Dare I blog upon my iPhone?

When I got my treo 700 a few years ago, I was pleased. A phone I could write programs for and connect to the Internet with! But soon I would find that coding for the treo was a chore, and while there were some good apps, it’s overall crashiness turned me sour.

I was sad that the irc app was modal (if a call or sms came in, there goes my conversation), but the AIM was kindly persistent. I was annoyed by the lack of options with the camera, at how obfuscated the process to install java was, and how often the phone just hung seemingly frozen for half a minute.

Now I have an iphone. Programming for it turns out to be a pain (Xcode is pretty but inconvenient, obj-c is weird…), the irc apps are still modal, as is the AIM. The camera is slow as dirt whereas the treo was responsive and could take video! There’s no option to run java apps at all on the iPhone, and the device often likes to freeze up for upwards of half a minute.

The treo also could be used as a USB modem, providing evdo to my laptop avoiding situations where one might have to tap repeatedly on a glass screen to make good on blogligations.

It also had buttons to actually press which I could type incrediballt fast upon and would not try to correct me if I ever wanted to say duck.

..Duck you, iPhone.

It also had an sd card slot, just like everything else I pwn.

And it could motherfickinf copy and paste! Can you believe it?

And it wasn’t madeof glass! By the end of my two year contract it was dinged all to shut from uncountable drunken fumbling, but the screen was perfect and it was in solid working order.

…and yet somehow, I wouldn’t go back.

I don’t want the iPhone either, mindyou. I doubt I want the g-1, either.

I just want a smartphone that doesn’t fucking suck.

WHAT? Fucking?!?! You’ll let that through? Duck you, iphone.

So I pulled out my trusty iPhone looking for some diversion. After catching up on my Twitter feed, I looked around hungrily for something new. I scanned through the games section and tried to buy the Square-Enix iPhone Game only to be told to go bugger off because it was over 10mb in size and I wasn’t on a wifi network.

Balls.

So I went through what apps I had locally, and decided to give the paint app I’d downloaded months ago a fair shakedown. I wasn’t too impressed with it in the past, but I didn’t spend more than a minute trying. And now I had all the time in the world… or at least in the office.

Unfortunately, my initial assessment was correct: MS Paint puts this app to shame.

Scribble’s UI

Colors

In Scribble, you have a finite set of 11 color options. You cannot change them. And while I often will fight the fight of “very limited color palettes create superior art“, the limited color palettes I speak of aren’t 11 colors, and those colors aren’t straight out of the cheapest pack of crayons you can get.

It is not very much to ask that, at the least, palette slots be changeable. Even though there’s no default color picker widget in the iPhone’s api, there are sliders, and there is a handy-dandy keyboard/textfield interface in which you could type hex codes.

Tools

The tools provided are: smallish circle pen, medium circle pen, and large circle pen. And that’s it. No undo, no 1-pixel-size pen, no zoom, no anything other than three pens. While I admire simplicity in design, this goes beyond that. The tools you are given are limited without the ability to zoom in/out and undo mistakes. Without any sort of fine control, this app goes from having a variety of simple image editing/creation uses to being a simple finger-painting toy.

In the gallery below you will see a few examples showing the limitations of the program. The image with dots shows the three pen sizes. The image with large, drawn circles shows the limitations of the interface in picking up on quick movements (note how the circles are very polygonal). The images with logic gates drawn on them illustrates the inability to have much fine-grain control at all, and where a lack of undo/zoom really gets in the way of scribbling down some technical notes.

…Not that most people would really want to draw logic gates for back-of-the-napkin type scribbles, but I needed to draw something and no you may not have all of my extra-awesome secret plans.

Input/Output

One of the better design choices was to save to the Camera Roll, allowing all of your camera-picture-using apps to interface with your hastily drawn pieces of digital refridgerator art. Another nice bit of fun is that it allows you to load a picture from your camera roll as a base for you to scribble upon. This means you could snap a pic with the camera and draw crude cartoon bubbles with a very short word in it over your blokes, or (more likely) disembodied cocks jizzing all over them.

And, really, right there is the killer feature for Scribble.

In the below gallery I took the high road and painted over a picture of my best gal on my couch in a psuedo 80′s pop-deco style. The effect is only halfway there, though since the UI elements prevent me from getting the bottom of the picture covered.

