Angry Birds in 30 Mins or Less

As posted here on Ansca Mobile's blog:

• http://blog.anscamobile.com/2012/01/from-zero-to-angry-birds-in-30-minutes/

Here is how to code an Angry Birds style game basis in less than 30 minutes using the awesome Corona SDK...

Part Two

Interesting And Social API In Corona SDK

Here is a list of blog posts documenting how to use the most interesting and useful parts of the Corona SDK API by Ansca Mobile...

Many of these can be found on this root page: http://blog.anscamobile.com/category/tutorials/

Firstly, the social API's:

• Facebook Single Sign On
  http://blog.anscamobile.com/2012/01/implementing-facebook-single-sign-on/
• Native email and SMS
  http://blog.anscamobile.com/2012/01/composing-email-and-sms-in-corona/
• App URL schemes
  http://blog.anscamobile.com/2011/12/using-app-url-schemes-in-ios/
• Push notifications
  http://blog.anscamobile.com/2011/12/push-notifications-for-ios-in-corona-sdk/
• Local notifications
  http://blog.anscamobile.com/2011/09/local-notifications-now-in-daily-builds/
• Uploading photos to facebook
  http://blog.anscamobile.com/2011/12/uploading-photos-to-facebook-in-corona/
• Kindle Fire apps
  http://blog.anscamobile.com/2011/11/building-and-publishing-kindle-fire-apps/

And second, the deeper API's:

• Storyboard API
  http://blog.anscamobile.com/2011/11/introducing-the-storyboard-api/
  http://blog.anscamobile.com/2011/11/common-storyboard-api-questions/
• JSON
  http://blog.anscamobile.com/2011/08/tutorial-exploring-json-usage-in-corona/
• Custom fonts
  http://blog.anscamobile.com/2011/07/custom-fonts-corona/
• Web popups
  http://blog.anscamobile.com/2011/08/getting-creative-with-web-popups/
• XML files
  http://blog.anscamobile.com/2011/07/how-to-use-xml-files-in-corona/
• Content scaling and Dynamic image resolution
  http://blog.anscamobile.com/2010/11/content-scaling-made-easy/
  http://blog.anscamobile.com/2011/01/dynamic-image-resolution-made-easy/
• Closures
  http://blog.anscamobile.com/2011/02/using-closures-in-lua-to-avoid-global-variables-for-callbacks/

Project Management

The Never Ending...

Appleish

Wisdom

Calculating Trajectories

When plotting the course of a (lets say) ball thrown in a simulated physics environment it is advantageous to be able to draw the course the ball will follow. Doing some "internet research" brought up this little gem of a site:

• http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/traj.html

From which I was able (yes, it's cheating, but hey) to refactor the javascript and produce the code for a Corona implementation here:

• http://developer.anscamobile.com/code/calculating-trajectory

The root of the above site is quite amazing and hopefully can teach everyone (certainly me) about all manner of interesting physics concepts and maths:

• http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html

Some, Er, Projects...

Some Projects...

Hey, I Know That Feeling

Getting Some Perspective

iOS 5 Accessibility Features For Everyone

Playing around under the Settings->General->Accessibility section and found some absolute gems - nice and useful for everyone...

• General
• Accessibility
• Vision
• Zoom
  Allows 3-finger zoom and pan of any screen, including the lock screen. Controls work as expected.
  Good for when photo zoom doesn't quite do it for you or you need to check pixel-specific placement on a web page.
• Speak Selection
  Separate from VoiceOver, this allows any selectable text - web pages and such - to be spoken. The usual popup menu gains a "Speak/Pause" item. Speech speed can also be adjusted.
  Good for when you just can't be bothered to read the page.
• Hearing
• Custom Vibrations
  When editing a contact this adds a 'Vibration' option immediately beneath the 'Ringtone' option. Vibrations come with 5 pre-set patterns and custom patterns can be very easily recorded, named and re-used.
  Good for when you need to know who is calling you without taking the phone out your pocket.
• LED Flash for Alerts
  Simply flashes the camera flash LED when an alert, like an incoming call, occurs.
  Good for truly silent but noticeable alerts.
• Physical & Motor
• Triple-click Home
  Set this to 'Ask' and it will pop up a menu whenever the Home button is triple-pressed - even when locked.
  Good for easy access to some of the above options.
  From there you've got options to turn On/Off the:
• VoiceOver
  Not the same as 'Speak Select' - reads anything tapped with a single tap.
• Zoom
  See above.
• White on Black
  Inverts the whole screen colour.

