When developing a mobile app, it’s easy to focus on what’s visible – the general design identity, the user onboarding process, the backend, even marketing. However, one thing I learned over the years is that some of the best features you can have in an application are invisible, and as such, seldom discussed. It’s not […]
Continue reading →The GameInput APIs are a somewhat new thing to Adobe AIR, and as such, I suppose it’s still undergoing some intensive testing and polishing. Following a tip from James D. Palmer (who encountered different results than me on some controls), I decided to do a new round of testing of the GameInput controls one gets from common devices […]
Continue reading →Google has updated the Android dashboards with statistics of Android version distribution for the week ending on September 4, 20313. As expected, newer versions of Android are slowly becoming more popular, while the ever-lasting Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) is slowly disappearing. The notable fact is the absence on statistics of the very latest Android version, Android […]
Continue reading →For my latest game prototype, aside from KeyActionBinder, I’m also using my new GameLooper class to control the main game loop. Because of the way the class has been built, it is particularly easy to integrate it with something like Box2DFlash, which is what I’m using in my prototype for physics simulation. Integration works by […]
Continue reading →As I mentioned in my previous post, one of the advantages of abstracting game input with a class like KeyActionBinder is that supporting more than one platform is a fairly easy, one-step process: you simply specify the expected inputs during setup of the key binder. I’m currently building a (fairly fun!) prototype and I plan […]
Continue reading →Facebook has just announced their new mobile initiative on Android, called Facebook Home. After much speculation from the tech press predicting anything from a Facebook phone to just an update to their existing mobile app, the real deal seems to be something in the middle: a mix of new applications that work on top of […]
Continue reading →Since I’ve had my first web server set up – somewhere around the year 2000 – I’ve been running tools to analyse my logs daily and generate statistics of visits such as referrers, browser versions, screen resolution, and other useful data. I have tried several different tools since then, but the one I’ve been using […]
Continue reading →It’s time for Android developers to start creating their applications for Android version 4.0 or higher. My own personal and experimental Android applications are seeing a bigger Android 4+ user base than anything else. Kana Mind, for example, supports Android 2.2+ but only 5% of its user base is using this version… 36% is on […]
Continue reading →Much is said about the Android platform’s fragmentation problem. However, the fact that there are a lot of politics and conflicts of interest at play creates an echo chamber that is difficult to wade through – especially if you reach articles by websites with an obvious bias. The reality is that fragmentation is a serious […]
Continue reading →One of the most baffling things for me when I started messing around with Android was dealing with XML files, especially parsing them. In Actionscript, parsing a XML is simple enough: var xml:XML = new XML(“<root>Some-stuff</root>”); And you can get children pretty easily using E4X, or the standard syntax. For example, to get a list […]
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