update

I haven’t posted on here in a while so I figured it was time to give a quick update. I am currently working on multiple project at once, outside of my day job at Adobe and my all-the-time job of being a daddy:

1) Stitchopedia for Android. This is a complete rewrite of Stitchopedia in Java. It is still pretty early in the process but I am pretty pleased with it so far. The initial release will only be for Phone devices. Eventually I plan on adding tablet support (read: Kindle fire)

2) 3D game with my buddy. This is pretty exciting as it finally gets me back to what I originally went to school for: 3d animation. Plus I am learning pile of new (to me) technologies: Unity 3D, Blender, C#, etc. We have a pretty epic vision of where this is going but we want to keep the team to just us, so its currently slated as a 2 year development window.

3) Stitchopedia for iOS. I am working on adding support for printing the patterns and definitions from the app. I am not going to support printing images right off the bat, as I feel it may endanger the IP of the image contributors. If theres a swarm of 1 star ratings after the update, I’ll reconsider and possibly ping all of the image contributors to see what they think of it.

4) Jub Jub/Jub Jub Lite. Man, I had great plans for this. Unfortunately, it has been pretty lackluster sales wise. I think it is mainly due to lack of visibility. I need to promote it a bit. Also, I am adding a new game mode, and playing with the idea of making Jub Jub freemium and scrapping Jub Jub Lite.

5) Children’s book for my other buddy. My friend Jason (who did the art for Jub Jub – very talented dude) is making an awesome children’s book for iOS/Android. I am helping him out with the coding.

 

So thats where I’m at. I generally get a few hours a night of dev time so I switch back and forth between these… Having a blast

Jub Jub is seriously messed up on the new iPad

My friend just sent me this image of Jub Jub running on his shiny new iPad. All he said in the message body was ‘doesnt look right’. Bit of an understatement!

Turns out there is an issue with the Corona SDK platform that I wrote Jub Jub in with regards to scaling to the new iPad’s resolution. Thankfully they have quickly released an updated build which fixes the issue. I have compiled Jub Jub against this and submitted it to Apple – hopefully it gets approved soon

Stitchopedia drawing winner!

Since all of the images are done for Stitchopedia, it was time to do the drawing for the $50 knitpicks.com gift card.

I wrote down an entry for every image that everyone has submitted for Stitchopedia, and my daughters drew a name out of the hat.

Congratulations, Theresa Vasalofsky, you’re the winner! Have fun

Stitchopedia 2.1.4 update is live

Stitchopedia 2.1.4 update has just been approved by Apple and will be making its way into the store over the next few hours. This update has the imagery for the rest of the stitch patterns that were missing images. Accordingly, I have raised the price to $1.99 – the initial $.99 price was a (year long) sale until all of the images were added.

Also, this weekend I will be doing the raffle for the $50 gift card to knitpicks.com. My kids will be helping me out

I received lots of fantastic feedback on what the users of Stitchopedia would like to see in the next update. I am currently working on adding in the ability to add your own stitch pattern and example photo. I’m having to shuffle quite a bit of code around in order to work this in, as I had not considered this use case when I was first building this app. I hope to have it done in the next couple of months. Stay tuned!

Jub Jub is afoot!

I just released my newest app, which is a word jumble style game called Jub Jub. For more information, check this out:

http://benrimbey.wordpress.com/jub-jub/

It took me just about a month to make the game from start to finish. I wrote it using the Corona SDK, which was a fantastic experience.

Next up is an update to Stitchopedia, and then I’m going to start on another game. Woohoo!

Stitchopedia 2.1.2 update rejected

Well, I have just had my first official rejection from Apple. Turns out the request for help making images that I have in the app description and the app itself constitutes as a ‘contest’.

The problem with that is that I did not explicitly lay out the rules or liabilities of Apple or myself in the description. Makes sense – I wish I had thought of it when I did it. I went ahead and removed the information from Stitchopedia and re-submitted it as this is pretty much over with -there are 14 images left and they have all been assigned out. I will be doing the drawing for the knitpicks.com card when those images come in to me.

