jason's weblog

Day of Git

My first morning of the SCaLE conference. As I guessed, some nice free wifi from the expo folks -- thank you! I was happy to IPv6, too -- very cool.

Just ran into a colleague from work which was unexpected and nice. Always good to see a familiar face. I'm registered and ready to go... trying hard to avoid my third cup of coffee this morning but the coffee joint is so close to me...

Off to see what's going on at the conference... more soon!

SCaLE 8x

Just got in to the Westin LAX for the Southern California Linux Expo. Quick flight from Phoenix, no surprises other than a smaller plane than I was expecting. Terminal two in Sky Harbor was near-empty, though... no line at security which was nice.

Opting out of the $11.95 wifi for the Westin... I'd imagine SCaLE will have wifi available in the morning, nothing too urgent going on. Just need to close out some Words with Friends with Mystique then get some sleep. Tomorrow I'm on a panel for Git -- Advanced tips and tricks. Looking forward to participating there, plus there are some good talks on tomorrow's agenda that I'll be able to hit.Need to fly out late tomorrow night, though, so I'll miss Sunday's agenda unfortunately. Next year, though, I need to take a look at attending for the whole weekend.

On my iPhone Part Two

I know, the suspense is killing you... I will continue with page three of my iPhone apps. But first... this little journey into my phone has become beneficial to me. I've already cleaned off a few apps that I haven't touched in a while, plus I removed a few web shortcuts that I stopped using. I may get my iPhone back down to six pages of apps after all!

But enough about me... on to my iPhone:

Page 3

App Sales

Sweet little free app (because the source code is available) that downloads your app's daily sales reports from Apple and keeps track of it, all on your iPhone. My morning routine usually consists of firing up this app soon after waking up to see how the previous day's sales were.

Galcon Lite

Fun little game, sort of a fast-paced Risk. You have a number of planets, each with a certain population of ships that grows over time. The computer has a similar setup, and your goal is to send a stream of ships to unconquered planets in the "system" in order to control them before your opponent does. This is the free, "lite" version, which is enough for me.

Weather Bug

Weather application that I hardly use anymore. I like it, though, because it finds weathercams that are available for the areas you track.

LifeGame

Conway's life in an iPhone app. I still like seeing the gliders being created and wiggling across the screen. Nice app, contains a library of starting patterns that are entertaining. It's free, too.

AP Mobile News

Another news application, this one straight from the AP. I'll fire this up when I have a couple minutes (Starbucks line, for example) to see what's going on in the world.

Toy Bot Diaries

Another $4.99 game... professionally done, mildly entertaining. It was one of the first "real" games for the iPhone so I picked it up to see what it'd be like. Nice use of the touch screen and accelerometer.

Sextuple Word Challenge

Similar to a game on Facebook -- six letters are shown to you and you need to figure out all the words that can be made from those six letters. Used to play it more often than I do now, but I still like it.

Toobz-Free

Free version of someone's kick-ass game :) This free version limits you to just three rounds of play.

Fuzzle Lite

Don't play this game much anymore... it's one of those match-the-colors-on-a-grid sort of games. This app should really be on my sixth page but it's kind of a pain to move it all that way...

Yahtzee Adventure

Nice Yahtzee game with a few variations that keeps it fun. I believe it's from EA Games. I'll play this every now and then as I put my youngest daughter to sleep on my shoulder.

Penguin Lite

Fun free version of the Penguin game. You're either catapaulting or dive-bombing penguins, trying to knock down polar bears.

Orions: Legend of Wizards

A game similar to Magic: The Gathering. It has an adventure mode that I've never tried... I just like firing up the duel against the computer every now and then.

Remote

Apple's application that allows me to control my mac's iTunes. I use it to stream music to our AppleTV without having to get up off the sofa.

mondo

Ambrosia software's solitaire game. Very nice app -- I've always been a fan of Ambrosia, ever since the Escape Velocity running on my Mac IIci (which is in my garage, by the way). It's always nice to play a good game of Klondike every now and then.

LinkedIn

Portal to my LinkedIn account. I fire it up every now and then just to see where folks are moving around. I don't update it very often.

And that does it for page three. Three more pages to go!

What's on my iPhone?

I'm an iPhone app addict. I've installed around 120 apps so far. Most of them are free, a lot of them are $0.99, and a few are in the $1.99 and $2.99 range. I think the most I've spent on an application is $4.99, but it was worth it. Actually... I did just spend $10 on an app, but more on that later.

I thought I'd share what apps are currently on my iPhone over the next few weeks with some mini-reviews. I'll just go page by page... for the most part I haven't done much rearranging of applications, so it's not too important what page an application is on. That said, there are always exceptions. Such as app #1:

Page 1

Toobz

This is actually on the first page of my iPhone apps, of course, so I have to mention it. It's a fun game and it's only $0.99!

Byline

This is the $4.99 app that I bought. It's basically an RSS reader but the best part about it is that it synchronizes with Google Reader. I used to use mobile safari and Google Reader's very nice web interface and was quite happy with it. With Byline, though, I'm even happier.

Page 2

NYTimes

Pretty nice little app that was free and allows me to read some of the stories from the New York Times web site.

Facebook

Well done application that's a nice portal to their web site.

loans

My first attempt at an iPhone application that I never released. It's a very simple interface which shows you payments on loans.

Evernote

The iPhone version of the web and desktop note-taking software. I store links, clippings, and random bits from the web in it. I don't actually reference it too much, but if I'm trying to remember something I've seen I usually check it. The iPhone version synchronizes nicely with the web and desktop apps. All of which are free.

