Street Fighter 4 has some new blind boxes, so as a direct result I now own two. Guile (on the right) doesn’t stand up too well, so he’s on his head.
Street Fighter Blind Boxes
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Category Archives: news
The Flying Developer is Going to Vancouver
Are there any Vancouver hackers reading this? If so, you should come to HackVAN, the upcoming HackDays event in your city. I’ll be there representing Shopify and helping people build kick-ass things with our API. We’re also bringing prizes!
Having attended two of these events in the past as a participant, I’m super-excited to be on the other side of the fence and helping people out. If you’re planning on coming, you should read the article I wrote about How to Write an App in 8 Hours (or Die Trying).
The event is being held on August 20th, which is the Saturday after GROW. The location is TBD, but I still recommend you head over to the HackVAN registration page and sign up. I’ll see you there!
Life Dial Status Update
Giant Growth
Life Dial has been doing rather well since I launched it on the android market. So well in fact that it just passed Omnivore in active downloads despite the fact that the latter has been out since February.
I don’t think that Life Dial has an objectively larger audience than Omnivore, and I haven’t publicized one more than the other either. So why the large uptake? Continue reading
Mucha-Inspired Webcomic Prints
I’m a big fan of both Questionable Content and Dresden Codak. I got to meet the creators in person back in May when I attended TCAFand while I was there I picked up a couple of signed prints. Earlier this month I finally got around to taking the prints down to a local framing shop where they mounted them for me. Now I have them on my walls, and they look gorgeous. Here are some pics:
Both these prints are available online:
The Flying Developer Gets an Early Start
No ‘real’ blog post today, but here’s a picture of my Dad helping me get to grips with some new-fangled technology:
And here’s me passing on the favour somewhat later to my nephew Arthur:
Sticking it Old School
Here’s a shot from our team’s first monthly planning session last week, courtesy of Joey1. Even though we have a huge amount of technology at our disposal, sticking post-its on the wall was the perfect way to prioritize our tasks for the next four weeks. Of course the first thing we did after this picture was taken was put the items into Basecamp, but physically writing everything out made it really easy to fiddle with priorities and add new items without worrying about squashing anyone else’s ‘edits’.
We totally stole this idea from BarCamp‘s scheduling sessions. I’ve never had the opportunity to go to an unconference, but from our own little experiment I can definitely see how this bottom-up approach to planning and organization has been a success there.
- Specifics have been blurred out to protect our seekrit plans! ↩
Nerf Warfare
There is an arms race at our office. This is my contribution (Click for full version).
Apparently it’s suitable for children over the age of 8, but I doubt an 8-year-old would be able to even lift it. It has a tripod and thanks to the position of my desk I can cover the door to the lobby from my seat.
Introducing: Life Dial
My latest project is now available for download: Life Dial.
Life Dial is a simple companion app for Magic: The Gathering players that tracks your remaining life as well as poison counters. It uses a dial control as the input for changing the life and poison totals, which I believe to be more usable than a slider, +/- buttons, or swipes/flings. All changes are made in a single gesture whether large or small. Big changes can be quickly approximated with fast rotations, but fine adjustments can still be made by simply slowing down.
The UI is as simple as I could make it. Life and Poison totals are displayed at the top left and top right respectively, and an extra gesture total appears to help you keep track of the current change you’re making. The menu button reveals a reset function that sets the totals back to the standard 20/0. I’m very happy with it as it stands, but I have plans to add a few extra features to track stats in special game-types such as Commander.
Life Dial on the Android Market
(This post is also available on Inflatable Apps)
The Flying Developer is a Proper Businessman
Getting business cards makes me feel like I’ve leveled up professionally. Now I can introduce myself to clients/friends/attractive women with style!
The Flying Developer Is A Magician
I picked up a new addiction at PAX East: Magic the Gathering. I dabbled briefly back in high school, but never had the money to really get into it. Now I have a job, that restriction has been lifted somewhat. Uh oh.
There is some software-related news to go with this. Firstly, I was bored one night earlier this week and decided that none of the existing Magic-related Android apps worked quite how I wanted to. Naturally, the solution was to write my own.
I’ve wanted to put together an app using Carson Brown‘s DialView component (which is based on work by Ivan Memruk) for a while. It’s a really intuitive interface for number selection on a touchscreen, and it turns out that it’s way better than a slider if you need a precise number. It’s basically the touch-screen version of the click wheel found on the iPod Classic.
The app I’m writing is a simple Life tracker. Right now it’s just the DialView with an attached label for displaying your life total. You turn the dial, the total changes. That’s it. All that really needs to be added is a poison total and some polish and I’m done.
The other thing that I acquired recently for work is a business card scanner. The software is pretty neat, it does OCR on the text and then intelligently assigns it to fields in a contact card (e.g. email, address, job title). However, I have another use for it. I’m going to scan my Magic collection, and write a script that auto-generates a card library for me. I was quite excited when it arrived…