Anyways, I just re-submitted the update to apple. Here’s hoping I have everything right this time

Stitchopedia 2.1.2 submitted to Apple

I just submitted Stitchopedia 2.1.2 to Apple for approval. This update contains imagery for 37 stitch patterns, as well as a couple of new abbreviations and pattern corrections.

In this update I took a slightly different tact in how I seeded out patterns to people to knit samples for. I had a very large number of people emailing asking if they could help. I had more people than stitch patterns, to be honest. So when I had assigned everything out, I went back to the beginning and started re-assigning what had not come back in yet. I ended up doing this a few times.

The up side of this was that I received a lot of images for inclusion; I am happy to say that there are only 15 remaining stitch patterns that need images! However, the downside was that in several instances, I received submissions from multiple people for the same pattern. When this happened, I used the first images that I received for the pattern.

Anybody and everybody who submitted images had tickets for their names thrown into the hat for the $50 Knitpicks card, as well as getting promo codes for the app.

I wanted to briefly touch on this in case someone downloads the app expecting to see their image  in it and walks away disappointed. If you have any questions on this or would like to talk to me about it, please email me at ben.rimbey@gmail.com

I have met a lot of awesome people during this project, and I am continuously amazed at the quality of imagery that comes in from you guys. I owe all of you my sincere gratitude.

Follow up: bad Stitchopedia build

I found the issue… I had the release compiler settings incorrect for this library I just integrated called Three20 (written by Facebook).

I have submitted a new build to apple. Stitcopedia will remain removed from the app store until the new build is approved. Hopefully it’s fairly quick this time (last time was 5 business days).

Bad Stitchopedia build

I just installed the latest build of Stitchopedia on my iPads, and i see this:

I never saw any behavior like this in my debugging. I pulled the app from the app store for the time being and am submitting a new version that backs out the functionality causing the issues.

To anyone who bought this version, or updated to this version, I sincerely apologize. The updated version is going to the app store tonight and I am working on fixing that functionality for a subsequent update.

Thanks for your patience!

Sync multiple photostream accounts to one iPhoto library

This is kind of a random topic but today I set about syncing both my wife’s and my photostream accounts to one iPhoto library.

I tried several approaches but in the end I did this:

On my Mac OS X lion server, I made separate user accounts for both her and I. Each account is tied to our apple ids. On each account, I setup iPhoto to automatically import everything that comes through over photostream to disk. I made sure not to sync stuff to photostream though as that seemed to be making duplicates (kind of an obvious bug, but whatever).

Pretty easy so far. Here’s the tricky bit.

I needed to get those photos into the iPhoto library synced with the apple id that I use for our house media server. So I needed a process of extracting the photos from the user accounts I mentioned above and injecting them into the server iPhoto library. I found a utility called Hazel which could automate this kind of work – it can watch directories for new files and then perform actions on the files. The problem however was that I had no way of marking the files I had just extracted as already imported. I also couldnt remove them. This is because the server account didn’t have permissions to modify the iPhoto directories in the user accounts. I fiddled with this for quite a while modifying permissions here and there with no luck.

What I ended up doing was enabling the root user account, logging into it, and then setting Hazel up there. Works like a charm. The root user account runs with highest permissions, so it can do whatever it wants anywhere in the system. Security wise, kind of a risky thing enabling it but I’m (fairly) confident in my abilities here heh.

So now the root account has a Hazel script that does the following:

Iterates over the iPhoto directories for my wife and I.
If it finds new photos, it copies the files from the iPhoto libraries and places them into the Auto Import directory (inside of the iPhoto library) on the media server user account.
Then it deletes the found photos from my wife’s and my user accounts so that the photos don’t get imported again.

Since my wife’s and my user accounts on the server are only for iPhoto, it doesn’t matter if the photos disappear from there, especially since they are being migrated to the media server account. Also, since it’s just copying stuff from photostream, I don’t run the risk of messing any actual data up.

Now if my wife or I take a picture on our iPhones, it automatically gets injected to the media server iPhoto account, which syncs all over our house. Also, it’s convenient having one library for the family.

If only photostream handled videos…

Anyways, hopefully that helps someone out there. I did some googling before I did all of this and didn’t see anything too helpful.