Matt

  • Andromeda’s Savior v1.1

    A late night of coding produced the first update to Andromeda’s Savior submitted to iTunes. This new version brings a health bar, a bunch of new enemies to shoot, and much improved Game Center integration.  It also includes a check to prevent people from cracking the game and getting free upgrades.  To date there are…

  • Produce as Much as You Can

    It took a long time to really  fully appreciate the feeling you get from producing something new in this world and letting it go for sale or for free. There’s a lot of apprehension that comes with those first few products you release.  You worry about the bugs that are still there, the features you…

  • 6 Tips For a Successful Project Plan

    The difference between a successful project and one that is a dismal failure can often come down to the project plan.  There are different approaches to planning from ad hoc planning to full on gantt charts in MS Project.  I think there are some universals for developing a plan that results in a project that…

  • How to SOA an existing project

    SOA or service oriented architecture is a way of building a complex project so that each individual unit can stand alone with a documented API.  There are many benefits to taking an SOA approach to designing a complex software system. To those familiar with programming, SOA provides the same sorts of benefits as OOP but…

  • Another Game in the Queue

    On Monday this week we submitted another game to Apple for review.  This one is called Andromeda’s Savior and it should be available sometime next week in iTunes. The plan is still to push out a bunch of games very quickly. After an intense strategy meeting on Tuesday we decided to focus on a few…

  • Successful Game Launch

    Colum’s and my work on the release of Air Barons has found tremendous success!  This is a re-skin of UFO Invader with rendered 3d model graphics of WWII era planes done by the talented Colum Furey. The initial response to the game has surpassed all expectations and it has been earning a very respectable income…

  • Finding a good A/V receiver

    My 12 year old A/V receiver bit the dust last week.  It seems to have overheated and burned out some components judging by the smell. So now I’m looking for a replacement.  The first thing I learned is that the Canadian stores all price the products at about 2x what they go for on eBay…

  • Next Gen Websites

    the web 1.0 was defined by static html pages and simple cgi scripts.  Web 2.0 was marked by improvements in CSS and HTML capabilities, as well as growing influence of Javascript especially with AJAX to make things a bit more interactive. The next significant shift in the development of websites is moving a lot more…

  • Another Personal Test

    There are 3 different things you can do to affect your weight. Exercise changes Dietary changes Take drugs It is possible to take any weight management strategy and estimate percentages of effectiveness to each of these 3 categories.  You can lose weight by just exercising more, or just eating less, or doing both. I have…

  • Lines of Code Per Day Performance

    There are few arguments with programmers that can elicit such passionate hatred as a debate about measuring a programmer’s performance by tracking the number of lines of code they write per day. There are far too many variables at play which can affect a programmers ability to type code – how well they understand the…