Latest gameplay video, at the cost of boring dev details

If you want to skip boring details about my struggles, skip to the video at the bottom of this post.


I've at least found a good temporary solution for the landscape issues, and I've been progressing with learning Objective-C / Cocoa / UIKit / etc. but not to the point at which I can concretely delineate between each of these terms. I'm also struggling a bit but getting the hang of several things.

I finally installed a third-party mouse configuration software so that I can get more than a kindergarten level of control over my mouse sensitivity.

I'm getting the hang of the MacOS app launching model, the dock bar and how it represents running versus non-running programs, the "Finder" file browser and its quirks.

XCode is like Visual Studio lite, or perhaps "Visual Studio Gimped". I've chatted endlessly on IRC with people who gladly praise XCode over Visual Studio, but I wonder if they've used VS2005 or greater. It's just no comparison; there are redundant windows/panels everywhere, the debugger runs in a separate tiny window, though you can resize it, covering your other windows. The expression watcher is nowhere near as powerful as Visual Studio's, and Intellisense (or its equivalent) is weaker in its implementation, requiring more keystrokes for simple tasks.

Speaking of the tiny debugger window (obviously resizable), this is a common observation with MacOS. It seems the norm to be expected to manually drag windows around and place them as you need them; stretching them to just the right extents, etc. In Windows my usual mode of operation is to only do that when I'm copying files from one explorer window to another. When I'm running apps, I generally switch to the app, then maximize the window if it isn't already maximized. Windows seems to work well with users who are used to this behavior. MacOS doesn't seem to be expecting it; hence, I'll find that apps have lots of little "helper" windows that are expected to be resized to comfortable dimensions for the particular user at that particular time. This is not how I want my apps to work. Visual Studio supports this, but also a very extensive docking scheme so I can have all my windows docked where I want them instead of floating about in the ether, always getting in the way of content behind them, or else getting hidden themselves when I click somewhere else.

Again I find it ironic that so much of what makes the iPhone dominant over Windows Mobile is the same that makes Visual Studio dominant over XCode and the general Mac development situation. Of course, I am trying very hard not to bias my arguments with my existing familiarity with Visual Studio. There's still much more to learn.

Other factors which add major hurdles include simple things like the feel of the keyboard. It's no longer Ctrl-C, it's Command-C, etc., not to mention completely different dev environment hotkeys. And on my particular keyboard, the Esc and F-keys are tiny.

I finally bit the bullet and sacrificed dual-monitors on my PC in order to have a dedicated monitor with a DVI input from my Mac. I also switched placement of my keyboards/mice so that my Mac is in my primary workspace on my desk, and my PC is riding shotgun. This will encourage me to give my Mac some more love.

If you've read this far, your reward is a video of the app in its current state, run through the iPhone simulator. Long story short, I need to go through a long, painful process to enable deployment to my iPhone ever since switching Macs.

F#$king Landscape mode

I have spent the vast majority of my coding time on this project trying to get the damn iPhone to properly handle content created for a Landscape-only orientation.  I never realized how much easier life would be if I was a good boy and just kept everything in Portrait mode.

I heard rumors that the 2.2 SDK (currently 2.1) will include a fix for the landscape-mode hackery that exists now, and hopefully this will prevent me from needing to create a transform and do some sort of wild, seemingly arbitrary calculation to find the center point of my view (used in the aforementioned transform).

This really is insane.  I don't know how people say they've been able to get apps going in like 10 days.  Actually I do know why: they weren't creating apps in landscape mode.

Vacation...

I know you've all been wondering why I haven't updated in a while. There are two reasons: 1) I haven't had a Mac available for iPhone development since August 28th or so, and 2) I'm on vacation right now in Disney World, returning September 10th.

I'm having an awesome time but it'll be really nice to be home and back to my geeky endeavors.