Mr. .NET

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.

Last night I was preparing my laptop to go to the office this morning and needed to copy a file off my windows PC desktop to my Mac.  Nothing unusual there, just connect to the share and copy the file.

This morning I noticed an additional file sitting on my desktop: .DS_Store and it reminded me that I’ve been meaning to look for a way to turn off this behavior on my Mac.  I’m sure I’ve left quite a few .DS_Store files on the network file share at the office

A quick google turned up this article that describes the commands used to disable that behavior.

To prevent the creation of these files, open the Terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

It may be necessary to log out and back in, or even to restart the computer (which is what the article states), for the change to take effect.

I’m sure the guys at work will appreciate me doing this.

Ugh, after spending about a week booted solely into Windows XP it was rather aggravating to come back to OS X.  Why?  The mouse acceleration curve used by OS X is broken.

Fortunately there is a remedy, MouseFix alters the curve making it much more familiar than the OS X scheme.  It’ll probably take me some time to find the right set of values to use but this should save me some frustration.

Thanks to a handy wiki article, the mono project, and Cocoa# I have written my first app for OSX. Its the prerequisite Hello World application of course.

I don’t know if I’ll do anything serious with this knowledge, I’m still much more efficient writing against Windows Forms; but maybe I can glean some ideas off from the Mac way of doing things.

On Saturday I got a MacBook Pro.  Since then I’ve been getting used to the way it works and setting up various apps that I use.  Primarily Adium for IM and VMWare Fusion for running Windows (writing code).  I’ve already switched all of my email to gMail and I don’t use a built-in calendar much; though I am trying out iCal.  I’m also digging the Spaces feature in Leopard, I used the heck out of the same feature when I was in college and ran unix.  I also had a similar app for Windows but over time I stopped using it.

The way the dock integrates with Spaces is amazing though; I have IM in one screen, iTunes in another, VMWare in yet another, and everything else on one.  When an app is running I can just click its icon in the dock and go to the appropriate space immediately.  I can also set it up so that certain apps always occupy a particular space.

The thing I’ve been impressed with the most so far has actually been VMWare.  Its Unity feature lets apps from Windows look as if they are part of the OS X environment.  So I can have Windows Explorer sitting on top of a Finder window just as if it were another dialog.  Once I figure out how, I’ll get a screenshot posted to show what I mean.  Eventually I’ll also get this laptop set up for compiling Mono and see how some of the other IDEs compare for writing code.

I’m still missing a few things though.  I’m used to having at the very minimum MSPaint that I could paste a screenshot into and then crop and do minor edits to add call outs.  I’ve been using Paint .NET to fulfill this need for a while.   I’m also at a complete loss when it comes to shortcut keys.  I’m starting to retrain myself to use Command-C, V, X but when it comes to text cursor movement I still struggle much more than I should.  Now I know how new computer users feel when presented with the Ctrl, Alt, Windows, and Context Menu keys on a windows keyboard!