Amrits M.A.D Class Progress Blog

Is this the end? (Weekly Report - October 25th)

Something wierd happened and October 19th Weekly Report didn't get uploaded???

Oh it was probably me just being lazy. Busted :( Please don't tell Tim and Chris.

 

Anyway, out with the final words!

In our final week, we worked very hard to finally turn our "demo" style application into a working game, it has been super exciting to say the least.  We went the full mile, adding health bars, bosses, multiple enemy types per level as well as two different movement types (touch/drag to move on level 1 and tap to jump on level 2) - lets not forget the centipedes on plane boss, dinosaur boss and shuriken throwing ninja! We also done HEAPS of user testing throughout this big rush and managed to squeeze some really nice usability fixes into the mix.

I won't bother delving into further detail because the important details we have already detailed to the people who care last night, which leads to our presentation.

We delivering our final presentation on Tuesday 28th October, our final M.A.D final class. Seemed to go down pretty well with minimal "what the hell did you do that for" factor.

 

Conclusion

This really has been an interesting and valuable course, easily the most fun I've had while learning.

The only downside now is that I will have to hand in this iPhone which I have become so attatched to. Can't imagine living without it so seriously considering going for an iPhone 4.. guess it depends on how well I survive going back to my old Windows Mobile 6.5 device :(

Thanks to everyone of the MAD 2010 class, was great working with everyone - especially the awesome Tank Team - @ Maple / James!

Thanks to Tim for the great knowledge and insights.

Thanks to Chris for setting up the course and (eventually) getting the developer certificates for us.

Thanks to Thom for the hardware as well as educating us in the art of blogging.

Thanks to Caroline for the free spell checks.

Thanks to Nitish for the free comedy presentation about robots and Java.

 

Cheers,

Amrit

MAD Tank Team

 

 

Here's our final presentation slide show :

 

We are back in the office! (Weekly Report - 12th October)

We've come out of holiday and ready to start thinking about probably doing some work

This Tuesday we had discussed the work we did(n't) do during the holidays and came out with some objectives for the next week. We also managed to fit in a little basic user testing swap meeting during the class.

 

What did we actually do in the holidays?

• Almost nothing, because we were on holiday!
• Actually before going on holiday we half thought about a new structural idea and half implemented that, then decided it was too much work, we don't need it anyway so we half reversed some of the junk we didn't want anymore but decided there were some good things. The result was that we left it in a pretty unusable state with no notes on what to fix. 
• We did manage to obtain official permission from Brian Wright (also known under the alias of A Big Guitar) to use his music in our iPhone application. You can find out more about him here : http://www.broadjam.com/artists/home.php?artistID=52469. His music is just amazing, he does a lot of nice solo guitar work (as you could guess from the alias) and the general emotions fit in perfectly with the game style that we are going for.

 

Objectives list :

• Do everything

1.     But only for the first two ~ three levels.
2.     This includes giving it a professional presentation
3.     and everything else

 

Basic user testing indications

Ok we had some crashing issues (as described in the what did we do in the holidays section) but we quickly fixed those before the end of class and had the opportunity to participate in the user testing session. Also just quickly fixed the plane movement algorithm on level 1. The plane now rotates (with that cool rotational animation sprite) full time, and the user can move him by tapping anywhere on screen (movement on Y axis only still, he won't just teleport to that location, he will smoothly move to there) or by dragging his finger around the screen and plane will follow (follows instantly now rather than with huge delay as before thanks to new algorithm).

What did we find out from the user testing?

• The Text Label Menu Items were terrible. We were of course pretty accustomed to those because we programmed the thing, but everyone else couldn't click on the menu items properly without a lot of fuss. Thanks to finding this out, we will be changing those hard to tap labels with button/image items which have a greater surface area.
• One of the testers indicated that he wanted a master mute option directly on the gameplay screen, he said this feature is common in all games he has played - I disagree and think it would be a waste of valuable screen real eastate but after he mentioned it, many other people agreed so we will have to find a nice way to fit in one of those.
• No one went into the settings menu but they did test the pause feature in game play. This means we should probably get rid of the settings menu because it won't be used, this way we can also turn the initial display screen (main menu screen) into the level selection screen which will eliminate the extra click users normally had to perform before being able to play. I think it would be safe to migrate the settings options directly into the pause menu now, it can have master volume on/off as well as music volume and game sound volume sliders.

