Announcing GPS Log, a location logging, and tagging tool for the iPhone which lets you record the places you visit, complete with text, photos and tags – then enables you to revisit those locations later through the Maps app, and export all your data for viewing in Google Earth.

Check out all the details and videos at http://GPSLogApp.com

If you are interested, there is a free try-before-you-buy version (linked on that website), so give it a whirl and see if you like it!

If you do use it, please give me your honest feedback directly, or via the forums.

]]> http://omegadelta.net/2009/02/28/announcing-gps-log-the-premier-location-logging-and-tagging-app-for-the-iphone-3g/feed/ 0 http://omegadelta.net/2009/02/15/neonscape-112/ http://omegadelta.net/2009/02/15/neonscape-112/#comments Sun, 15 Feb 2009 08:55:55 +0000 Will http://omegadelta.net/?p=779 Neonscape 1.1.2, a mostly bugfix release, has hit the App Store – grab it while it’s hot.

In this release:

• I have adopted Rhys’ suggestion to improve the Calibration UI, and the high score UIs
• The calibration is more effective (shameful I know… but the previous calibration code had one rather large (yet simple) flaw which rendered the averaging useless).
• Non-latin characters can be submitted to the global leaderboard (congrats to ?? [ed: it seems however that they can't be submitted to WordPress! [ed: ok, fixed, just had to update my database]] 巴士 for the first user to utilise this)
• Anti-cheating methods have been implemented on the global leaderboard

The App is pretty stable now I think. Neonscape 1.2 is in the works which will have a pre-game options screen for the user to tweak the starting speed (amongst other things), and potentially a new graphics theme and new sound. The price will be hiked for the 1.2 release – so grab it while it’s cheap!

To send you will need to firstly encode and escape your data using this code, where yourString is your string. This code is useful for escaping any data sent via HTTP URLs. Thanks to Firefly for the code (he provides a complete sample of how to launch the Mail app with your custom message which I have also used).

NSString *reserved = @”:/?#[]@!$&’()*+,;=”;
return [NSMakeCollectable(CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(kCFAllocatorDefault, (CFStringRef)yourString, NULL, (CFStringRef)reserved, kCFStringEncodingUTF8)) autorelease];

Once encoded, you will probably need to send it using a POST HTTP request as the data may exceed the limits of a GET HTTP request.

Doing that is a little more involved, here’s my code based off these two useful samples

NSString *reserved = @”:/?#[]@!$&’()*+,;=”;
NSString* escapedData = [NSMakeCollectable(CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(kCFAllocatorDefault, (CFStringRef)data, NULL, (CFStringRef)reserved, kCFStringEncodingUTF8)) autorelease];

NSString* httpBodyString=[[NSMutableString alloc] initWithFormat:@”to=%@&DATA=%@”, emailAddress.text, escapedData];

NSString* urlString=[[NSMutableString alloc] initWithString:@”http://domain/script.php”];
NSURL* url=[[NSURL alloc] initWithString:urlString];
[urlString release];

NSMutableData *reqData =[[httpBodyString dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding] retain];
NSMutableURLRequest *urlRequest=[NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
[url release];

[urlRequest setHTTPMethod:@"POST"];
[urlRequest setValue:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%i", [reqData length]] forHTTPHeaderField:@”Content-Length”];
[urlRequest setHTTPBody:reqData];
[httpBodyString release];

[webView loadRequest:urlRequest];

The last line I am particularly proud of. Sure you can do NSURLConnection *connectionResponse = [[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:urlRequest delegate:self]; but then you have to handle the results problematically and NSURLConnection returns raw binary data which is a bit annoying.

So what I do is simply load it into a UIWebView so I can view the results (or errors) from my PHP script. In the final version I’ll just hide that web-view or even keep it for user feedback. The UIWebView handles all the delegate methods. Even if you do want to handle it in code – I suggest you use this as a way to debug your PHP script.

Almost done – now we need to actually send the email!

This PHP script is a very good example of how to send email with attachments, very easy to tweak to accept your $_POST data (and not load it from a file), and change the attachment type to XML.

