Last Ray of Hope

Whilst working on animation support for Athena for Courage, I began working on a game for the iPhone called Catalyst last weekend.

I was thinking about a game I had played about a month or two before called Polygonal Fury, and realised it would port nicely onto the iPhone.

So I started a OpenGL ES project (and discovered the new version of the iPhone supports shaders), and started with just making some circles bounce around.

Since the collision of a circle is easy, they seems the easiest to setup for interaction with touching the screen.

Initially I just made them “die” if tapped, but later I added the ability of shapes to spawn reactions.

All sprites within the game are triangle fans, but I will probably change them to quads with a texture due to the break that occasionally appears in the geometry, and alpha glow around the edge.

It is not much, but it is a start, I plan to add some more particle types, and maybe a few different upgrades than the ones giving in the Flash version.

The background needs changing, I was thinking of something going on in the background like in another Flash game I played, Spewer, with maybe cut scenes like the Nintendo DS game Contact had.

I’ll probably request for it to be added to the app store in a week or two, free to download of course.

With the release of iPhone 3.0 Beta 2, which automatically unlocks tethering as well as fixes a few other bugs with Beta 1 that were annoying me, I finally got around to upgrading.

However, during the process of the upgrade (I selected Update instead of Restore this may have been what caused it), an error occurred. Fearing I may have just bricked my iPhone with a firmware changed, I quickly ran Restore, only for it to fail with an Error 1611, or maybe it was 1602 or 1604.

Searching the interwebs, I found various people who had the same problem with earlier version of the iPhone firmware, and one recommended putting the iPhone into DFU mode… BIG MISTAKE! It turns out that MacOSX doesn’t recognise an iPhone in DFU mode, treating it like an iPod and giving Error 2001 messages. But not only that, but I was stuck in DFU mode (which btw is a black screen with no way of knowing if it is turned on or not).

The only solution at the time I could find around this was a piece of 32bit Windows software, which wouldn’t work with my 64bit OS. Luckily I came by some instructions the next day, which said to exit DFU mode, all you have to do is hold power and home for 10 seconds. I don’t know if it was this however, since I think my iPhone had run out of power, I might have just been turning it back on.

To fix the original problem, all I did was delete the ipsw files in “/<user>/Library/iTunes/Device Support” directories. Restore didn’t work until I manually Restore using Firmware 3.0 Beta 2 (probably something gets changes which is why you can’t downgrade through normal means).

Apple recently released the iPhone SDK for 3.0, which for developers means that they can get an early release for version 3.0 of the OS (though it is possible to get ahold of the OS without being a developer through shady means). One great thing about this, someone browsing around the new iPhone OS found tethering, a much wanted feature of iPhone since its first release.

And so as usual, a fake upgrade was made, which enables it. I’ve already gave it a whirl myself, and it works great. However, I haven’t ran it for extensive periods since there is nothing in my O2 contract about tethering, which means O2 could charge me for using it. I wonder if there is a way I could get it added in…

I look forward to the actual release of tethering. There are still many other great features being introduced in the iPhone OS 3.0 for me to play around with, and I don’t really need tethering at the moment, everywhere down here seems to have WiFi close by. Maybe I should get a WiFi detector instead.

I awoke this morning to find an email in my inbox from Apple, reminding me that I hadn’t finished enrolling for becoming an iPhone Developer yet. Surprised since they hadn’t told me I could finish yet, I just assumed that it must have been filtered by my spam filter (must remember to fix that thing).

So since there was an hour to go before work, I quickly followed the instructions, paid for my membership and got an emailing saying that within 24 hours they will get back to me with instructions of how to setup my iPhone to allow development. However upon getting back from work, I was greeted by an email telling me it had all been setup and that I was now able to develop and publish applications for the iPhone.

The setup process was a little annoying, the tutorials aren’t fully specific, but I managed, and sometimes it was my fault for not reading them correctly, but they do come with pictures depicting how things should look when it is done correctly, which is very helpful. Finally, I setup one of my iPhone examples to compile and run, and bobs your uncle (which he is quite ironically) it worked. So next weekend I’ll start work on porting my chuck norris game as a starter to get use to developing for it.

There are so many things that can be done with an accelerometer that I hadn’t thought of, I even found an example on the internet that uses the accelerometer in a MacBook Pro so you can move water about on your screen. Usually its just used to move the needle off the hard drive when there is a suddenly change of gravity. It can also be used to detect seismic movements, or used in conjuction with Expose so you can tap the side of your laptop and shift screens, I probably won’t use this, I’m already afraid of smashing the glass screen.

