Tag Archives: development

Phonegap is not ready yet.

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This may sound like not true, but actually Phonegap(Cordova) is not ready yet for the prime-time. The point is something or the other will always get in your way if you try to do a little more than basic UI.
It’s a pity to see that Phonegap has reached a version number of 3.3, still feels uncomfortable to work with.
While for a basic static page navigation it may be a solution to go for, for mobile, but think twice if the UI is becoming even a little more than basic.

A simple childbrowser (inAppBrowser) is failing in the current version and I found people are finding workarounds or solutions to fix this. So the point is not that its fixable but its not dependable.
Again, from version 3.0.0 on-wards, one need to have an internet connection to start building! Well, its NPM and NodeJS, I know, but its not comfortable at all rather confusing.

The best Phonegap version as I know is 2.8.0. Its the stable of all.
If at all you are trying to develop on Phonegap, stick to this version(2.8.0) until they release a stable version again.

Happy coding.

StartUp : Geek Mentors

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It’s very exciting to see these people at geek mentors doing a nice job porting angrybirds to a local version.
Flash is not always about flashplayer, its much more than that if we really follow the philosophy of Flash community. These guys at this startup began their career in Flash, but as of any cool dude in Flash, they always tried to push the technology and dove into new platforms for the learning and broadening the horizon. They are hungry for technology and fun, both at once.
The momentum is always there for fun and learn new things all the time. The work never seem to be complete but then they never seem to rest ;) that does not mean they are working under pressure, that means simply they keep on working for what they love. Apart from developing games for Apple appstore, there is a quality mentoring option for people who want to learn things the fun way by doing it. The best part is there is no project manager to manage you, come to work and do it by how you want to do.
There is a heavy investment on new technology learnings. When the world was fighting for whether to Html5 or Flash, this new startup solely concentrate on GameSalad. A solid platform for publishing your games to IPhone, iPad and even HTML5. The point is if there is a tool which can produce quality applications, why fight over how many lines of code one need to write in a particular platform!
GameSalad link for Angry Anna : http://www.angryanna.com/
The content below is kind of an interview with the company

Introduction of the team :
Mohd Shah Nawaz : Co-Founder,
Mohd Faisal: Co-Founder,
Himanshu Himthani: Art Director,
Abhishek Chawla: Production Lead.
Ajay Joshi: Educational Advisor
Experience till now : Don’t know what to write…..
Vision : At Geek Mentors Studios, our vision is to be the best company in the world–in the eyes of our customers, shareholders, communities, Employees and people.

Wishing the team all the best.

Mobile device emulator as Chrome Browser extension

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If you are a mobile application developer, then it would have been always a quest to find the devices to test the applications. Apart from that, one need particular environments to develop the application too. Some device applications can be developed and tested in particular Operating system. Then there are HTML5 and JS frameworks and tool kits to develop mobile applications. These frameworks and toolkits allow one to develop applications as web applications. While this option, opens up the opportunity to develop mobile applications in any environment, there is still a lot of work to do, when it comes to test these applications in various mobile devices.
Ripple is an extension to Chrome browser. I think this can not be more easier than this. Once installed, the interface is quite straight forward. Well the process goes like this. If you are in a webpage (any webpage), just right click and say

Emulator > Enable

That will render the webpage in a mobile device, there are choices to configure the devices also. That means, any web application can be tested with a number of device emulators, right in the browser itself. There are options for Device, Platform, Accelerometer along with a lot more.
I think this can not get easier than this.

Lua : some basics

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This is an extension of my last post about Lua. If you have not read that yet, I strongly suggest start from there as a beginner of Lua. On the other hand, if you know the basics of Lua, this post is exactly for you.
Hope you enjoy Lua as I am excited about it. Lets get started.
Commenting in Lua is done by “–” for single line and with “–[[ ]]” for multiline.