HoldEm

I believe this is the first game I bought for the iPhone -- Apple's nice rendition of Texas HoldEm. I don't play it all that much anymore, but it's a well-done application with good computer play and wifi play, as well.

Twitterific

A pretty nice free twitter client. Keeps track of the 300 iPhone devs I follow on twitter.

FireDrop

Interesting game I used to play a lot some time ago, but really haven't fired up recently. Block-matching game if I remember correctly.

Air Sharing

This application allows me to copy files (namely PDF books from the Pragmatic Programmers) from my iMac to my iPhone. It uses a WebDAV interface for that connectivity and is pretty slick. The PDF reader is ok as well, although with large books the iPhone can become a bit sluggish.

Pandora

Awesome application that lets me listent to a customized music stream from Pandora. I use it at work over 3g.

Castles Lite

A "free" (aka demo) version of the Castles game. I haven't played it much... in fact, I'm having a hard time remembering exactly what the game is like. And I'm stubborn enough not to fire it up as I type this.

Sportacular

Simply the best application I've seen to keep up-to-date with sports scores. Nice interface, all the big sports... and free.

Instapaper Free

Another must-have for offline reading. Combine this app with the easy-to-use bookmarklet sitting in my browsers and I can easily save an article I'm reading from a web site. Then when I fire up Instapaper on my iPhone, it syncs up with what I saved and presents a simply-formatted version of the site's article that I can easily read on my iPhone. I really like this app but haven't been able to pull the trigger on the full version which adds some nice features but is $9.99.

Ok, that's the first two screens of my iPhone. I'll do page number three in a few days!

Moving to gmail

Just in case anyone tries to email me -- I've just initiated the switch of mail.haslup.com to using Google Apps, and in particular email so there may be a delay in some of my emails for a bit. I've been using gmail for the past... um... wow, since June 23, 2004. Four-plus years now... 8200 messages, using just 8% of my quota (681mb / 7268mb). I really like it, obviously, so now instead of my email address being forwarded by my web hosting company, I'll just use Google directly.

In other news... the free version of my iPhone game (Toobz-Free) is up and doing fairly well from what I can tell. It's definitely provided a bump in the sales of the $0.99 version, so that's nice, plus it's just cool knowing that lots of people are at least trying it out. I've got some ideas for the next app, but I'm also debating about adding some things to Toobz, so we'll see how that balances out. Definitely nothing out in what's left of 2008.

Physics Games

A bunch of physics games have been coming out lately... this one is a lot of fun.

First iPhone App!

It's up! My first iPhone application was just put up on the App Store: Toobz!.

It's a game based on the classic "Pipes" game where you need to create a system of "toobz" (pipes) before the water starts running and spills out.

I've put up another site, Off Center Software, where I'll put more updates.

iPhone SDK'ing

Been a long time! Lots of fun stuff going on... let's dive right in:

I've been enjoying the iPhone SDK for a little while now. Still no apps on the App Store to show for it but that should change soon. Got one app (a game) that I'm polishing up (sounds, final graphics, a couple minor features), and I've started a couple of other apps, plus I have a ton of ideas.

Now that the Apple NDA has been lifted it's great to see a community starting up. It also makes it a lot easier to find answers to all the random questions I have while powering through the SDK. I've purchased both of the iPhone SDK books, as well, and they're pretty good reads so far.

VMWare came out with Fusion version 2.0 which is a rather nice upgrade. Adds support for multiple snapshots, as well as multiple monitors for the guest OS. I haven't tried that yet, either on my windows install or one of my many linux installs, but I'm sure I will soon enough. I'm still enjoying being on the Mac platform... it's a nice mix of command-line fun and a polished UI. I still can't tear myself away from emacs, of course, so I use that for just about everything text-related (such as this post).

I'm not, however, using emacs for my iPhone / Mac development... I'm using Apple's XCode IDE. It's pretty nice, I'm still getting used to it, but what made it a nice transition was their emacs-based key binding set. Not everything is there, of course, but at least basic page navigation as well as killing and yanking is there, so I feel comfortable enough.

In other news... I finally signed up for Facebook for some reason. It's been fun since Mystique is also on it, as well as my brother, some old co-workers, and folks from high school. I'm not addicted to it, but I do like reading about what old friends are up to.

That's about it for now... I'm hoping to fire this blog back up, so check back soon!

iPhone Apps

A couple must-have iPhone applications:

AOL radio -- great selection of streaming music. I've only used it so far on wifi at home, I'm pretty sure it'll suck down the battery pretty quickly with 3g.

Texas Hold'em -- for $5 it's a fun little holdem game. Very impressive graphics, moves along at a nice pace.

Shazam -- listens to any song for ~12 seconds and can identify it. Provides links to iTunes if you want to buy. Nifty.

That's all so far... I've added a bunch of other apps but I've lost interest in most of them. So far I've only paid for the one (Hold'Em)... trying to stay away from paying for others... too easy to get sucked in.

iPhone

Well, I couldn't take it anymore and bought one of the new 3G iPhones today. Got a 16gb white one... was going to get an 8gb black but I heard the black ones get pretty smudged up, plus the apple store only had white ones. So yes, I'm using the smudge thing as an excuse to get the 16gb version :)

Glad I did, too, because I only have 5gb left after loading up music and videos. Got a few apps installed, too... I'll try to get some reviews of them up soon. I've been reading up on the SDK and I'm looking forward to writing an application. At some point I might break down and pay the $99 to become an official developer. That means I can put my app on the iTunes store and run the app on my iPhone instead of just the simulator.

That's the excitement right now... if anyone is in the market for a samsung blackjack 2, let me know :-)