 

Github stinks, we moved on to Google Code

The reason we changed was not out of defiancy, but simply because one worked and the other didn't. We were instructed on what version control is, what Git is and how Github helps maintain a central repository but we were not taught how to actually utilise these tools in a multi-user environment and after many failed attempts with various online tutorials, we just grew contempt for the system. SVN with SCM in Xcode just worked perfectly for us with minimal work so we will continue on with that. Maybe in the future we will re-visit GitHub with the release of Xcode 4, which promises full Git integration.

Please check out our new repository at :

http://code.google.com/p/madtankteam/

If you have SVN installed, you can perform this to get the latest version of our works :

svn checkout http://madtankteam.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ madtankteam-read-only

If you don't have SVN :

Windows : http://www.sliksvn.com/en/download

Mac : http://www.open.collab.net/downloads/community/

??? : http://subversion.apache.org/packages.html

 

Regards,

Amrit

MAD Tank Team

We quit... For two weeks!

We are on a Holiday Hiatus!

Just in case anyone was wondering, yes the MAD Tank Team is on a 2 week break (along with the rest of the 'sane' students/staff of Unitec) while we settle down, relax, and plan about how we will tackle certain problems when we get back to "the office" in a couple weeks time.

Holiday Hiatus time span : Monday 27th September ~ Monday 11th October.

This should not have any adverse effects on our progress as we are still at least taking care of organising things like music usage permissions and trying to source art works in our free time here (that's the main time consuming kind of work) as well as planning, just on paper for once, some structural changes.

 

Regards,
Amrit
Mad Tank Team

Weekly Report - 21st September 2010

GitHub Repository:

I'd like to point it out again, please check the GitHub repository if you want to see more specific information, each commit goes into a lot of detail about all previous changes! Follow us at : http://github.com/AmritP777/MAD-Tank-Team

Project 2 : Amrit/James - new project code name : Not A Tank Game

In last report I detailed that the Cocos2d port has begun, but did not get very far. This week I am happy to announce that the port is completed and performance is pretty good. We are now working on "rapid feature output" in hopes of getting ready for a big usability test in a couple of weeks.

Various improvements/changes:

• Now using CocosDenshion sound library, more specifically, SimpleAudioEngine, to take care of all sounds. Have turned my Sounds class into a singleton which can be accessed from any other class in the game, it's the one central place which deals with all sounds. Loading in a nice MP3 song (but we will soon have to sort out compressing that down) for background music as well as using some cool sounds for laser/machine gun fire, it's all really smooth and exactly how we want it. Initially there was problem with slow-ish level load times because it would initialise the necessary libraries for working with sound, but to get around this I initialise all those things on appdeletate init. Basically it makes application start-up time longer but gets rid of delays on level load which I thought was more important. This start-up difference is actually only about 2 seconds extra than normal.
• Got rid of the old Explosion class along with the lame, cheap looking explosion animations.
• In place of the old Explosion class, now using cocos2d particle effects for explosions which look super awesome! I would upload images, but they really wont' do any justice. It's better if you just check it out in class or compile yourself from git. If you don't know what particle effects are, a guy has made a video detailing a couple of the possible particle effects at : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koWpcRPBeTE
• The Weapon/UserTank/EnemyTank classes no longer hold UIImage's, instead I have changed it so they just hold an NSString referring to the image that should be used for it. Eventually, I will need to change this again as I will get on to using sprite sheets where I can make further changes so that as a enemy tank moves, it's not just translating position across screen but also showing some kind of frame changes to look better.
• Fixed problem where bullets were appearing from center point of tank, they now appear in front of the barrel, therefore look way cooler
• The game loop is scheduled to sync at update speed of the app, which is at 60FPS. Everything runs faster and is generally smoother now
• Have got some (albeit cheap looking) background images in place just by setting up a sprite in background, but hope to eventually create backgrounds with CCLayers and have the backgrounds animated to some extent
• Changed the way the game works a little bit (I will detail this more in a little bit below), the menu system is now like this (the items inside that screen are shown in parenthesis) :
  Launch game -> Presented with Main Menu Scene (Play Now!, Settings), click Play Now! you go to Level Select Scene(Intro, Level1 ~ 10, Back to Main Menu). At the moment only level 1 is being worked on, as a base to get things in place. Once we have that sorted, we will be able to use that sort of as a template for the other levels scenes. Anyway, on this level select menu, we have a nice pop-up that comes up when a user clicks on a menu item for a level which has not been created yet/not yet been unlocked. We could have mixed UIKit here and had a UIAlertView come up easily, but that has frame rate implications mixing OpenGL and UIKit like that, so we just created a new little layer to add on.
• Now reading through some tutorials to learn how to use spritesheets properly, want to start with having nice effects when the player tank is moving up and down, rather than just teleporting he can have nice animations.
• Done some more research about the textureCache (was trying to figure out how to use that from last update) and found out that I don't explicitly have to add all my textures to that textureCache, actually when you create a new sprite , "spriteWithFile", Cocos2d will automatically add that file to the texture cache and whenever you create another sprite, it checks the cache for that file name, if it's there, it returns the texture, if not, it adds the new one to the cache.
• Added in some nice transition effects which occur in between scene changes, there's lots to choose from, and the way we change to other scenes can actually be a lot better but for now it's done the "quick & easy" way.

