Tea Time! Available on The App Store Now!

My first iPhone app, Tea Time!, just hit the App Store today! Tea lovers of the world: Go get it now.

What am I doing writing a little app like that? Don’t worry, that’s not what I’ve been doing for the last few months 🙂 It was an experiment to see how quick I could put a simple app together and getting the experience of going through the whole cycle with the App Store. Tomorrow I’ll write an entry with all that I’ve learned so far.

Enjoy your tea!

Get Your Games from Within Fix on The Go

I hate driving. You have to deal with crowded roads and people who seem to be doing their best to get in your way. Worst of all, it’s dead time: you can’t read, you can’t write, you can’t use a computer, or even take a quick cat nap. So I really try to minimize how long I spend on a car and try to do everything remotely, or walk or ride my bike instead.

This being Southern California, cars are an inevitable reality. So what do I do while I’m stuck in my tiny subcompact hatchback? Devour every broadcast of TedTalks. I’m totally, irreversibly hooked on that podcast. And now, we finally have our own game industry podcast.

Ryan Wiancko, over at Industry Broadcast, has started recording articles from several of the top game development blogs. I’m happy to announce that he has added Games from Within to the list of articles he’s recording. He started with the oldie-but-goodie Optimizing the Content Pipeline that I wrote for Game Developer Magazine a few years ago (Note to self: I need to write an updated version of that article with my current thinking on the topic). He’ll be adding some of the most popular articles from the site as well as covering new entries.

So fill up your iPod with juicy game development recordings and have them handy wherever you go.

Feed Yourself

I’m lost without feeds. In the last few years, my mode of operation with teh itarwebs has gone from poll to push. I used to have a set of bookmarks that I would visit every week. As the rate of change picked up, I started visiting every day, but it soon became overwhelming.

Now I’m 100% feed driven. Content is pushed to me, and not the other way around. Interestingly, the number of sites I keep up with has gone up significantly (over 100 by last count) so it’s still as time consuming as it was earlier. I just get a lot more information during the same amount of time.

So, for those of your who use the RSS feeds (and I hope it’s 99% of you out there, if not, head over to Google Reader right now), I just enabled two new types of feeds:

As a side note, WordPress totally rocks. I’ve used other blog systems before, but the latest version of WordPress is so slick, configurable, and easy to work with that it’s a real pleasure. Adding new themes or plugins is as simple as downloading a file and administration is done 100% through a super-slick web interface. Definitely better than MovableType, and light-years ahead of the hulking, slow beast of Drupal.

To give you an idea of how much I’m liking WordPress, I’m even using it to write posts. Seriously, that’s no small feat for me. I usually loathe online editors, and always composed the text offline and then pasted it into the blog at the last minute. With WordPress I feel totally comfortable composing posts on the fly, which makes the whole process very painless (which hopefully translates into more posts :-).