… 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.

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.