-- single line comment
--[[
Multiline comment is
Like this.
]]
print("comments are done, get back to work")

Continue reading →

Lua : getting started

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At very basic Lua syntax is very flexible. Lua can interpret the line ending!! I am serious. For example the code below

local a=6 local b=5 print (a+b)

is exactly same as the code below

local a=6 
local b=5 
print (a+b)

That means we can go ahead writing like the code below too.

local 
a=6 local b
=5 print 
(a+b)

But then comes readability. Its generally better to write code, which we, ourselves can read later too !! So generally one statement per line is a convention.
Now for the declaration of variables, by default any variable declaration is a global variable, unless we define it as a local variable with the ‘local’ keyword as follows.

local a=1
local b='string'

If we remove ‘local’ keyword, the variables are global.
Any variable declaration can contain any kind of values, i mean its not mandatory for a variable to store one kind of values, Lua interpreter can take care of that.
For people who are used to semicolons at the end of the statement, can write that way too and Lua interpreter can take care of that too.

local a=6;
local b=5;
print (a+b);

Writing a for loop in Lua is as below

for i=0,10 do
print (i)
end

Writing a conditional statement is as below

if(a>b) then
print ('a>b')
end

Similarly the if-else would be as below

if(a>b) then
print ('a>b')
end if(a

Finally the way we load different .lua files is through 'require' as follows


require "newFile.lua"



Finally there is a way to start experimenting with Lua without even installing it. This is through the Web Lua project.


With that I think we can get started with this small but powerful language, Lua.

Lua : My experience with it.

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Well, on my journey with mobile development, I picked up Lua for sometime. I am quite impressed with its simplicity and power. If you do not know, Corona SDK provides Lua scripting language to build applications for mobile devices. The popular Angrybirds game utilises the power of Lua.
Basically its a simple language with very minimum number of key words and language syntaxes. Anyone familiar with javascript or actionscript can start jumping into it and be productive from day one. There are variants of the installer for Mac and Windows. Some what I feel Windows installer is the best and has got its own IDE, which is on top of popular SciTE IDE.
There is a complete 2D game engine / framework for Lua named Love. With that one can instantly start creating Lua games. As Lua is simple, so as Love is. But then one gets a whole lot of goodies out of a framework. I would say a must try for any game developer.
There is a nice framework for iPhone, which uses Lua and its called WAX. This also fits Lua’s philosophy as to keep the framework simple and easy. The best part is, once you start coding in WAX, you do not have to think about memory management, which is very important and sometimes most time consuming act, while developing application with ObjectiveC.
Now that I have seen Lua’s power and simplicity, I will try that out more and more and post updates about my experiments. Here are some Lua related links for you to get used to
1. Users, tutorials and more
2. Love : 2D game engine
3. WAX : iOS development framework
4. 2D Engine A 2D game engine (I Have not tried yet)
5. Luxinia 3D game engine (I have not tried yet)
6. Lua Forge Projects, tutorials and more
7. Baja Engine A game engine (I have not tried yet)

With that I think I also have to pick up some engines and start playing with it. Overall, Lua feels just perfect as its simplicity and power. Its portable and lightweight. After all its Opensource and Free.

One size fits all, does not fit.

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I heard this one before, but then kind of ignored. Why?!! For I, as a web and desktop designer and developer when started iphone development it seemed, “ok, fine, lets do the design and go for development” . Iphone and any iOS in that case have a clear guideline of user interactions. So no worries, if I am sticking to those guidelines, I am sure the product will have a nice user experience. Keeping that in mind, I moved on. And then it all went well. Until I started developing for other devices and other OS such as Android.
Developing games on the other hand is not about those default navigations, one has to think of it from the gaming UI perspective. So what I think is while game design can be one design for multiple devices but the size factor does the trick. If a game is designed for 2 different mobile phones (may be different make too of same OS), it does not matter which OS they are running in, as long as the size of the device screen is kind of same, we are good to go. But then if at all there is a difference in the ratio of height and width of a device screen, the design needs some tweak to give the user a same or similar user experience.
Now, if we talk about application design for mobile, then its all together different approach. Apart from the size, one has to take into account, the platform that is running the application. This surprised me, when I was trying to port an application from iphone to android. Well, we can just port it and it will work the same way it works on iphone, but then there are different physical buttons present in Android devices (even Windows mobile phones and other OS phones), which are not present in iOS devices. The point is either we are not utilising the UI of the device or making a bad use case of the UI of the device and in turn our application, if we port one application as is to another device.
So clearly, each device will have a different design, the code base may be same, but design must be different to be useful and give the same user experience through out devices.

Finally updated the internals of this blog

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well, its been a long silence. But better late than never. I have finally updated the base wordpress engine and the plugins to its current available state. I am not saying I will post this update message every time I will update, but this one needs a mention as I have taken log time ignoring this. Partly for ignoring and partly too enthusiastic. But then, i think I am better now to get up and keep going.
I least I am hoping so and wish me luck for the same.

Thank you all for stopping by.