Game change ideas are finalising!

You might recall we've been trying to think up of a nice game scenario for a while so that we can have a reasonable change in theme to separate our product from Maples one. Basically, the storyline of ours is going to be something along the lines of :

Your virtual character has bumped into a secret treasure chest, he releases this Genie who gives him the choice of having any kind of special power that he wishes to have. The character cannot decide about what is best, so he makes a deal with the Genie to let him try out a few of the things he might want to wish for. The genie will take the player and put him into all sorts of chaotic adventures with special powers of his choice, this will be the basic premise for each of our levels.  - The intro scene will be what explains this storyline and will be available to view at any point in time via the Level Select Menu. We can also add in some basic tutorial describing game controls and so on in this section.

We decided a good number for a total amount of levels would be 10, and some ideas for the levels we have so far (will probably only implement 2 of these for a prototype/demo):

1. Be a transformer-guy who transforms into a plane. In this stage, you are fighting in the Sky, where you shoot big ugly birds and other air planes. You will have Machine-gun as default auto fire weapon and Rockets as stronger weapon available after a cool down period. Nukes are also there, it will call some other planes to bomb all enemies on screen.
   The boss stage (yes, all our levels will have classic boss battles!) will be in space, he will probably be some ridiculous Satellite who bounces back your bullets to you every now and then as well as shoots lasers at you. This will be the easiest stage
2. You turn into a Ninja and try to keep the enemy martial artists from invading your home-town. You will throw acid bottles (sort of like a basic nuke) and shurikens (ninja stars). We might be able to implement something tricky to use the current game engine to have the ninja move on y axis too, with melee attacks, but that is yet to be seen.
   The main nuke would be throw a bunch of ninja stars, affecting all enemies on screen. At the end, you would fight this gigantic Samurai boss who throws ridiculously large swords at you.
3. You become a werewolf and  run around the woods trying to rescue your wolf buddies from this evil dragon boss. You fight little goblin guys and eventually work your way up to the boss. The boss is this big dragon guy who can burn you right up if you're not careful. He has heaps of life and just runs around really quickly and throws fireballs.
4. .... Haven't thought of more ideas yet!

Problems

So as you can see, there are lots of nice things we want to do, but for now we are working on tackling a couple issues which have arisen from this weeks progress:

1. There is a huge memory leak issue, it's got to do with the CCParticleEffects as far as I can tell from the Leaks Performance Tool, but I'm not sure how to go about it from there. According to my knowledge, the property that I used "autoRemoveOnFinish=YES" is supposed to completely cleanup that particle object once it's animation is over but it doesn't seem to work. The memory leak, as severe as it is, strangely enough doesn't effect performance of the game. The memory drops right down to 3MB and then slow to 1MB, going back up to 4~5 and looping again from 3MB. It never goes to 0 and never crashes which is wierd.
2. Also seems to be a bit of a leak from the audio class but it's no where near on the same scale as the one regarding particles
3. Nothing in the Settings screen yet, so when you get there from Main Menu, you can't go back - you have to exit the game fully (click home button then go to multi-tasking dock and close it from there too). Eventually need to get on to putting volume controls and displaying current high score on there as well as providing a means to go back to main menu.
4. Need a whole lot of images for basically every single interface element. Right now just using really cheap 2-minute MS Paint jobs. People see it and think it's just a crappy 1-week game and don't realise the efforts that were put into making it what it is.
5. Need to change enemy out of bounds removal so actually it removes them when they move off the screen rather than when they "poke their nose" off the screen.
6. Try to use midi files for back ground musics as they are really small in file size, plus there are heaps of nice royalty-free ones available. With such small file sizes, we can afford to have a unique separate bg music for each game level.
7. Implement a proper pause method on the game scenes and instead of drawing two separate "back to level select" and "pause" buttons, have a single button which pauses the game and brings up a menu (similar to the one that shows "level locked" on Level Select Screen) with options to resume game, change game options (go to settings screen) or go back to level select. This should also pause background music as well as call pause on sharedDirector to invalidate any current schedules etc.
8. The collision frames are all wrong! Now that the images are bigger while we are testing it, it is way more apparent that the out of bounds frames are quite wrong. Should be a quick fix, for now we consider it a minor bug - barely worthy of documenting but here nonetheless. 
9. Have started to try use a sprite sheet that I made using this software called Zwoptex, it also created a handy plist file for me which I can use directly with cocos2d to load spriteframes from. Unfortunately I was having too many bugs when trying to use it following this tutorial (it was a bit outdated), I'm just hunting around forums now trying to find a solution. So far I heard its probably fact that my version of Zwoptex is newer than what is supported by the cocos2d version I have installed so I will try fix it by upgrading cocos, but that will involve moving into risky beta territory.
10. Visually display cool-down of the extra weapons somehow

