Introducing Windy Garden
or…what I’ve been spending my weekends and early morning hours working on.
If you’ve read many of the early posts on this blog you’d see that I’m an avid gamer, and that I like to write code for various things however the one combination that hasn’t appeared much has been writing my own games. This is mainly due to the fact that I don’t have many ideas that are realistic for me to implement.
Enter Windy Garden, the first game I’ve written since my days on the TI-85. The premise is simple; a bunch of seeds are floating around on the screen and your objective is to plant them by nudging them with a chain reaction of blooms created by tapping on the screen. You need to have good timing and strategic placement though; as the blooms only last for a short period of time.
Inspired by a similar game on Facebook titled Chain Reaction, I felt the concepts in this game were simple enough to implement for my first foray into Objective-C and iPhone programming.
The screenshots below show my current progress on the app, using graphics that were all hand-made so they don’t look the best. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that in the end.
Currently the core part of the game has been implemented, but there are still a few tasks that remain including scoring, game over, etc. And I have a couple tricks up my sleeve yet as well. Look forward to future posts which will discuss how I went about writing the game and what I learned as I went along.
ActiveReports 6 RC Available
Earlier this week the ActiveReports team made a Release Candidate available in the run-up to the final release of ActiveReports 6!
This release brings us closer to the final release of ActiveReports 6, and its coming soon!
ActiveReports 6 Beta, now available!
The ActiveReports team has just released the first public beta for ActiveReports 6!
This new version has many new features in it, with a healthy mix of design-time and run-time enhancements.
My favorite new features are the Flash viewer control, designer snap lines, and RepeatToFill option.
Flash Viewer
The Flash viewer control makes it easy to provide a great looking report viewer on your web page. It replaces the ActiveX control due to the obvious limitations that technology presented users, not to mention the security implications with using ActiveX that kept many people from using it.
Designer Snap Lines
Snap lines make it a cinch to line up the controls in your report. Now table style layouts are easier than ever to create and avoid the issues that overlapping controls can cause when exported to Excel.
Repeat to Fill
Have an Invoice style document that you need to generate, where the report contents fills an area on the page? Repeat to Fill to the rescue! This new property makes it possible to generate green-bar reports that fill the page, even if there isn’t enough data to do it.
Read what Sanjeev had to say about the ActiveReports 6 beta release.
A quick word about some great products
This week has been pretty exciting at GrapeCity. I started the week off by releasing Data Dynamics Analysis, the team is already working on some killer functionality I can’t wait to talk about it in a few months or so.
Next up, ActiveReports for .NET is in the running for the asp.netPRO Reader’s Choice Awards for 2009. Please take a moment to vote for us in the Printing and Reporting category.
GrapeCity and Data Dynamics have also won several awards from ComponentSource.
2008 Bestselling Products Awards
- ActiveReports for .NET—Ranked #2 in Top 5 Products
- ActiveReports COM/ActiveX—Ranked #26 in Top 50 Products
- Data Dynamics Reports—Ranked #100 in Top 100 Products
- I’m especially proud of this, as I’ve been on the Data Dynamics Reports team since March 2006 as an Assistant Product Manager and then as Product Manager. The product had already been in development for several years before I joined; but it’s still great to see something myself and the rest of the team have worked on sell so well.
2008 Bestselling Publisher Awards
- GrapeCity-Data Dynamics—Ranked #4 in Top 5 Publishers
- GrapeCity (Japan)—Ranked #5 in Top 5 Publishers
Lastly, Data Dynamics Analysis and Data Dynamics Reports are on sale for the rest of the month!
Save 33% on Data Dynamics Reports by using coupon code “903955CBD” and save 46% on Data Dynamics Analysis by using coupon code “AE0455CBD” at checkout!
New release of Data Dynamics Analysis
Tonight I’ve released a new build of Data Dynamics Analysis to the world. The team has been working hard on this release since the beginning of the year, and I’m glad that everyone can see what they’ve been up to since then.
The release notes for this build are below.
- 119139 – Samples are now provided in Visual Basic .NET.
- 121656 – Calculated measures are now correctly supported.
- 123784 – The internal data manager has had some updates, this affects local cube files which cannot have sorting and filtering applied to them because they don’t have the required data in them. New local cube files do not have this issue.
