Posts
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Programming Art
Been a bit quiet around here, eh?
As I mentioned in my New Year’s post, I’ve been kind of taking a break lately. Haven’t really been doing much of anything to write about to be honest. Waiting for inspiration to hit me.
Well, it’s starting to hit. A few weeks ago, I talked to Shawn Pucknell about speaking at FiTC Toronto. So I needed to come up with a subject to talk about. Up to now, I’ve almost always done a brand new talk for every conference I’ve spoken at. Really, the only exceptions are when the organizers explicitly ask me to do a specific talk. But it seems that most speakers are doing the same talk at multiple events these days. Many do the same talk for a year, or a good part of thereof, at every conference they speak at.
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Kindle vs. iPad
There’s so much I could say about the iPad, particularly being a Flash guy. But I’ll stay out of that fray. Whatever will be, will be.
The thing that bugs me about people’s reactions to the iPad is when people say it’s a Kindle killer. First of all, I’m pretty sure that most of the people saying such things do not own a Kindle. It’s a totally different device. Here’s where the Kindle wins out:
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AdvancED ActionScript 3.0 Animation published in Japan
Just before I went out to FiTC Tokyo, I was contacted by Naoki Miyagawa, a translater working for OReilly Japan in Tokyo. He said that he was working on the translation of my book, AdvancED ActionScript 3.0 Animation and had some questions for me. It was pretty cool to be able to say, “Well, as a matter of fact, I’ll be in Tokyo next week. Why don’t we do lunch?” So in Tokyo, I successfully navigated the subway system solo and got out to OReilly’s offices, met with several people working on the book, got some cool Japanese OReilly schwag, and had an awesome lunch.
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Emergent Behavior
I wanted to make a demonstration file for a talk I’m doing this week to show the difference between bitmap and vector performance. So I needed something that drew a whole lot of lines. Came up with this, which I probably won’t use for the presentation, but surprised me with a cool pattern emerging.
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Falling Balls Rising
So my iPhone game, Falling Balls, has been out for almost a year. In the first few weeks it was out, it rose to be the #1 free application on the iTunes App Store. Trust me, this surprised nobody more than it did ME. It stayed in the top spot for a day or two, maybe more, I forget exactly, then started slowly sinking down the chart. But it sank quite slowly. I think it stayed in the top 100 for something like a few months. And even after it was out of the top 100 free apps list, it was still hanging in there in the top 100 free games list. Of course, all good things come to an end, and eventually it went out of site.
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Generative Gestaltung
A short while ago I got an email from Hartmut Bohnacker, one of the authors of a book called “Generative Gestaltung”. In his words, “In this book we try to explain the basic principles how to generate images with code.” The code used is Processing. You can find out more about it at https://www.generative-gestaltung.de/
The reason they were contacting me is that the book included some works and code based on my Lissajous Webs at Art From Code. They had credited me with the idea, but wanted to inform me personally. I, of course, was fine with it – honored in fact – and asked if I could get a copy of the book.
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RunVis – Visualizing GPS Running Data from a Garmin 305.
A while back I mentioned on twitter, and the other day here on this blog about a pet project I was playing with, visualizing the running data gathered by my Garmin 305 GPS watch while on runs. Well, here’s what I’ve got so far, for a 5 mile run I did a couple of weeks ago:
[kml_flashembed publishmethod=“static” fversion=“10.0.0″ movie=“https://www.bit-101.com/RunVis/runvis.swf” width=“800″ height=“800″ targetclass=“flashmovie” base=“https://www.bit-101.com/RunVis/”]
[/kml_flashembed]
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Another look at the Nook
When the Barnes & Noble Nook was first announced, I was intrigued. If it was as good as it seemed to be, I was actually planning to get one. It seemed to be an incremental improvement to the Kindle.
A couple of things bothered me from the start though.
One was that the screen refresh speed (how long it takes to turn a page) seemed awfully slow in the one hands-on, non-Kate video I could find. eInk itself is not the speediest of displays as it is. The Kindle itself is kind of just on the edge of annoyance. You learn to press the page turn button in on the second to last line of the page, and hold it there til you are into the last line and release it part way in, giving you time to read the last half of the line and shift your eyes upwards just in time. Sounds silly, but you can get into a good rhythm that keeps it out of the annoying range. The Nook’s refresh speed looked seriously slower. Enough to just make it that little grain of sand that irritates you every time you turn a page. You might not notice it if it was your first ebook reader, but if coming from a Kindle, I would imagine it would get on your nerves. Anyway, this was just an impression from a little video, but I wanted to see it in person, or read some hands-on reviews that mentioned how the screen update was. This brings me to the second concern…
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Another year…
For the past few years, I’ve posted a review of the previous year and a look to the coming year. So, I’ll do it again.
2009 was a very interesting year. Like this year, last year I had a whole bunch of unused vacation time at the end of the year, so took a couple of weeks off over Christmas. I decided to dive into Objective-C and iPhone programming. Little did I know how much that would dominate the next year, both in terms of my personal projects and work projects at Infrared5. One of the very first things I did was a little game called “Falling Balls”. A stupid little thing where you tilt the phone right and left to avoid … well … falling balls. It was just a silly thing I did in about 1.5 days, mostly to get a handle on the language and writing games in Objective-C. Unbelievably, the game rose to be the number one free application on the iTunes store. I put some ads in it and the cash started pouring in. I mean, more money than I could believe. Of course, it had its peak and eventually slid down the chart and made less money, but even now, it’s doing amazingly well in terms of ad revenue.
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Hello Tokyo!
On Thursday, I’m heading out to Tokyo to speak at FiTC! I’ll be getting in late afternoon Friday, Tokyo time. As I’m sure many know, my wife is from Japan and I’ve been over there several times. But when I go with family, we are up in a pretty small, rural village in Kuwana-shi, near Nagoya, just doing family stuff. This time I will be going alone and in Tokyo for four days. We have the conference and party after that on Saturday, so if you are in the area and going to the conference, I look forward to seeing you. If you are not going to the conference, I’d still be happy to meet anyone, talk about Flash, iPhone, whatever. I need to do some shopping for the family – my wife has a long list of stuff she wants me to bring back. I might need extra luggage. 🙂
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