Ignacio Sánchez Ginés

I have been working for a week in a project for iPhone and iPod Touch.

I ported the Chip-8 Emulator I already did for J2ME enabled cell phones to the Apple handhelds.

Chip-8 is an interpreted programming language used on the COSMAC VIP and Telmac 1800 8-bit microcomputers in the mid-1970s.

I decided to release the emulator completely free, bundled with several public domain games!! Get it from here.

I am proud to announce that Puzzle Star is ready to download on the App Store, available for iPhone and iPod Touch!!

Get it here!!

I just finished a site redesign for www.geardome.com

Now the website is ready for the new games we are going to publish for iPhone and iPod Touch devices.

Feel free to visit it and try all the games!!

Some time ago I was writing about how you can minimize any application to the system tray in Ubuntu.

My main concern was minimizing the Thunderbird window to the system tray so I can have the mail reader running in the background.

Now I have just found a nice extension that do what I need.

FireTray is an extension for Firefox and Thunderbird that let you minimize both applications to the system tray, and still have them running in the background.

I have it running now in Ubuntu and it seems to work very fine!!

I enjoyed the classic “Same” game in the past, that little game where you have to collect pieces of the same color in order to clear the board.

It’s a really addictive game and I thought it could be a good game for trying out the iPhone SDK so… I created Puzzle Star!!!

I have changed some things from the original game. The difficulty increases as you progress in the game and so does your score. When you finish you can send your score to a worldwide scoreboard to compete with players around the world!!

I have already sent it to the Apple Store and it’s now waiting for review.

This waiting is killing me!!

I am a hardcore C++ fan and I really dislike Objective C.

I decided to take a look to the iPhone SDK and see if I can make some OpenGL programming using pure C++.

I found that it’s really easy to mix both languages in the same project. You can even mix Objective C and C++ code in the same file just by adding the “.mm” extension to your files, instead of “.cpp”.

Using the OpenGL ES example bundled in the SDK I made a wrapper in C++ that receives the iPhone events I need, like input and drawing.

I modified the example so it calls to my wrapper in every drawing and input event and then, the wrapper calls to my pure C++ objects.

I can now concentrate my efforts in writing the logic and drawing methods in pure C++ and see the changes in my iPhone