- 123793 – When using part-to-whole calculations, the grid now indicates the cells that are considered the “whole”.
- 124878 – It is now possible to export the values of a view to the CSV file format.
- 120917 – Using a dataview with an unbound data source no longer causes a file not found error.
- 121252 – Removing a filter no longer drills up attributes.
- 122730 – All CardLayout settings are now loaded when loading layouts.
- 123785 – Improved performance of relational/unbound data.
- 123935 – A data provider error no longer occurs when dragging and dropping a hierarchy.
- 124489 – Some licensing issues have been corrected.
- 125808 – The maximum value for graphs is now calculated correctly when adding two discrete fields to the row or column shelf.
- 125810 – Part to whole calculations now calculate totals correctly.
- 125865 – The range for a quick filter and manual filter is now correctly displayed.
- 126133 – The page card no longer has a broken slider in Mozilla FireFox 3.0.
- 126186 – The Quick Filter card for a KPI is no longer empty.
We’ve got some big features planned for the future and I can’t wait to share them with you.
I’ve been Kindle’d
In high school, I used to be a voracious reader, going through books fairly frequently. However, once I went to college and after I moved to my own apartment my reading dropped. Lately, I’ve been wanting to get back to reading like I used to. Not only for the enjoyment but because I felt like I was missing something.
Now that I actually have furniture in my apartment I also have a comfy place to read. I almost bought a Kindle in October or November, but held off. Would I really use it enough to justify spending $350? Then in late January several of the people I follow on twitter kept mentioning the announcement/release of an updated Kindle. I bit the bullet then, and placed my preorder for a Kindle hoping I would automatically get upgraded to the new one if it was announced. Two days later it was publicly announced and I received an email confirming that I had been upgraded.
Fast forward to a week ago. My Kindle arrived! I was immediately impressed with the device. You can probably find unboxing photos on various gadget sites. The day before I purchased a few books and they synced to it shortly after I turned the device on.
Coming back to now, I’ve read three books on the Kindle; not counting the user’s guide or the thank you letter from Jeff Bezos. Bad Astronomy by Dr. Phil Plait, Ur by Stephen King, and A Briefer History of Time by Dr. Stephen Hawking and Dr. Leonard Mlodinow. If anyone loves to read, I would definately recommend getting one.
Hotfix for Data Dynamics Reports now available
We have released a hotfix for Data Dynamics Reports. This new build fixes the designer redraw issue that was present in the last build released.
The redraw issue was caused by a partial fix that was put in to correct an issue where borders disappeared on the chart.
New build of Data Dynamics Reports available
Over 4 months in the making, and it shows; I just uploaded a new build of Data Dynamics Reports to the site.
This build introduces many new features and even more fixes for issues that users have reported.
In the next month or two we’ll be debuting an enhanced setup application, a new chart type, and more fixes.
Release notes follow the break: Read the rest of this entry »
Thanks, Tim
I was saddened yesterday to learn that Tim Moffatt passed away after his battle with cancer.
I didn’t meet Tim until after I was hired at Data Dynamics. He was busy dealing with taxes so was unable to sit in on my interview. Which makes it all the more important to me, that he and the other owners of Data Dynamics were willing to take a chance on me; at the time I was working a dead-end IT job and had no real software development experience.
There is so much more to say, but the words don’t flow easily; so I’ll stop and repeat the words I started with today: Thanks, Tim.
Rest in peace
Keith May, Lucas, Raji, and Mike also posted their thoughts.
Data Dynamics Analysis 1.0.464.0 Released
I just uploaded the latest version of Data Dynamics Analysis to the website!
This version has been in the making for quite a while now. It introduces several important features. First is that we’ve done away with the convoluted licensing process for the ASP.NET control! DDA now makes use of the licensing facilities provided in ASP.NET and Visual Studio.
Second, we’ve introduced part-to-whole calculations. With this feature you can see how each member relates to the whole picture, a particular row/column, or row/column group. Perfect for when you’re interested in seeing how the data changes within the table, row/column, or group but don’t really care what the actual values are.
I don’t have the feature pages updated yet because I didn’t want to hold back this release any longer; I’ll get them updated sometime this weekend though.
