Sunetos, Inc.

I didn’t spend much time on iPhone on Tuesday.

Day T-40 Accomplishments (Tuesday, March 2, 2010)

• Not much

I so dearly love memory management problems — they are always so easy to find and fix…sure. I had a couple of hours of focused time this evening for development work, but unfortunately wasted the last half trying to find a memory allocation bug.

In some recent refactoring I introduced a double release somehow, but after an hour of late evening head banging, I could not find it and decided the wisest course of action was to drop it for the evening — hopefully I will find and fix the issue within the first little bit of my next session. I believe I at least know when I introduced the bug, so hopefully this will be another demonstration of “version control software is my friend”.

Day T-41 Accomplishments (Monday, March 1, 2010)

• Remembered there is a point where it’s best to just put down the keyboard and walk away

I did no coding on Sunday, but did get comfortable on the couch with a couple of development books:

• iPhone Game Development, Zirkle & Hogue
• Mobile 3D Graphics with OpenGL ES and M3G, Pulli, etal

Day T-42 Accomplishments (Sunday, February 28, 2010)

• Spent a couple of hours with some iPhone development books

I had to choose one of two goals for today: better material handling, or better movement processing. In thinking through what each meant, I realized that the better material handling is really dependent on smarter movement processing so I dove in. We are almost to my brother’s house, but I finished the core refactoring that should provide more efficient handling of movement, better coverage that will support the material handling better, and simplification of several classes.

Day T-43 Accomplishments (Saturday, February 27, 2010)

• Simplified movement handling
• Provided good basis for material handling improvements

I am heading out of town on a two week trip, visiting family in Florida for a week, then on to Alabama to help my daughter and her husband move to a new house. I have enough work commitments that I’ll probably try to get in 60-70% of my normal consulting work hours, but I also hope to elicit some good feedback on my app (and continue making progress!). It is far enough along that I can explain where I am going, have folks try it, make some changes, etc. It will also be a sanity check on what they think the “fun” factor is.

A key part of the game involves digging with tools of different shapes and sizes. I want the tool face (width of a shovel, bucket, etc.) to rotate to be perpendicular to the current direction of the touch movement, and tonight I got that behavior working correctly. As you move around, the screen is updated as I expected.

Next on my list of things to accomplish is a more realistic movement of material. Currently, the tool picks up material along the path of movement, but without limits–a shovel with infinite capacity. I have placeholders for capacity and some reasonable ideas of how to handle it–perhaps tomorrow.

Day T-44 Accomplishments (Friday, February 26, 2010)

• Finished tool rotation code, it now correctly stays perpendicular to direction of motion

I didn’t spend a lot of time evaluating things at the mid-point — my natural tendency is to over analyze, so I’m going to give it a quick check:

• Progress is not as fast as I had hoped, but I *am* making progress
• I over-estimated my available time, but I have not been that far off the mark overall–I just need to be disciplined with the time I have
• I do not know if I will have my app in the store before 360iDev, but I’m not discouraged–it will be done when it’s done
• I over-reached a bit early on, but I think I’m doing a reasonable job of keeping over-analysis and feature-creep at bay

My project is a game that involves digging motions where you push material around with touches. Today I modified my tool handling to start taking into account the direction of the movement. I added code for rotations as well as decent unit tests, but still have some odd behavior with the gestures–fixing that behavior will have to wait until Friday.

Day T-45 Accomplishments (Thursday, February 25, 2010)

• Added tool rotation code to gesture handling

Last Thursday was the last time I worked on my project–I was sure I had control of my schedule and that I would be able to spend most of Friday working on it as well. But, on Friday, my schedule took control of me instead and I only escaped this morning. My main consulting project consumed most of that time, but we pushed the latest release out to QA this morning, and I believe the next few days will be a great opportunity to get some quality time in on my iPhone project.

I left my project in a broken state the last time I worked it, including a stupid, but insidious bug that would have taken the entire evening to track down if I didn’t have a decent set of unit tests for that particular class. Fortunately, after about 20 minutes of remembering where I was, the failing tests pointed me to a small block of code and led to a fairly quick fix.

I once again believe I will be able to spend most of tomorrow on this project (hope springs eternal!). But, even if I can’t, at least I am leaving my project in a working state.

Day T-46 Accomplishments (Wednesday, February 24, 2010)

• Finished an input gesture refactoring that left my project in a broken state last session
• Reclaimed control of my schedule (at least temporarily)

Wow. So much for keeping on a regular iPhone development schedule. For each of the days from Friday through Tuesday, I could find clear reasons why I could not spend time on my iPhone project, I just wish it weren’t so.

It doesn’t seem like I completely skipped 5 days, but Wednesday evening I will finally be able to get back on the development wagon, though it is likely to take an hour to remember where I was.

Day T-51 through T-47 Accomplishments (Friday, February 19 through Tuesday, February 23, 2010)

• None, not even a passing thought

I spent most of this evening adding some new classes to add some new behavior and a few to replace some C pointer arrays and structs. I’m not against using C structs, etc, but in this case they were getting in the way of getting work done. I don’t believe the changes will introduce much of a performance hit, and they will be much easier to work with now.

I updated my input gesture handling and display to be a little more fitting for the game play, still more to do — always more to do 🙂 Hopefully I will be able to spend several hours on this project on Friday to keep up the momentum I feel.

Day T-52 Accomplishments (Thursday, February 18, 2010)

• Added slightly better input gesture handling and display
• Replaced some older style code to ease development

No Xcode work Wednesday, but I should have extra time on Thursday.

Day T-53 Accomplishments (Wednesday, February 17, 2010)

• Zippo