UI

The ui consists of several buttons that cover over the drawing area, and cannot be dismissed. You can get a good gander at it up above in the pineapple picture.

Conclusion

It sorta sucks, but you get what you pay for; This app is free.

If you want to scribble dicks and show them to people furtively at meetings, it will meet your every need and more!

If you want to scribble dicks upon pictures of people you know, this is your horse.

Otherwise, keep on trucking, sailor. Personally, I’m waiting for Deluxe Paint 2e to come to the iPhone…

Arting!

To the left you will find animated versions of the main character from Rusty Larner and my Sokoban clone for the iPhone. This is heavily, amazingly, tremendously inspired by a 16×16 sprite named “bobo” made by Jon “evilbob” Wofford back in the early v3 days. I gained his permission to derive a work from his, him stating that most anything from those days are now derilict.  

I always remembered it because it was so simple in design.  The slightly-pissed-off, slightly-defeated blue orb.  I loved the eyes, and the way that the shading stayed in the same orientation no matter the view (showing that it was light shading on it’s orb body instead of any particular coloration).  I also like the lack of connection between the feet and the body and the eyes.

So I upgraded it from 16×16 to 32×32, but of note is that I actually preserved, without almost any alteration at all, the eyes and eyebrows from the original.  The rest of the sprite was redone for a native 32×32 sprite.

Anyways, the sprite is done. The game will shortly follow, now several weekends overdue from the original “deadline”.
 

lateness

So, last night I spent entirely setting up backups to amazon s3 for this server using Brad Fitzpatrick’s “Brackup”. Actually, I killed a lot of time trying to use duplicity, but in the end debian’s apt-get defied me and I threw my hands into the air.

Anyway, at any time I could’ve made a gruedorf post, but I didn’t because my Gruedorf Competition Widget said I had 1 day, 2 hours left! So I was all “oh, cool!”, and went along with my system administration.

Unfortunately, when I first built the first one, it wouldn’t auto-refresh. So I was looking at page results from the previous day, which was when I last hit the update button.

Oops.

Here’s an Updated Gruedorf Competition Widget, which auto-updates every 15 minutes. ]]> http://www.egometry.com/gruedorf/clocks-and-art/feed/ 0 http://www.egometry.com/gruedorf/busy-week-no-pretty-pictures/ http://www.egometry.com/gruedorf/busy-week-no-pretty-pictures/#comments Mon, 27 Oct 2008 10:37:26 +0000 mcgrue http://www.egometry.com/?p=157 This week’s gruedorf entry consists of:

• Fixing a bug with deletion in McgRender Mark V (in sully).  This was requested by Gayo so he could make the battle intro/outro effects in the Sully battle system.  Yay!
• Working on the edit post functionality at http://beta.verge-rpg.com as well as general message-centric fucntionality.  The awesome thing is that both my sandbox and vrpg agree on what tests pass and what tests fail.
• Added a sprite animation system to the iPhone Sokoban game.  Rusty also implemented some pathfinding to add some superior UI tap-based movement into the game.  A d-pad is a bad idea for an iPhone game, as is a 1:1 gesture:movement ratio.  You don’t want to stroke your phone 12 times to move 12 tiles.  Honestly, even the iPhone isn’t sexy enough to warrant that level of public fondling.

Another day in the red tile factory...

This week’s advancements in the field of gruedorfery mainly lie in the iPhone side of things for me. Rusty and I creep ever closer to the end goal of shipping an iPhone game. We’re working, if it’s not clear, upon a sokoban clone to start with, and will progress to add features to our engine with progressively more complex games.

Of course, this may all be in vain if a verge 3 port to the iPhone comes out. Not that I’m one to start rumors…

Gruedorf turns one, starts teething.

This marks the first anniversary of my first gruedorf post, when a humble Grue and a pompous Dorf first shut up, threw down, then started swaking again.

It amuses me to see that since it’s inception, twenty competitors have joined our unwinnable contest. As of this writing, 6 are in a state of “not losing”, 10 are in a state of “losing”, and 4 have defunct sites. All in all, the contest is serving some of it’s purpose, keeping some chatter and activity constantly going, but I’d like to see it grow in the next year.

I’d also like to see Overkill and Toen stop failing so much, since both have made pretty awesome things in times past.

What is Gruedorf again?

Gruedorf is a simple contest between myself (McGrue) and Kildorf designed to promote activity in the amateur game creation community over at www.verge-rpg.com.

