This week’s buzzword: Augmented Reality

Since iPhone 3gs came out with it’s compass everyone has been talking about augmented reality. So we jumped on the bandwagon. In two weeks I’ve made a full on game for augmented reality on the iPhone complete with skin animated butterflys, full UI, and fairies with fast beating wings. And it’s fun, too!

We can show as many butterflies as we want- it shares the animation results and only processes it once a frame. I really like the engine I wrote over this last couple years. It’s sad that the other projects it’s been in haven’t been very commercially sucessful. This project is different- it’s not being held back anymore. Now that it reads Interface Builder files directly it doesn’t need a secondary user interface engine.

This time around we finally have an honest to goodness technical artist. Every 3d house must have one, and we have a great guy!

Dunno when the publisher will release it but I’m excited about how fast and well we made it!

I had *no* idea.

From Slashdot (http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/25/132203)…

“Today, as every May 25th, geeks all over the world celebrate Towel Day and carry a towel in honor of Douglas Adams. The popular author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy died in 2001 at the age of 49, but his work lives on. According to the book, a towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Hence its symbolic role in this celebration. This year, for the first time as far as we know, Towel Day is being supported by the British publisher of Adams’ books, who organizes a photo competition.”

Why windows cross development can be a pain.

Debug image crashes app, have to compact them on mac side.

Can’t switch to window mode – no button. Compact again on mac side.

Network disconnects halfway into session. Have to reboot.

Windows UAC locks up when switching back to window mode.

Took two minutes to fix, once I could actually reach the problem. Total time: two hours.

Done!

My first iPhone project, Flick NBA Basketball, now shipping! View on Freeverse.com (dead link)

My goodness it’s fun to work on the iPhone. It’s amusing to me, that my career started with Apple ][e’s and the iPhones are based on the same basic architecture (ARM processors). It also seems to separate the coders who actually care about resource (RAM, disk, etc) useage from the ones who just “splat” code.

 

Yup, there I is, “Lead Programmer.” Woo!