Goal for two weeks time

We are getting into our Uni holidays soon, will have other assignments and things to work on too, but hopefully will set aside lots of time to totally rush this project to a good enough state where we can submit it as a demo to the app store. With this, we should be able to have other people download and start testing it, providing us with valuable feedback on usability factors and general game play. Also we will be able to tell if it sparks any sense of addiction or not.

Conclusion

That's it for now, I'm sure we will come up with more interesting things for our next update. Will try to keep up more regular updates, maybe every 2 days rather than twice a week since we seem to have so many changes/improvements all the time.

Regards,

Amrit

Mad Tank Team

Mid-Week Special Report - 17th Sept 2010

GitHub Repository:

I have now set up a GitHub repository which can be accessed via : http://github.com/AmritP777/MAD-Tank-Team .  This TypePad blog has weekly/bi-weekly progress reports, if you would like updates on a more regular basis (up to 3 times every day - WARNING for non-programmers: our GitHub progress notes are almost always in "programming jargon"), please join GitHub and follow us there as well as here. In our GitHub update notes we detail more or less exactly what has been changed since last commit as well as any bugs we may be experiencing at that point in time. I am also attempting to establish a "bugs database" using the Wiki service provided by GitHub (Tank Team Wiki). There I will list from now on, all bugs that I come across and how they were solved. If you see a bug that seems familiar to you and you might be able to provide clues as to how to sort it out, please send me a message!

Project 2 : Amrit/James

I got a chance to test the application on an iPhone 3G (all this time I have been testing on 3GS) and found that the performance was actually pretty bad.

Following this, I have been encouraged to start porting the application from its current state over to Open GL via Cocos2d. It might be a bit difficult, but it will mean that our game will be playable and also have far greater potential. I also understand that with some of the extra audio playback libraries provided, it may also be able to solve our sound problems.

So far from what I've tried, I'm pretty happy with the results, Cocos2d is very good to work with and thankfully so far I have not had to make any changes at all in the GameEngine so all I've had to focus on is adding and removing sprites as well as trying to figure out how to use the texture cache. For now I am not using sprite sheets, but eventually will try to integrate that once I have sourced some proper artwork to use on this project (but I have to decide on a nice new theme first! Tanks are boring, any suggestions?).

A couple of previews of the porting progress :

Port Progress pic 1

Just testing to see what would happen if I randomly generate 1100 bullets and get them to draw, one by one, to the screen. At 32 fps, performance is not that bad! Definitely one good reason to love Open GL!

 

Port Progress pic 2

Slight improvement upon previous one, you can see less memory usage (counter on the bottom right) as well as higher FPS. It's actually normally steady 60 FPS but it dropped somehow when I was taking this screenshot

One funny thing I found out when debugging was that NSLogs have a HUGE impact on performance, at one time I had 3 NSLogs occurring once per gameLoop and this dropped frame rate from 60 to 30 FPS. I was really confused as to what bugs I had added to lead to this drop. It got me for a long time until I added a few more NSLogs where I found out that frame rate dropped more after adding each NSLog call.

- Amrit

Weekly Report - 14th September 2010

Progress Reports - 14th September 2010

Project 1 Status - Maple

Maple has been testing his application on iPhone 3G and found that there were significant performance issues with using Core Animation to deal with the game. Since then, he has re-coded the game to work fully with Open GL ES and now enjoys a smooth 60 FPS.

