link back onto the page… Android’s download page (http://tools.android.com/download) says: “download …ADT and Tools … from http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html ” This […]
As a developer, I’ve been using iPhone’s since they first came out. I have to test my apps on every version! iOS 6 is the first version of iOS “post Steve Jobs”. But it’s terrible – it seems to be a 2nd-rate product rushed out by a small team of […]
In the past, I’ve had terrible advice from brilliant people. The best way to avoid that is to be careful to research the brilliant person and tailor your questions to avoid their weaknesses. Tomorrow I’ll be meeting a bunch of people at Google London’s open day. I started by writing […]
(I’m prototyping a new game (working title: “ChessQuest”) – original post here) Major changes: Enemies have health, and can be killed by touching them Performance is another 30% faster (should be running OK on most phones now?) Enemies have a direction indicator (not necessary right now, but it’ll become important […]
(I’m prototyping a new game (working title: “ChessQuest”) – original post here) Three major changes: You have a health bar, and can die The trackball is now supported for movement Performance is literally 1.5x – 2x faster Download link Chess Quest-0.3.3 So, a friend of mine tried it out today, […]
(I’m prototyping a new game (working title: “ChessQuest”) – original post here) A couple more hours work, a few more changes: Overview of what’s changed Obvious from the screenshot: added alternating black/white background tiles. I want it to feel like the traditional chessboard has become the “floors” of the dungeons/towers […]
Last weekend, I was playing around with some ideas for a Chess / RPG mashup. I did some prototyping with Android (because iPhone apps can’t be shared, and Java is much faster to debug than ObjC). If you’ve got an Android phone, try this, and let me know if it […]
Steve Yegge’s Google Platforms Rant is not so much a rant as a sign of someone fighting an inappropriate culture. We saw stuff like this a lot at NCsoft when people were trying to turn around the $100 million clusterf*ck that created hundreds of redundancies all the way to director […]
Today I finally discovered that the iPhone has StreetView. That means it’s only taken me THREE YEARS to find this secret feature that Google has worked very hard to make sure no-one ever uses. The best bit? The top two Google results for “iPhone Streetview” were both incorrect, and useless […]
A delightful quote from Google. Although equally, Florian Mueller has an interesting analysis on whetherGoogle really wants to kill patents – or just kill “patents which Google doesn’t already own”? note that Google’s discussion of its intellectual property rights starts with patents. They could have started with copyright, trademarks and […]
I couldn’t enter this LudumDare competition on a technicality, but here’s my entry which plays by the spirit of the rules. I took a total of 24 hours (out of 48), of which only 12 were actual design + development (see below). Hopefully next time I’ll be able to do […]
Following my own install-guide from Jan 2011 (because Google didn’t provide one at the time)… Google still doesn’t provide an install guide Eclipse is a *little* clearer on what to download – but only slightly Eclipse.app on Mac OS X is *still* broken ADT is still “hidden” by Google for […]