jjohnson
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Posts by jjohnson
The Real Matrix
0I 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 >
Load Remote Content in FlatRedBall
1Long 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
0User 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
1Here’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);
}
//
What’s Up at MS?
3I’m a cross-platform developer, not a “Microsoft-dedicated” developer. I work in a variety of languages on a variety of platforms as you will know if you have read any of my other posts. I develop video games when I’m motivated and don’t have freelance web work. This year I worked on an Xbox game and released a WP7 game. As I look to next year and decide what types of projects I get into beyond freelance, I’m evaluating what’s out there.
Lately there has been a lot of [gamedev-specific] news about Windows 8, the roadmap of XNA, what’s up with More >
Sorting Standard Sizes
0Last week I was finishing up some stuff to do with size/color selection on the product detail “page” of the Android app I’m building. This turned out to be pretty complicated. The overall solution is bigger than the scope of this post but basically, the detail page should display all of the colors and sizes available for the product. If the customer selects a color it should filter the other lists, somehow marking the sizes that are sold out for that color. It should do the same thing for sizes, filtering colors if the customer selects a size. It More >
Why the Occupy Camp is Misguided
0Every time I see press about the Occupy folks (which is constantly) I groan inwardly. There are so many problems with the world, our government, our cultural et al right now that it is painful to watch such a large movement about something that makes so little sense. I also am frustrated at the popularity of socialism in a country that, not too long ago, fought hot and cold wars to stop it.
First let me say that I have one of “those friends” on Facebook that is always posting poorly conceived political platitudes that directly insult the opposing More >
TPL vs Async, What’s the difference?
0
Prior to working on a MonoDroid project for my employer, I had near-zero experience with multi-threaded programming. On mobile devices, if you hang the UI up for more than a few seconds (varies by platform), the OS will tell the user your app is unresponsive and offer to close it. Thus, it becomes very important to move potentially-long-running process out of the UI thread and I have been forced to dive into multi-threading whether I want to or not
Earlier this year, before I started More >
Grimwar 2 via CodeIgniter
0I built Grimwar.com in 2009 because my friends played Magic the Gathering frequently and talked a lot about a collection manager that would allow them to see each others’ collections, save deck builds and create wishlists. It started as a simple database of cards but slowly grew into a fairly-full-featured site. The problem is, it started without any real vision for UX or code and thus things were just tacked on as fast as they could when people had new feature requests. It became a pain in the rear More >
Fable 3 and User Input
0
It’s been too long since I posted. I have had a lot of stuff going on. Work is really busy because I’m working with a variety of unfamiliar technologies that require a lot of new learning. Home is really busy because we have two kids, a baby and I’m always coding something up when I actually have spare time! I have a lot more to post about mono and Android development but I wanted to take a little side trip to talk about something really important in game development: user input.
I recently purchased the PC version More >