His goals for next week remain the same as they were for last week, as this week ended up being spent on porting game to Open GL ES rather than adding functionality.

Project 2 Status - Amrit/James

We got to test our application finally on real devices and found that the frame rate was more than playable on 3GS, even after we had made the following changes :

Since then, we added a very simple form of Collision detection (leaves a nice opportunity for improvement later on), proper weapon switching (with different properties on each weapon as well as smoother movement than before), laser beam working a bit more as desired, there is a REALLY cool nuke working now (a big fat plane comes in from bottom right and kills off all enemies on screen as it moves it's way to the top left corner), explosion animations (a simple 4 frame animation that plays at the point where a collision occurred then goes away after short period of time), as well as tested out playing sounds when  a weapon is fired (only implemented for laser beam so far, we are making the sounds ourselves with Garageband effects/Guitar + multi effects pedals).

We had quite a lot of issues with sounds across the different methods we had tried. For now, we have settled on core audio services which seems to have the least lag of the lot, but still the effect is not particularly desirable.

Our goal for following week will be to find a way to get the sounds working better as well as create/record more sounds for more events.

How to get your Apps running on your iPhone

Hey guys, the guide is finally finished and can be either viewed via the Google Reader embed here or downloaded directly from here:  Download MAD_DeveloperCerts (includes all required resource files)

Slideshow embed :

Have fun!

Developer Certificates are here!

Chris has sent over the Developer Certificate files (thanks!) and we can now test our applications on the device. I am proud to report that ours is running much better than we anticipated :)

I will try to re-enact w/e steps I followed to change the project settings as well as install the files from Chris and make a nice little tutorial about it. Expect it in a few hours I guess, for now I'll be busy playing Maples awesome game, it's pretty fun!

Tank Game Group : Weekly Report (September 7th)

Sorry about the delay in posting this up, but it's up now so I hope that makes everyone happy :)

Source codes have been sent to Chris, Caroline, and Tim earlier on, since then we have already made some great changes so keep posted for our next code review next week!

Note about Xcode projects :  If you have problems building our projects (we use iOS SDK 4.0 but it is only included in the latest version of Xcode) , just go to project settings and change the base SDK to whichever version you have, eg: iPhone SDK 3.2.2 and change the simulator from default of iPad to iPhone.

Why are there two projects?

As you will notice, there are two project files. The reason for this is that Maple is such an awesome programmer that me and James (a.k.a Jammer) were left with nothing more to do, we are still getting our heads around many of the concepts which Maple would consider extremely basic - it's so hard to keep up and even though (in my opinion) we are doing some really cool things, we can't help but feel like we are super-amateurs who are very far behind every time we get a glimpse of his code.

Because of this, we decided we will build our own game, but with slight changes of course - we are still deciding those game mechanic changes as we progress, nothing really set in stone yet but we got some really good ideas.

Hopefully this group of three will come out with two different but still interesting products by the end of this course and we will all be better off for it.

Anyways, on to the....

Progress Report(s)

Project 1 Status - Maple

Majority of the game functionality is in place already -

• The game is running on 3 threads currently
• Game save and load working with local property list files
• Game levels are working, with possibility of over 100 levels - enemies health and damage increases over levels
• Not only do the enemies move across the screen nicely, they all fire their own bullets too. There are also multiple types of enemies, though not yet any such "Boss" enemy
• High scores list is functional, though currently only local - in the long term we may add a global scores list so player can compare his score with score of other people around the world but the effort to benefit ratio is not particularly feasible here
• Can navigate between all the views
• Tutorials view is functional, with some tutorials in there
• Options view is functional, with settings actually being applied in game, though not yet volume controls because there is no audio here yet
• Two-finger gesture recogniser is working (if you do any two finger maneover in-game, it will pause the game and bring up a menu where you can choose to quit that game, save current progress, or resume game

Project 1 - What to do for the coming week

It might be a weeks worth of work for  a normal student, but I think Maple might be able to get it all done in a couple hours or so, I have added some extras which would hopefully keep him busy : -

• Get the game running on a real iPhone to identify potential improvement opportunities
• Work on getting the laser beam to look like a laserbeam
• Add sounds for enemies moving across, and all the bullets firing
• If that is all done then start the following "extras" :
• Get collision animations in place (animations for when a bullet hits a tank, a enemy tank crashes into the player tank, when a enemy tank is destroyed, when a player tank is destroyed)
• Implement Boss tanks which spawn in and have the ability to not only shuffle X position but Y position too, they might have the ability to transform into a 3 headed dragon and fire laser beams out of each of their eyes as well as a breath of fire every now and then which burns the terrain a bit