And that’s it. I couldn’t find all this info in the one place – as you can see by all the link, so here it is!

Call Divert – all calls – activate *21*(Number to divert to)#
Call Divert – all calls – to check *#21#
Call Divert – all calls – to cancel #21#

Call Divert – on busy – to activate *67*(Number to divert to)#
Call Divert – on busy – to check *#67#
Call Divert – on busy – to cancel #67#

Call Divert – on no reply – to activate *61*(Number to divert to)#
Call Divert – on no reply – to check *#61#
Call Divert – on no reply – to cancel #61#

source, and more codes

This is my first foray into iPhone game dev.  I teamed up with my mate Ben Kosmina to create the game with me doing the coding, and him creating the original concept and doing many other aspects like the sound and sprites.  It was great fun to create; learning objective-c, workshopping the idea with Ben to add some cool goals and dangers (watch out for the dreaded über tanks!).

So far sales are a little sluggish – but the Neonscape publicity machine is just cranking into gear so hopefully the press will drive some sales and help pay for my RTW trip ;-)

Grab it on the iPhone store now for only US$1.99 (or your local equivalent).

What they don’t tell you in any of the related docs for glDrawArrays is that if you are using VBOs and are not resetting the buffers, geometry drawn with glDrawArrays will be draw corrupted.

Fortunately there is a solution – they need to be set to zero with glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, 0);

The code signing setup is a real pain, way more complex than running XNA code was on the Xbox360 – you have to generate certificate signing requests, get several certificates, register the device and then finally apply this fix

Any app/game I make will have to satisfy two goals:
- something I will actually use myself (in the case of an app)
- something I can knock out a proof of concept for in ~8h

I have some ideas – stay tuned.

I found it very informative, and got more out of the relatively small (in a global sense) conference than expected. Tom from Tantalus kicked it off, detailing the GDAA’s efforts to extend the “screen” tax breaks currently applied to film, to games. This was followed by a typically ‘as low level as it gets’ PS3 talk, a free lunch (ok, included lunch), and a rather more interesting talk by Peter Isensee about Multi-core programming, including some easy ways to make a game multi-threaded (starting with separating update and draw into separate threads, and continuing with thread job-pools, Double-buffering update/draw and even a sub-frame buffer pipeline for enhanced responsiveness at the cost of programming flexibility). Asserting on non-ownership of objects in setters I thought was another good tip.

Peter is Director XNA Development Connection and was a good speaker. He plugged an XNA Event that was to be held just down the road in Microsoft’s southbank meeting office. Being very interested in XNA, as a hobby game platform, learning tool and commercial prototyping tool, I attended. It was a fun night, we heard more from Pete, and Nic from the Sydney office, and Glenn Wilson, an MVP. There was a good turn out, probably 20 or so, ranging from hobbiest who had not yet used XNA, to those that had, to people in the industry. The pizza was good too :) All in all a fun night, and I’m looking forward to continue playing with XNA.

Astute readers may have noticed a rather pro-Microsoft tone in the previous paragraph. I may as well admit that I’m a bit of a convert. It is hard to deny what they are doing with the 360 – not only is it a good, easy to develop platform, but their representives and support is excellent too. The fact that they allow *anyone* (for a small fee) to make games that run on the 360 (with a few limitations), is amazing. This is very very unusual for game hardware vendors. Companies such as Sony and Nintendo, and most that had gone before try very hard to keep out unlicensed developers. Granted, you can’t actually sell an XNA title for the 360 – but you can make them and play them, and pitch them. It is a winning strategy for MS too – by XNA being used by many universities, there will be a lot of young people who have X360 experience, further lowering development costs for that platform.

Had a good chat to the IBM guys, who were there spruking the Rational suite. Managed to get a good swag – 2 free t-shirts (one for our QA lead), a nice pen, a sweat band, and a table top arcade gaming machine (which I won)!!

All up it was a great two days, and winning the IBM raffle capped it off.

Interesting story on game prototyping