So I have gotten my first Palm Pre game in a playable state, sans one bug that I am currently working on. The game is called 5 or more and I have included the rules and how to play with the game (under the help menu). You will need to have your pre in developer mode in order to install it (note this is different from having to root your pre) and use this application to get the game onto your phone:
http://predev.wikidot.com/installing-apps-on-a-stock-pre-post-1-04-update
And here is the game:
http://www.codeofdoom.com/fiveormore/com.codeofdoom.app.fiveormore_0.5.0_all.ipk
Some screen shots:
Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3
Screenshot 4
Screenshot 5
Things on the todo list:
- fix bug that doesnt let you move a piece to a certain spot
- Sound (sound from moving. maybe ambient music while playing?
- Add a background
- Add “special pieces”
- Add achievements
- Change the scoring around a little bit
Of course, if anyone wants to give any feed back on the gameplay, let me know. I also already want to rewrite this app. This definitely started with something where I was learning javascript, but definitely not applying best practices. Soon I will be picking up a few books to help out with that. I do have a few other ideas for games to create, so keep an eye out 
.
ps
Although I am sure many of you have heard, Palm made the SDK publicly available. So feel free to check it out.
Marcel Palm Pre Add new tag
Any regular readers of this blog probably took not that I went from posting one of two things here a week to posting nothing for about two months. Maybe I cursed myself by writing the article Why do our time estimates suck, because I am finally wrapping up a project where the estimations just went down the crapper. I did learn another lesson though about why estimations suck, and that is being on a project that its entire life cycle (IE, planning, development, testing, regression testing, etc) is a massive discovery phase.
This basically boiled down to those who were in charge of pulling the data down were not aware that what the client was asking was either a)something different or b) next to impossible given the dataset. No one knew it at the time, so everyone just found out as the project progressed. Luckily the blame of that was not on our plate, but it did affect our ability to get the job done in a sane manner. However, the project is “done”, so hopefully my schedule will go back to something more reasonable and I will be able to contribute more.
In the mean time, I did end up picking up a palm pre and actually got invited into their pre SDK development program. I have been messing with that and I have started working on a game called 5 or more. The gray pieces are “open spots” where you can move the colored pieces to. You have to have a clear path of open pieces when you move a piece from one place to another. Each time you move a piece, 3 more pieces will drop. Once you line up 5 or more of the same color, they will change into open (gray) pieces. Here are some pics of it so far:
5 or more picture 1
5 or more picture 2
Its pretty close to being completed. Once it is completed, I will be submitting it to the app catalog, so hopefully I will be able to be part of the initial wave of new apps .
In the future, I would like to start posting articles about developing for the pre, but I would like to get some more experience with it first.
Marcel Random Notes, java
One of the things I love about Flex is how extensible it can be. You are able to make composite components to do almost anything you want using out of the box components. However, if you really want to take advantage of its power, it helps to have a good or in depth knowing of the interfaces that come with it. The reason to proclaim the importance is that using these interfaces, you will be able to create extremely light weight components, but you will be able to make them do whatever you want (in a programming sense of the phrase).
There are, of course, quite a few different interfaces. I have looked through them and picked out five interfaces that I consider to be the more important ones. For each, I will give a brief explanation of why they are important and where you would normally use them.
Read more…
Marcel Best Practices, Flex, Learn This Actionscript, Best Practices, Flex, Learn This
As mentioned in a previous article, one thing I like to do when giving interviews is throwing out a curve ball. A standard type of questions I like to ask about are design patterns. Normally I will ask them to describe a specific pattern and seeing that both Strategy patterns and Decorator patterns are pretty common, I will ask about those. Most of the time, they can answer at least one of those. Whenever they answer both, I like to throw in the ‘Describe the difference between them and when you would use them.’
I ask this normally because it is kind of a gray area. Well maybe gray area isn’t the correct phrase, but they are strikingly similar*. They both encapsulate and delegate the behavior of the classes. They both encourage composition. Both are great alternatives to inheritance. And they both allow for new behaviors to be easily added to existing classes. With all the similarities, its hard to see where they differ, making it a great question to ask in an interview.
Read more…
Marcel Best Practices, Design Patterns, Learn This, Opinion, tutorial Best Practices, Design, howto, Learn This, tutorial
Love it or hate it, its hard to ignore Twitters recent explosion in popularity. Not only are they super popular to the masses, but they are nice enough to give us an API to use in order to create our own twitter applications. I don’t use it too much, but I figured it would be worth checking out at least from an API stand point.
Turns out, the API is actually just a series of webservice calls that just return a json or atom string, so it is extremely easy to use (and it explains the mass amount of twitter programs out there). I don’t feel it would be too beneficial to create a bunch of ‘This is how you search for people’, ‘This is how you do a post’, so I decided to turn this into a mashup between this and google maps.
What I decided to do an article on is how to take twitters geocoded search feature and place them on a map within google. This article will explain how to call Twitters search service, parse that and then using Googles Geocoder, plot where those users are twittering from.
Read more…
Marcel Flex, Google Maps API, tutorial Actionscript, Flex, howto, tutorial
