Announcements

Come join us for the next iPhone developers meet-up. This should be an interesting one with lots of things to share after GDC and the launch of several local apps (Sky Burger, Appy Newz, Flower Garden and more!). When: April Wednesday 22nd at 7:30PM until whenever Where: O’Sullivan’s Pub in Carlsbad (home of the Appy Entertainment Secret World Headquarters) Appy is being a great host again and providing some munchies. You’re responsible for your own drinks though :-) ...

The latest podcast from Mobile Orchard covers my interview describing my experience as an indie iPhone developer and how Flower Garden was developed. I was particularly pleased when Dan Grigsby invited me to do the interview because the Mobile Orchard podcast is one of the two podcasts I listen regularly (the other one being TED Talks). The interview topics range from high-level topics like business aspects of iPhone development, down to the nitty-gritty of how the procedural flowers were created, or how I had to use assembly language to take advantage of the vector floating point processor on the iPhone to do all the heavy lifting for matrix transforms.

Flower Garden was finally approved and it’s available right now! This is what I’ve been pouring my heart and soul for the last six months. You can buy it directly from the App Store. If you like it and would like to help out, here are some of the things you can do to promote it: Go back to iTunes and write a fair review Grow flowers and send bouquets to your friends Join the Flower Garden group on Facebook Tell all your friends how great it is :-) Thanks everybody for all the encouragement and support along the way. I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed creating it. ...

With all the excitement last week with GDC and the last push for Flower Garden, I completely forgot to announce that I submitted Flower Garden to Apple last Friday. It’s currently listed “In Review” and hopefully, if all goes well, will be available on the App Store either this weekend or early next week. Keeping my fingers crossed!

Yes, it’s a horribly busy month. Yes, GDC is around the corner. Yes, I’m supposed to ship Flower Garden this Friday. But none of that is stopping us. Come mingle with other iPhone developers this Wednesday at the Irish Pub in Carlsbad. As a bonus, I’ll do a practice run of my GDC talk about iPhone development (now that’s an old picture!). When: Wednesday March 18th from 7:30PM until whenever. Where: O’Sullivan’s Pub in Carlsbad (home of the Appy Entertainment Secret World Headquarters) ...

It seems like GDC was just the other day, but GDC 2009 is around the corner! And this year, I’m going to be giving a presentation titled iPhone Development: Exploring The New Frontier I’m sorry about reverting to the cliched format of having a colon in the presentation title. It was too hard to resist :-). I’ll be sharing my experiences transitioning from traditional AAA console game development, with teams of 100+ people, multi-million budgets, and several years of development, to indie iPhone development. There are a surprising amount of things that carry over from “big game development”, and quite a few that are totally different. I’ll go into what’s involved making games for the iPhone, and what game developers can expect when making the transition. ...

Or is that the flowers out of the bag? In any case, I finally get to announce the project that has been keeping me up at night for the last few months: Flower Garden for the iPhone and iPod Touch. In the next few days I’m going to start beta testing, so if you’re interested in participating, let me know. More info coming soon…

We had so much fun the first time, that we decided to do it again. Last time we had a great turnout and we had a great time comparing ninja UIKit techniques, giving exclusive worldwide previews of apps in the works, and sharing voodoo spells to to make your app show up in the front page of the App Store (amazing what a few beers will do). So we’re back at it again. Anybody involved in iPhone development or interested in learning more about it is welcome to come. ...

As the 0.5% of you who are not using an RSS reader might have noticed, I’ve added a new sidebar with my Twitter activity. I’m pretty new to Twitter… actually, that’s not true. I did join quite a bit ago, but I just didn’t get it. Nobody I knew was really using it and I didn’t want to read a random stream of posts from everybody. A couple of weeks ago, prompted by seeing a few other indie iPhone devs on Twitter, I decided to give it another try. I’m glad I did! It has been really fun and useful. Unlike Facebook, which is all about connecting with long-lost friends, and seeing pictures people’s new babies, I’m using Twitter exclusively for iPhone development. I keep my follow list to a relatively small amount of people, all of them independent iPhone game developers (so please, don’t feel offended if you’re a friend and I’m not following you). ...

I missed the iPhone Tech Talk World Tour last Fall. At the time it wasn’t a big deal because I was still soaking in all the information from the iPhone SDK docs. Now, on the other hand, I’m at the point that I’m getting into more advanced stuff, either not covered in the docs, or that it’s just plain tricky. For example, I spent all day today trying to coerce my app into sending an email with an image attachment–in the end I either kind of succeeded, or I bypassed the problem, depending how you look at it. But that’s another story for another day. ...

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. ...

Are you doing iPhone development? Are you in the San Diego area? Come meet a bunch of local iPhone developers next week. It will be an informal gathering, just to get to know each other, trade war stories, and bitch about the App Store over pizza and beers. Feel free to invite anybody interested as well. When: Wednesday January 14th from 7PM until whenever Where: Karl Strauss Brewery in Mira Mesa Hope to see you all there!

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. ...

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. ...