It's Just Bad, OK?

Doing iOS in CSS3 and HTML5 - iPad Popover Menu

This is really great... Peter Viszt has created an iPad popover menu in CSS, using the design by Morgan Knutson as a basis. It looks really good and he links to a customisability tool:

• CSS Popover: https://forrst.com/posts/CSS3_iPad_style_popover_menu-PJv
• CSS tool: http://jsfiddle.net/XYubE/
• Original designs: http://dribbble.com/shots/289926-Free-download-of-my-iOS-style-popover

Corona Roadmap Poll

Most wanted feature or improvement

• In-App Purchase support for Android
• Improvements to Physics API (friendlier collisions, etc.)
• Improved transitions: pause/resume methods
• Improvements to Sprite API
• MapView support (Android)
• Improved WebPopup behavior
• OAuth support
• Exposed table of active timers
• Integrated advertising
• System capabilities API
• Payment integration Android (Paypal,etc)
• Analytics
• Split Features. Don't wait to have feature parity on both Android/iOS. We can live with wichever is
• Add "2.5d" image transforms
• Improvements to image saving API
• Physics: simplified collision detection for "non-physical" cases
• Improvements to Corona debugger
• Support for compressed textures
• Improved line drawing API
• Support for Android softkeys
• OpenGL shader support
• iTunes library support
• On-device debugging
• Misc. improvements to core API usability
• Page Flip
• Improved Text Fields
• New Corona UI Features
• Curve Fitting
• Object Fill
• Bezier Manupulation
• Procedural Graphics
• Fluid Dynamics
• Reconstruction of Arbitrary Topology using NURBS
• LOD Rendering for terrains
• Bon Jour
• Device IP
• BT Stack
• Timer pause/resume
• Apple Push Notification
• Local Notification
• OpenFeint for Android
• Tinting
• Access to bitmap data
• Contact List (Address book)
• Email attachments
• Better XML parser
• Give Carlos a raise
• Live Wallpaper for Android
• Camera objects overlay (video, camera)
• Better Text Metrics

Created on Oct 19, 2011

View Results

T-SQL Tree Into XML

My previous post contained a link to a Microsoft article detailing how to get well structured XML directly from T-SQL. This post is about getting a tree of data from T-SQL into XML. FOR XML EXPLICIT cannot be used (without major headaches) but a simple recursive function and a SELECT can be used. Here's where I poached my solution from:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2409228/generate-structured-xml-document-from-hierarchical-table-data-t-sql/2425180#2425180

In short, my code is something like this (generic code for a wider audience):

CREATE function [dbo].[SelectCategoryChild](@categoryid as int)
returns xml
begin
    return (
        select
            categoryid as "@id",
            parentcategoryid as "@parentcategoryid",
            title as "@title",
            dbo.SelectCategoryChild(categoryid)
        from category
        where parentcategoryid = @categoryid
        for xml path('category'), type
    )
end
GO
SELECT
    categoryid AS "@categoryid",
    '' AS "@parentcategoryid",
    title as "@title",
    dbo.SelectCategoryChild(categoryid)
FROM category
WHERE parentcategoryid is null and siteid = 1
FOR XML PATH ('category'), root('categories')

The code above works for a single table created from the statement (references and indices omitted for clarity):

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Category](
[CategoryID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
[ParentCategoryID] [int] NULL,
[Title] [varchar](150)
)

CategoryID is the primary key,

ParentCategoryID references the CategoryID and provides theone-to-many tree structure, a NULL value indicates the node is a root node (top-level) in the tree,

Title is simply some data (in this case the name) of the node.

T-SQL FOR XML EXPLICIT

An excellent example of producing well formatted and structured XML direct from SQL where a non-tree structure is in use. I have used this to get a complex series of document information out in a specific format.

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189068.aspx

More Often Than You Think

IT Vs. Productivity