I recently purchased a MacBook Pro laptop to go with my iPhone (The iPhone is a new environment for me to develop for), and although I’ve critised mac users for most of my time as a PC user, I can understand why they use it now, I prefer it over Windows now.

I think the latest advantage of the new MacBook Pro range is that they are Intel cores, meaning they can now dual boot Vista, so if I want to, I can still use Windows (which I only really use now for Microsoft Visual Studio and SVN.

Advantages to MacOSX

• For a start, Mac OSX supports multiple desktops through an application known as Expose/Spaces. There are things you can get for Windows to do this, and Linux does this natively, but the Mac is the smoothest transition i’ve seen.
• The battery life for a Mac is AMAZING. On my way to Bolton to return some library books, I was using Vista, it said I have 20 minutes left, I rebooted into MacOSX, I now have 50 minutes left. I’ve got this running for 5 hours unplugged with constant use programming. I’ve had it running even longer when not using it, with the battery barely losing any life. Not only that, but if you put the Mac to sleep by closing the lid, you can hot swap the batteries supposedly if you do it in 30 seconds. I have had reason to try this yet, but I’m looking forward to see if this is true.
• No shoddy plastic/tft screen, the MacBook Pro uses tempered glass, which is a hell of a lot easier to clean smudges off.
• The screen is backlit evenly by LEDs.
• The keyboard is backlit based on the amount of light from the webcam. During the the keyboard is not light, but if I move my hand over the camera it turns on and get brighter the more I cover.
• Interface Builder – what an amazing tool which just kicks the ass out of Microsoft’s VS window tools. Not to mention with objective-c it can become very powerful.
• Networking, no having to screw around for hours to get things to work, to share files in a folder, I just add it to the shared list. Looking up networks is practically instantaneous, compared with the 5 minute wait Windows gives to check 255 addresses. I’ve had one problem with the WiFi in Bolton, and that was my MSN didn’t work in MacOSX, it did in Vista, but that was it.
• My new laptop has a better Vista score than my PC.
• MagLock power cable. So many motherboards for laptops get broken because of them chunky power adapters getting stood on or bent or pulled. The Mac laptops use a MagLock power cable that is held in place by a powerful magnet.
• Cooling: I cannot believe still how cool the laptop runs, they really do use power efficiently and yet you wouldn’t notice to use one. I left it on overnight to download something, and in the morning it was only slightly warm on the bottom, yet freezing on the top.
• Style: They are nice looking, especially the integrated cdrom on the side, they use things such as MiniDisplay or something to that extent, and some tiny ethernet to retain their low profile, but I can live with it (it supports WiFi n).
• Dictionary: Anything I type is has automatic OS spell checking ^-^.
• Updates: No more Microsoft Updates telling me to restart every 4 hours (or 10 minutes on XP). I choose when I want to update, it notifies me once, and thats all, I can update whenever. And when I do update, if I choose not to restart, I do not constantly get told that I should restart, it understands that I’m busy, that is why I’m doing things, unlike Windows when typing suddenly it pops up and if you type a word with a Y in or press enter, oh no looks like it restarting.. again.
• Terminal: I like how it comes with gcc, and I can just make a Makefile and source file and just compile in terminal.
• Multitouch pad: I love this one, one finger is left click/move, two fingers is scroll in the direction I move and right click. And three fingers when in finder, allows me to move backward and forward (like alt+left/right in windows explorer). Not to mention the pinch maneuver to stretch and squish images.

Advantages of Windows

• A lot of software is made for Windows only, which is annoying, I have to find either cross platform or Mac only downloads that are comparable, which isn’t as hard as it may appear, but is a nuisance. Like TortoiseSVN, I haven’t found a decent Mac version yet. I can always boot into Windows, but I do prefer MacOSX environment.
• Maximize, I love the maximize button and miss it a lot when in MacOSX, I hate everytime I open a window I need to stretch it to fill my screen. Is it too much to ask to have something that does it automagically. Maybe I’ll write a program to do it…
• Print Screen, I hate the key combo for print screen on MacOSX, and I miss home/end.

Really there is good and bad things about both, neither will get it right since they want to be different from the other, but at the moment, I’d have to say Mac is slightly in the lead with design for the user. Microsoft let itself down with Vista by trying to make it more shiny than useful. If anything they made things more difficult, like going to the place where you can disable network adapters, etc.