Using the Tutorials

After going through the tutorials listed in the previous article (Android Development's 2D Tutorial Series, Robert Green's Getting Started in Android Game Development, and Programmer XR's Android tutorial: How to make a basic game loop and FPS counter) there were a few things that I noticed/liked about/learned from them.

Surface View and Thread

First thing I noticed is that you'll use the SurfaceView Class as your main drawing pad. This basically just gives you access to the canvas that you'll end up drawing your game on. It also provides you with an method, onTouchEvent(MotionEvent), that lets you know when a touch event has occurred on the screen and passes you what that MotionEvent is. This method will be very useful later on when we try to interact with the game. The other part of this equation is the Thread. While the SurfaceView handles the place to draw and letting you know when it can be drawn on and interacted with, the thread handles all the logic of the game. This logic would include where to draw the images, the physics applied to the images, how the input is handled, sound effects, etc... pretty much everything else. For a complete tutorial on how to set up the SurfaceView and Thread, check out the second part of Android Development's 2D Tutorial Series.

The Game Loop

Where Android Game Development Begins

A little background, I'm a C# developer (mostly web now), have dabbled in game development pretty much all my life but never really gone anywhere with it, and the last time I really used Java was when I took a class on it in college a few too many years ago. What this means to you as the reader is that since Android development is done mainly with Java, there is a high likelyhood that I will make mistakes or not be aware of some methods available... feel free to email me at onmydevice@gmail.com and let me know.

The Development Environment

For the development environment I chose Eclipse which can be found at http://www.eclipse.org. The reasons I chose this were a) I used it in college during my Java class b) It feels a lot like Visual Studio, but not quite as good in my opinion c) It's free and easy to install. Once installed I ended up setting it to run as administrator and things seemed to go a lot smoother with it.

Starting Android Development

Social Network Sharing Expanded Using Delicious, Reddit, and Digg

This article is a follow-up to Social Networking: Letting People Share Your Articles on Facebook and Twitter. I would recommend reading it first as it sets up a lot of the ideas used in this article and also gives you quick Facebook and Twitter sharing. As said in the previous article, the best way to grow your website is to allow your current audience to advertise for you. This article will help set you up with Delicious, Reddit, and Digg.

Also, as mentioned in the previous article, if you are just looking for a quick method of sharing and don't really care how it is done, I recommend using a tool like ShareThis. However if you would like to see how this accomplished please keep reading.

Sharing Tasty Links With Delicious

I saw this article on Slashdot that sounded interesting about Jarlsbeg from Google. Basically Jarlsberg, like the cheese, is a holey web application whose purpose to to show you how to exploit websites in the hopes that your future web development projects will not contain them. Jarlsberg works with both black-box hacking (source code unknown) and white-box hacking (source code available) to show you some of the techniques that will be used against you and to try and get you thinking more like a hacker when designing your websites. As you probably guessed, the source code is available to you so you can look at the deep innerworkings of it. It is written in Python so having some familiarity with that language would be a help.

Joining the Amazon.com Affiliate Program

You've probably seen the links on other people's websites that when clicked take you to the specific product on Amazon.com and should you buy, the sender gets a little kickback. Whether in a special advertising space or mixed right in to a message, this is very effective way to recommend products to your readers. I'm going to guess, like me, that you went to Amazon.com and couldn't find the link to their Affiliate Program very easily, if at all. You probably went down to their "Make Money with Us" section and became very confused by all the options, none of which appear to be the affiliate program. By now you were probably thinking that the Amazon Affiliate Program is some secret, invite only organization. Of course you probably decided to give it one more shot and check with Google and that's how you probably ended up here.

So what exactly is the Amazon.com Affiliate Program? It's Amazon's way of allowing you to advertise products for them. Fortunately they're willing to pay you around 4% for each product sold through links on your site. It also makes available special tools while you're searching Amazon.com to make linking a lot easier as well as tracking your earnings. So let's get started...

A Third of the Way Review

For quite a while now, I have been trying to find a relatively good book for learning the basics of how to program for the iPhone. I started out by trying iPhone SDK Programming: Developing Mobile Applications for Apple iPhone and iPod touch by Maher Ali which started off with a lot of promise, but unfortunately really took a difficult to understand turn shortly after the excellent Objective C primer. This left me somewhat disheartened but I vowed to try again with a different book. So a few months later I bought a copy of Sams Teach Yourself iPhone Application Development in 24 Hours by John Ray and Sean Johnson and 8 hours in am quite amazed at the presentation.

A Quick Update

Sorry for the lack of updates, but I have been rigorously working on the content management portion of the site. Sadly, even though I swore to myself that I would not make another post until it is done, I underestimated how much time it would take as well as the time I had available.

So with that out of the way, I finally found a book worth looking into for iPhone development and will be posting a an 8 hour in review.

Hopefully I will get the needed content management portions done in the near future as right now it is quite a pain to make new posts, but eventually the setup I'm using will pay off.

Social Network Sharing Using Facebook and Twitter

The goal of most websites is to be seen by as many people as possible... this is also how most websites make $money$ One of the simplest things you can do to promote your site is to allow other people to do the promoting for you using two of the biggest social networking sites, Facebook and Twitter.

There are easier methods of creating these sharing buttons that could have kept me from reinventing the wheel like ShareThis, but since the point of this site is to learn how to do things myself, reinventing the wheel is how it shall be.

Security Because Bad Things Happen...

As many of you know, security is a major concern for websites. Without security bad people have a tendency to do things like take over your site, steal your data, and infect your site with virii. The first site I worked on, Kit's Closet, wasn't too bad because there wasn't really any input allowed leaving the url parameters as an option. Of course that site also ran completely off of text and xml data files to generate the content and didn't really contain any personal data.

So now comes the new site and I decided to use MySQL to store the data. Of course this means that there is a connection string that needs to be handled so the site can be connected to the database. Originally this was going to be stored in the code where it would be compiled into the DLL. Then I read that this wasn't the best idea, though they may have been referring to ASP as opposed to ASP.NET. The recommended solution was to place the connection string in the web.config file. Supposedly this file can never be served by itself, however just in case something like that were to happen they also recommended encrypting the connection string as well.

Encryption: The First Attempt

The first site I ran into on encryption Encrypt Connection Strings AppSettings and Web.Config in ASP.NET 2.0 - Security Best Practices which contains a lot of useful information. Especially interesting was the mention of how .NET 2.0 made encrypting connection strings exceptionally easier.
Continue Reading...

About Myself

Before I get in to what this site is about and what all I have planned here, let's go over a little bit about myself. I am currently a web designer where I work and have recently come to the realization that it is time to update the good old skill set (where this site comes in). I mostly deal with ASP.NET using C# with a little bit of JavaScript and JQuery thrown in for fun on a Microsoft SQL database. Currently I do get to hone my skills a little bit on my sister's site, but it doesn't quite give me the freedom that my own site would give me as there are many people expecting a comic each week.

Now you may be asking yourself why this site looks so crappy and I'm willing to tell you... a) I'm not graphically inclined and b) I'm still in the process of developing features.

Goals For This Site

First and foremost, this is my little playground on the web where I can experiment without worrying too much about breaking things. This is also the place where I'll put up pretty much whatever I feel like whether it's an explaination about what I'm doing, something funny, or a rant about something else... Anything is fair game