Back to work

Hi all. I've spent the time since I last posted this blog doing lots of things that really didn't preclude my continuing to write here. These included but were not limited to:

• Working at Apple, as an intern in iPhone Apps & Frameworks. I'm pretty sure OS 4.0 has some of my code in it. Hooray!
• Developing Brewpot [link opens iTunes], an app for beer enthusiasts.
• Writing an app for my school, screenshots of which I'll post sometime soon. We're hoping to pilot it during the summer semester and release a major update at the beginning of the fall.
• Making and releasing “Draw a Card”—this was kind of a speed-coding thing, and ended up taking maybe ten hours of work over two days.

Meanwhile: Mines news. I've had a couple of people email me asking about an iPad version. That will happen. The process of porting it, though, has broken pretty much everything: rotating the screen results in the UI getting horribly mangled. I'm moving the view setup to a NIB to see if that helps; odds are the problem is a combination of my bad math and misapplied autoresizing masks.

Gameplay-wise, I think I'm going to abandon the Mines 2.0 scrollable board view for the iPad version; the screen's huge, and as the smallest targets you'll ever hit will be finger-size anyway, the ability to view the board “zoomed in” wouldn't be too useful. One of the features I've been thinking about for a while is the ability to adjust the board size; On the iPhone and iPod touch, that'll probably be a “number of screenfuls”—how big the board is, measured in multiples of the screen size—but for easier boards on the iPad, I'd like to just make the grid lower-resolution, so there's simply fewer, bigger squares occupying the same space. More news on that whenever I get around to getting back up to speed with Core Graphics.