There are but two rules:

1. If you do an hour of work on a game and post to an RSS-enabled blog about it, you are not-losing.
2. If you fail to do work and post about it, you are losing.

It is important to note that nobody can win Gruedorf. It sure is nice when you ship a game, but doing so doesn’t free you from the eternal geas of a minimum of one hour per week. After all, we are people who profess to enjoying development.

So what got done this year?

I’ve lost a few times, but kept up a whole bunch of progress.

• Made progress on my game project that’s older than Duke Nuke’m Forever…
• Made significant progress towards finishing The Sully Chronicles, including finishing the implementation of the Battle System to a testable form.
• Made improvements to verge 3 on an engine level.
• Started work on a new verge community site, fully test-driving the process.
• Worked on and am shipping an iPhone game, using work done solely on weekends.
• Created a spike of a web2.0 sprite editor over a weekend

And that’s about it. Moving forward I’ll be focusing on Sully, http://beta.verge-rpg.com, and v3 for a bit. Whee.

Oh, and new site.

As a gift to y’alls, I ditched my old cakePHP spike of a blog and ported everything over to wordpress. I couldn’t justify working on the egometry source to do things that other packages did better. Leveraging other people’s work sometimes takes priority over having fun hand-rolling it, especially when you have limited free time.

So, yeah. You all can now comment on my blog finally. Whee.

Change is in the Map…

This week’s changes are mainly to the Crux Map-editor I posted last week. This week brings a bunch of refactorings, culminating in a much cleaner, quicker editing experience. Pending is some meta-data editing and a vsp view, but if you want to add more tiles for the meantime just add 32×32 pngs to the tiles directory in the established naming pattern and you’re all set.

Also along with tonight’s speed-up refactoring comes the possibility of a full v3 multilayer application built on top of this in the future. The slowdown that prevented this from happening was caused by a juvenile mistake that Kael caught after a half hour of me debugging and him playing videogames while aen looked on.

(It’s easier to “pair” program when it’s being projected on a wall and everyone involved is several feet from each other. It’s amazing how much being in comfy chairs and not having your personal space infringed upon helps.)

Anyway, for all of you out there in TV land who care, here’s the updated editor. CTRL-S also saves a .plist of the current map out into the v3.log, although the load doesn’t work yet. So sad.

This week I worked some with Rusty on the iPhone tile engine: we now have full maploading and zooming. yay!

I also worked some on a mapeditor. The mapeditor is a verge game right now, because the maps are simple and I wanted an editor mac and pc users both could use. I’ll post that when it’s a little further along.

SpriteWright.com

The biggest thing I’ve worked on this week is spritewright.com. I’ve been wanting to work on a javascript-only tile/sprite editing tool for a long time now (I really don’t know why: blame derangement if you must), and I finally just started tapping it out. It’s served pretty well to cement my love and understanding of the YUI and of event-driven programming. Thusfar this has been a non-TDD spike, but it’s almost too big now to go without tests. I certainly need to get my house in order before implementing a full undo/redo stack, for instance.

Future Plans

I’d like to eventually have a full database of public tiles and sprites up on SpriteWright, indexed and sortable by tag (omg, the icons of snozzberries are tagged ‘snozzberries’!) and/or by what palette was used. In fact, my obsession with palettes and palette-based art manipulation was half of the reason behind this whole thing.

I’d also like to add an open API so other art programs could load and save to the service. That’d be neat.

In the more distant but hopefully not-too-distant future I wouldn’t mind implementing a flash-driven web-based mapeditor that tied into the API, to solve once and for all the godforsaken verge cross-platform devtools problem (and to sharpen up my flex skills).

A Crippling Addiction

So, I think spritewright.com is the official name, but I also registered spriteright.com, spriterite.com, and spritewrite.com.

Clearly, I have a problem.

I like the implications of a craftsman that -wright implies, but I also like typing ‘spriterite’ because you get to spell ‘rite’ twice in a row. I got the others because if I’m ever pitching this site in the future verbally, I don’t want to have to spell it. I’ll just be all “Eh, it’s spelled how you think it is.” and let them get there anyway they think.

I also started work on a map editor coded in vc. If everything goes well, Overkill will be joining in on this on his next update.

Finally, I updated the Sully codebase to the mark 5 render engine: now with fully functional clickable renderstack items! Yay!