… since my last post.

Anyway this entry won’t have a ton of substance to it, but I thought I’d post it so anyone looking me up didn’t think I’d abandoned my online presences.

Summer! A huge reason it seems I’ve dropped off the face of the internet is that summer happened. These precious few months of warmth mean I’ve been out and about most weekends instead of cooped up coding. Couple that with the fact that I moved apartments this summer and I just plain haven’t had a ton of time.

Bundle! Still contracting with Bundle.com, which has been the bulk of my programming effort for the last several months. It’s been a bit of a trip using C#.NET/ASP/Visual Studio/Windows Vista since I normally never use those tools, but I guess I now know ASP and can at least get around in Visual Studio.

My “Comets” game referenced in an old post has stalled. It was a ton of fun making it (and I may at some point spend the necessary ~10 hours or so to get it from it’s current state to the App Store), but ultimately I found it more and more difficult to keep working on it. For one, it was my first endeavor into Cocos2D. Naturally I spent a lot of time doing things the Wrong Way, as is usually the case when one learns something for the first time. Starting a project on the wrong foot makes doing changes later much more difficult and time consuming. However, the final nail in that coffin was that it wasn’t very fun to play. I never intended it to be this really awesome shooter game since I was building it just to learn Cocos2D, but in the end I decided my effort would be better spent working on a project I cared more about.

Speaking of new apps, I’m currently re-writing “Will It Rain?” for the iOS4/iPhone4/iPad. Knowing what I know now, I think I can write a much better version. I also have a few game ideas up my sleeve, along with a couple Ruby on Rails sites I want to build. If only I had more time…

Well, that’s about it. These days my main contribution to the online world is posting links over at Forrst, which is more or less a twitter for developers/designers.

Here’s a sneak preview of an iPhone game I’ve been working on recently, code-named “Comets”.  It’s being built using the cocos2d framework.

The basic idea is that you’re the Space Station commander (yes that blob in the middle is your space station) in charge of defending your station from comets, aliens and other baddies.    You shoot projectiles by tapping the screen.

Hey everybody, quick update:

“Will It Rain?” version 1.1 is now in the App Store. It includes some pretty cool updates, including a better looking UI, snow detection, and a better algorithm for determining the likelihood of rain/snow depending on what time you launch the app.

The price is now a firm “free, but ad supported”. I experimented briefly (under 48 hours) with selling this app at $0.99, but users were unwilling to pay for this product so I knocked it down to Free. Unfortunately Apple’s NDA prevents me from saying specific numbers, but a few, and I do mean few, users paid $0.99 for this.  If you’re one of the chosen less-than-a-dozen, I’m sorry.  I’m fairly certain almost everyone who paid for it is someone I know offline, so if you’re one of those, let me know.  I’ll buy you a drink or send you an Amazon gift card or something.

Well that’s it! It’s a pretty big update as far as being more accurate and supporting different weather types, plus I’ve got more features in the works for 1.2.

“Will It Rain?” was released yesterday on to the App Store.  It answers the age-old question, “Will It Rain?” and tells you, in plain English, just how likely it is to rain in the next day or so.  And for only $0.99 free, what a deal.

Read more about it here.

This is largely “for my own benefit” since I come across this problem every time I make a smartphone site:  iPhone Safari freaks out when you rotate the phone from portrait to landscape.  By that I mean it will make some text bigger but not others, throw some text off the screen, and generally make a formerly pretty page look like garbage.

The reason, it turns out, is that the iPhone Safari browser is trying to “help” users out by making the text bigger.

Without further ado, how to fix this. Add the following in your CSS:

body { -webkit-text-size-adjust: none; }

Of course, if you do want this functionality, you can add that CSS attribute to specific divs or whatever parts of your site you want.

Recent Incoming Searches:

• how to make text bigger on iphone safari
• iphone safari resizes some text

News has been making the rounds on various industry news blogs, but if you haven’t heard by now: change your root password.  I’m assuming you know how to do this, if you don’t, you probably have very little use for sshd.  Turn it off.

If changing your root password causes your Springboard to loop, check out this guide.

If you ignore this advice, expect Rick Astley or worse.

From MocoNews:

Adobe has secured relationships will Research In Motion, Windows Mobile, Palm and Google to roll out full Flash capabilities to the various smartphone platforms. With such a complete line-up, the only obvious phone remaining is Apple’s iPhone.

This is of no surprise to me, and the reason should be obvious: the App Store is a cash cow.  To allow Flash on the iPhone would severely hurt App Store sales, reduce the number of developers for their platform, and severely reduce the number of downloaded apps.

From Apple’s point of view, adding Flash capability to the iPhone would need to bring in more sales than the inevitable reduction in App Store sales.  It’s very likely that they don’t believe it will.

I for one am not terribly bothered by this.  Flash support is far, far down the list on my “Things I’d Like To See on the iPhone”.  Some more important improvements could be being able to set custom text tones, being able to add content to the iPod App without needing to go through iTunes, garbage collection (Android can do it), customizable themes, or at least being able to change a few basic things, etc.  I say, make it a fully featured phone first, a mini-laptop second.  iPhone users only recently were given the ability to receive MMS, something my clunky phone circa 2002 could do (and with a similar quality camera, for what it’s worth).

From MacRumors:

According to a report from Multichannel News, the iPhone may be next in line to gain the ability to stream video via Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” feature. The feature is currently available on Mac and PC for all Netflix members, but subscribers with an unlimited membership plan may also take advantage of “Watch Instantly” on compatible devices other than a computer, such as an Xbox 360 or Roku Digital Video Player.

From TechDirt:

AT&T caught a lot of flak at the beginning of April, when it updated the terms of service for its mobile data network, banning all sorts of activities on it. AT&T later said the changes had been made in “error” and removed the new language, though it later reinserted language banning “redirecting television signals for viewing on Personal Computers” — a ban apparently aimed directly at the forthcoming SlingPlayer application for the iPhone, which lets users watch TV from their Slingbox at home on their mobile device.

Sounds reasonable, right?  Certainly you’d hate to lose your network connection because 5 people connected to your tower are streaming video.  However, consider the following:

AT&T’s “i-Verse” app works with their U-Verse TV solution that can either load DVR’ed shows from your U-Verse recorder into your iPhone at home, or stream shows across the net over their 3G network. The app was demoed last year behind closed doors and based on the reception then, prompted AT&T to go into full-time development on it.

Given the already restrictive nature of Apple’s App Store, the lack of customizable features of the iPhone (I still can’t display useful information on my locked screen or customize the colors of my text message bubbles!), and now AT&T throwing on their own layer of competitive lock-out, I think my next phone just might be an Android.