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April 24, 2012

Jumping Back (Into) Flash

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On my previous project, I was busy delving into the relatively new world of Unity game scripting as my go-to solution for dynamic content.  Now I’m working on a game that has me going back into the world of Flash, so I thought I would write a brief commentary on the differences I perceive between the two frameworks as it pertains to 2D game-crafting.

Before I go too far into this, I should point out that these two design paradigms are really not expected to be compared like this side-by-side most of the time.  Flash has existed for more than 15 years, and has undergone significant improvements in that time.  Unity is a relatively new framework with a more specific vision: 3D games that can be easily exported to other frameworks, like the iPhone or a web-based player.  In fact, the next version of Unity will even allow publishing to Flash itself.

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April 18, 2012

How a LAMP developer learned to stop worrying and love Ruby on Rails

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One of the most raging debates within the web developer community is LAMP vs. Ruby on Rails (RoR), with countless posts all over the Internet that debate the merits of one versus the other… but this blog entry isn’t going to be one of them.  You see, I’m new to RoR and hesitate to call myself an LAMP expert. So I’ll just discuss my own experience going from working on PHP-based sites to working on RoR-based sites.

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April 9, 2012

Grio Comic :)

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In this week post I decided to do something a little different. Being a designer, I am used to drawing more than writing. So, here I am drawing. . . I hope you guys enjoy.

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March 28, 2012

Goodbye Flash world? Hello SVG world?

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In the end, it’s probably Steve Jobs’ fault.

Back in April 2010, when Jobs explained why the iEmpire line wouldn’t be supporting Flash, a subset of the developer community was anticipating HTML5 as giddily as a Twilight sequel, but the majority were only marginally aware of its existence. The first preview version of IE9 had just been released. Firefox had advanced support for many HTML5 elements, but only those early-adopting developers were really paying attention.

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March 25, 2012

Picking an image from your Facebook photos in iOS

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Apple provides a convinient class, UIImagePickerController, that easily allows your app to display a user interface to pick an image from the photo library. There are countless apps out there that utilize this class. Since this class manages all the user interactions, end-users of the apps that use it will find consistency when picking an image from photo library. Facebook iOS app, WhatsApp text messenger, Messages and Tweetbot are just a few popular apps that leverage this class. It’d be great had Apple provided a similar class for picking a photo from a Facebook account.

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March 18, 2012

Google Android Translation Guide

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If you are new to Android programming, you will find there are a few ‘new’ concepts and paradigms to learn. There are fancy new terms such as ‘Activity’ and ‘Intent’. Rest assured, most of these expressions are just Google trying to put their own stamp on some pretty tried and true programming paradigms.

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March 14, 2012

Getting started with Amazon DynamoDB

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What’s Amazon DynamoDB?

DynamoDB is one of the most recent services offered by Amazon.com. Announced on January 18, 2012, it is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance along with excellent scalability. Let’s quickly analyze its positive and negative aspects in the lists below:

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March 11, 2012

Thumbnail View of a Large Number of Photos with Three20

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Three20 is an open-source library for iOS applications. It provides many handy features that make your iOS development life much easier. It’s used in many popular iOS apps, including Facebook. One of the features that I’d like to discuss is the photo thumbnail view. Here’s a screenshot of TTCatalog app, a sample app that comes with Three20 project.

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March 9, 2012

Clustering your data on the Map. What should you use?

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Web mapping services are become more popular as more applications are required to display a considerable amount of data on a map. Applications use a map view most of the time to show single points but clusters of data are becoming more popular.

Before moving forward with any of the web mapping services, it is better to understand what the application really needs from the map provider. In this case our system needs just two features:

·      Clustering data
·      Showing a single marker on the map

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February 29, 2012

Custom log files in Rails 3

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In addition to outputting lots of useful information, the Rails logger can be a useful debugging tool.  But debugging with the log file can become frustrating as it will be cluttered with default content.  The solution to this problem is to create a custom logger and log file for such output.

The easiest way to do this is to create a global log function, enable it in your development environment, and make sure that calls to it don’t do anything in other environments.

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