Project 2 - Amrit & Jammer :

Things we have working so far

• Player can move the tank by touching anywhere on the screen, it uses the Y position of the touch to move the tank
• The tank is auto-firing bullets, machine-gun bullets by default. Weapon switching is also working now though we are still working on nicer ways to give different weapons enough difference in property to make it interesting (we don't just want to keep it as simple as a different image, speed and damage)
• Enemies are spawning in but they are all the same basic type of enemies, they also do nothing else besides move along to the other side of the screen - though they do look pretty good. In my opinion, we have handled the way to draw all these objects to the screen in a really nice way, but I guess we really won't find out until we get it all running on the iPhone.
• Pause and unpause work, but it relies on the touch of a button to pause (tap anywhere on screen unpauses) rather than a fancy two finger swipe (we will get there eventually)
• We wasted lots of time arguing over "the most efficient way" to implement collision detection. Now that we look back in it, we should have just implemented our own versions just for the sake of having the functionality - thanks Tim for reminding us "get it working first, optimise it later"

Project 2 - What to do for the coming week

Well we are admittedly not as amazing programmers as Maple, so our work load is significantly lower, but we hope that within a couple of weeks time we can match his efficiency (though probably not his accuracy) :-

• Make a magical method that fires laser beams out of the iPhones camera lens
• Test the game so far on an actual device to make the game works as intended, if not, panic!
• Implement collision detection - for now, any method will do, we can decide on an "efficient" way later
• Implement significant changes to the way different types of weapons bullet's are fired to make it more interesting
• Get the laser beam looking like a real laser beam (a really awesome one!) and try to make it look cooler than Maples one
• If not implement, at least try to decide on a nice scoring algorithm
• If we get all of those done, here is some "extra for experts" ; -
• Make an important decision about what to do with the enemies and possibly implement it, but it really depends on where we want to take the objective of the game. Should our enemies fire bullets? Or should it be more like they just run through in tricky ways (possibly trying to avoid our line of fire) and try to make their way past our tank, into the city to try and steal our collection of computer games and heavy metal music?
• Try to research on the "proper" way to use sound channels with iOS and start planning what sounds we will have, where we will have them, when they will start and stop.

Goals for the entire team for the coming week:

• Get ourselves sorted with SVN
• Keep bugging all parties involved in order to obtain our developer certificates

Regards,

Amrit

The Tank Game Team

EDIT (11:57pm, 07/09/10) : The images are up, they are a bit half-*_*sed but they're up, you can view them at ; -

Maples Magical Tank Game Photo Galleria : http://amritp777.typepad.com/photos/tank_game_project_maple_e/index.html

Amrit/Jammer Unrealistic Tankgame 9000 Sneak Preview : http://amritp777.typepad.com/photos/tank_game_project_amrit_j/index.html

Developer Certificates! Vox closing down!

Just a friendly reminder to all parties concerned in organising our Developer Certificates/Keys:

I've heard that they will be ready "after the weekend", "tomorrow', and "next week" but heading on to the 8th week of the ~13 week programming course, we have passed 8 weekends and 56 tomorrows!

Is there anything we (the students) can do to help speed up the process?
If there is heavy data entry or the likes involved, I'm happy to help out and I'm sure other members are eager too, so we can all get started on the real fun stuff.

A few of us are really keen to start crash-testing and kicking our prototypes through loops on real devices. Our group has a couple of prototypes, at least one of of which we can no longer rely on the simulator to test important functionality/scope performance.

We would appreciate any news on this.

On a side note : Vox is closing down - http://closing.vox.com/ , new account creation already disabled and from September 15th we will no longer be able to make new posts. Who knows why and who really cares?

Seems they are allowing for a smooth exit off Vox by enabling an export feature to recommended service, TypePad. TypePad is normally a paid service but if you sign-up as part of the transition, you will get access to a "basic" account. Not sure on exact limitations, as usual, I'm too lazy to check.

@Thom, where shall we head from here? Over to TypePad, Facebook, or create our own free PHPBB3 Forum for the class?

Well folks, that's it! There goes the last topic for today, possibly last topic for this little blog (from great writers such as myself anyway, I'm sure there will be some more spam to come from all sorts of amateurs before the September 15th closure)  - Cheers all!