30 May 2011

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…

Thanks for reading! If you like my writing, you may be interested in my book: Healthy Webhook Consumption with Rails

David at 10:00