jjohnson

jjohnson

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Posts by jjohnson

Kicked out by Kickstarter

0
1 week ago
by jjohnson in

I’ve written about Grimwar several times on here. I keep trying to rebuild it and make it better but it’s a very big site with a lot of users and there is a lot of work involved with rebuilding. That being said, I AM rebuilding it. Even though it makes no money, even though I don’t even play Magic the Gathering, I think it could be profitable and I want to build it for the community, if nothing else.

I am rebuilding Grimwar in .NET MVC3 and it’s going really well. Unfortunately, Windows servers are more expensive than the LAMP servers More >

Binary Serialization in C#

3
2 weeks ago
by jjohnson in

Let me preface this by saying I’m not sure the information here is correct. Prior to this, I have not worked with binary serialization. I serialized to XML or JSON because it was easy to transfer and was human readable. But binary really makes sense for what I’m doing now. I deserialize JSON into objects from a Web API. To make the app run faster, I cache the deserialized objects. Many of them could be cached for quite awhile because they rarely change. So, persistent cache storage is good but I need to keep the cache footprint small on disk More >

Mono for Android List Optimization

0
3 weeks ago
by jjohnson in

One of the big things I’ve worked on lately is optimization of the Android app I’m working on for my employer. I want the app to run at its absolute full potential using every realistic optimization I can.

One of the most-frequently-used components in Android applications are ListViews. Android ListViews are good and bad. They are good in that, if you do it properly, they handle view recycling and can be pretty efficient. They are bad in that the abstraction is so leaky that 90% of the so-called tutorials and examples I’ve seen More >

construct2_events

Construct 2: Kicking the Tires

2
1 month ago
by jjohnson in

I love playing with GameDev tools such as engines, frameworks/libraries, game creators and new languages. I’ve been a big advocate, fan and user of FlatRedBall for some time as you may know.

Today, while reading up on something totally unrelated, I saw a reference to an HTML5 game maker called Creator2. Curious, I read a little about it and decided to play with it this weekend.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how awesome this tool actually is. While I don’t think it’s suitable for a super-feature-rich and complex game, it is a More >

nora_and_i

The R word

0
1 month ago
by jjohnson in

I avoid using strong language. I also try to avoid words that cause offense or harm to specific groups in a professional or public forum. That being said, I generally find jokes that poke fun at racial, religious and other stereotypes funny when they are joking and in the right company or context.

As you may know, my beautiful, wonderful, four-year-old daughter Nora has a horrible neuro disorder called Rett Syndrome. Dealing with Rett Syndrome is a major part of the lives of my family, More >

Digital Economics 101

2
1 month ago
by jjohnson in

As with all of my thoughts, these are hardly original. I have read a bunch of good stuff about economics and the evolution of digital content across the web that got me thinking about these things. But I like to think that I have a knack for reading and understanding the issues, swirling all of the ideas around, and spitting out a somewhat cohesive explanation of what it all means without using big fancy words. Incidentally, this has ties to my last post about how “free” services aren’t free More >

red-pill-blue-pill

The Real Matrix

0
1 month ago
by jjohnson in

I read a quote recently (I would credit it if I could remember the source) that was something like: “If a service is free than YOU are the product.”

Have you seen the movie Wall-E? In many ways, it’s almost the same story as the Matrix.

In the Matrix, humans live in a virtual world where they have the illusion of life and free will. One day Morpheus reveals to Neo that it’s all a lie. The Earth is a wasteland and robots provide humans with a fake reality to maintain a status quo and keep the humans generating More >

scout_green

Load Remote Content in FlatRedBall

1
2 months ago
by jjohnson in

Long ago I wrote a small and crappy top-scroller in AS3 that loaded all of its content from XML. The idea was that somebody could create their own graphics and XML to basically define all game assets and levels. It was rudimentary but it worked and I still like the idea of a game that loads all of its resources from remote sources.

So, how would you go about this in my favorite game engine?

I’m glad you asked. Here’s a quick and dirty description of how you can load sprites from More >

Understanding Threading and Why Android Feels Sluggish

0
2 months ago
by jjohnson in

User Interface Performance: Why it Matters

Fact: All but the most hardcore Android fanboys agree that even the best devices feel laggy compared to the snappy iOS UI.

This is not speculation or a debatable point. If you believe that the Android User Interface (UI) is as consistently responsive as the iOS UI, you are simply incorrect. It’s SCIENCE! There are specific reasons for this which I’m about to discuss but first let’s talk about why a laggy UI is a problem.

UI stands for User Interface but it may as well stand for User Experience. For most users, if More >

Best Practice: Passing Types to Methods

1
2 months ago
by jjohnson in

Here’s a question that maybe a C# Guru can weigh in on…

I abstracted some Activity-launching code that I use everywhere into a method on the base Activity that all of my Activities inherit from:

protected void LaunchActivity<T>(string url) {
    Intent activity = new Intent(this, typeof(T));
    if (url != null) {
        activity.PutExtra("ApiUrl", url);
    }
    StartActivity(activity);
}

// makes starting activities really easy:
LaunchActivity<MyActivityType>("http://myApiUrl.com");

 

I think this method could also be defined like this:

protected void LaunchActivity(Type t, string url) {
    Intent activity = new Intent(this, t);
    if (url != null) {
        activity.PutExtra("ApiUrl", url);
    }
    StartActivity(activity);
}

//

More >

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