New Direction!

I had a moment of clarity/brilliance in the shower this morning (side note, I always do my best thinking&brainstorming in the shower...why is this!? I need a dry-erase board in there to write stuff down because by the time I get out I usually forget the idea) and decided I needed to make a little game really quickly to finally have a product to show off. If you haven't heard about cocos2d before, check their site out. As far as I understand, it is a library that provides tons of graphic and layout tools so you can get a game up and running without necessarily understanding what each and every piece of code is doing. Perfect, right? Well I decided to jump in this morning because I want to port a game I wrote in 2004 called quadropong. Yes that page is still up on ticalc.org, a fact which blows my mind. This is the only 'full game' that I have actually finished and released, as silly as that sounds, but I decided to recreate it for iOS. It's a simple enough game that it isn't a very daunting task, and will allow me to finally finish something and get some confidence (hopefully). Redditors, please don't steal my idea and beat me to the punch. =]

I'm done coding for the day, so here's a small video of the new progress. Nothing too amazing, but I had to make one..

Calculator done, with a small problem

I finished all of the additions in the first 'Calculator' assignment. It consisted of adding a few buttons with new functions for the calculator, and some memory management buttons which needed new variables too. Adding floating point was the last thing I did, and it is almost working as expected. It was easy to allow the user to add decimal points (add a digit button with a '.' on it), took some thought to keep the user from entering more than one decimal per number, but now I am stuck on one situation. When the user is adding two decimals together (0.2 + 0.3), the second entry isn't allowed because of the way I check in digitPressed. Watch this video:

I want to move on, but think that I should figure out a solution to this before jumping in further. This is one thing that sucks about taking the class through iTunesU, you don't have any TAs or teachers to answer your questions or help you figure something out. All I have is Reddit. :)

Calculator!

I finished the highly detailed walkthrough for the Calculator assignment (it basically tells you step by step how to build this project). I added a few new buttons and some color, then recorded building and running it on the iOS Simulator. Enjoy.

The next step is to follow the actual assignment and probably add some more functionality. Fun!

//edit - so annoying, I cannot get a decent sized and viewable video to embed on this page. You can either view the small YouTube video here, or click through the the full YouTube site and view full screen there. Why wouldn't they just include the full screen button on the embedded video? :-\

Stanford Classes

I found the latest iTunesU class from Stanford, and have started to use those as my development guide. I even hooked up the AppleTV to stream the class to my TV so I can watch and do work at the same time. Will post a screen of the 'calculator' assignment when I finish it up.

An in progress screenshot