#59 – Android Game – Custom Comets
Custom Comets is a fast and free game for the Android. Comets will come rushing at you, and it's your job to shoot them. With classic arcade gameplay, a reversible firing mode, and the ability to load your own comet images, Custom Comets will keep you coming back for more time and again. The "Me Gusta" and "Problem?" memes from Reddit are used as the default comet and player images.
You can see more at the permalink page here, or download Custom Comets from the Android Market here.
Book Prices Rise at Midnight!
People (not just publishers) have been hounding me to up my book prices for some time now. While I'd like to give away everything for free, the current economy has not been good to me as an author. While I have a respectable influx of book sales each month, at 30 cents per book it's not adding up. Every couple of months "Build Your Own Distributed Compiler" will see a quick boost in sales followed by a couple of months lull. Anecdotally, it appears that my compilers guide is helpful to some subset of graduate students. This isn't specific to the Amazon or B&N bookstore either, so I can't really make any inferences as to which school(s) are using it. Along with a few good reviews (and loads of support from other authors), I've decided to up my book prices to the industry standard 9.99. If you purchase any of these books are are not satisfied with the new pricing, send me an email and let me know. I think a tenner is an exceedingly reasonable price for a textbook/guide. As always if you're a student and find yourself unable to pay I'll donate you a copy. I'll even autograph it.
You can see their permalink pages below:
Hacks
Live For Free
Build Your Own Distributed Compilation Cluster
#58 – Android Game – Custom Pong
Custom pong is a fast and free game of computer tennis where you choose the ball! Simply select any image to play computer tennis with that image as the ball! Perfect for relieving stress or just having fun playing computer tennis. The default ball image is the "Me Gusta" meme from Reddit.
You can view more at the permalink page here, or download Custom Pong from the Android Market here.
New Video – Time Lapse of Android Game Development
I've been writing programs for twenty years now, and writing about the process for at least ten. While I've written a few articles on mobile programming in general, I haven't really written anything about the process of developing for Android. I certainly haven't shown anyone publicly. While I was supremely confident for many years (even before grad school) that my C/C++ skills were mighty mean, I've only been writing Java/Android apps for about 6 weeks now. As such when it comes to the tools of the Android trade, I (and I assume many folks out there) are still getting it right. Though I've built myself up a nice little corpus of Android apps in this time (55 and a couple of games as of yesterday), the real elegance and nuance of development on the platform won't come through in my daily process for some time yet. I still run into a lot of "simple" problems, and have a great bit of room for improvement. As such I feel it's the perfect time to give a peek into my development process. I took a 6-hour time lapse video of my development laptop in its entirety, with one screenshot being taken every ten seconds. Enable YouTube annotations to enable my running commentary.
This came out to be a one minute and 38 second video, which encompasses the development of Skillful Surround (released in the app store 7/19/2011) in its entirety. From start to finish, I modify a basic panel class (from my previous work, but you can grab one from the lunar lander android example) into a puzzle game "Skillful Surround". This unedited view includes my development (and publishing) process with warts and all. I design graphics, code around bugs and limitations, research problems on stack exchange, make big mistakes and re-do simple functions etc. For anyone looking to get into Android development, it should be a refreshingly honest portal into the process. I use no custom software, nor commercial software other than the cursed OS that came on my laptop. I should have rebooted into Ubuntu before I ran Eclipse (Eclipse, the Android SDK, Filezilla and chromium are all available on Linux too, of course), but I was still waking up when the idea came to me.
#57 – Android Game – Skillful Surround
Skillful Surround is a fast and addicting game of skill for the Android. With a customizable difficulty level and easy to pick up gameplay, you'll find yourself coming back to Skillful Surround again and again.
Learn more about skillful surround on it's permalink page here, or download Skillful Surround from the Android Market here.
#56 – Android Game – Skillful Lines
Skillful lines is a completely free, thoughtful, and challenging puzzle game for the Android platform. Like all good puzzle games, Skillful Lines is easy to understand but hard to master. Optimized for both phones and tablets, Skillful Lines is a game of strategic placement. This mark my first entry into the Android games market, and my 56th published Android app overall. As all of my programs are prefaced with "easy" in the moniker, so thus will I preface my games with a "skillful" moniker. While the amount of skill required to play my games is certainly questionable, I think a standard nomenclature helps folks when searching for your other items.
You can learn more about Skillful Lines from the permalink page here, or download Skillful Lines from the Android Market here.
Android App #55 – Easy File Encrypt
Easy File Encrypt is a fast and free app which allows you to encrypt and decrypt files on the go! Set your own AES cypher password, and your file will be encrypted. Now no-one can decrypt the file without knowing the password!
You can view the permalink page here, or download Easy File Encrypt from the Android Market here.
Android App #54 – Easy File Scramble
Easy File Scramble is a fast and free app to scramble and de-scramble files. This prevents the files from being opened in file viewers, zip extractors, etc. Easy File Scramble uses a two-way encoding algorithm, so there is no extra data stored about the files encoded and Easy File Scramble has no knowledge of whether a file is being encoded or decoded.
You can view the permalink page here, or download Easy File Scramble on the Android Market here.
Android App #53- Easy Image Stamp
Easy Image Stamp is a fast and free app which allows you to "stamp" image onto a canvas. It fully supports alpha transparancy and pixel blending in images, so you can stamp rounded corners to your hearts delight. You can load an image in as a background, or just stamp images onto a blank canvas. You can use this to generate lolcat memes, edit photographs, cencor photos, make photo collages, and more. It also features the almighty undo button!
You can view the permalink page for it here, or download it from the Android Market here.
Android App – More Whistles Roundup
So I've gotten some more requests for whistles, thought I'd get them out of my system. For those that are still counting I'm up to 52 apps. Hoping to hit 100 before the end of the summer. I'm pretty sure I've covered all the whistles people could possibly want.
