Ignacio Sánchez Ginés

The 2011 Open Source Awards was launched on the 1st week of August by Packt, inviting people to visit www.PacktPub.com and submit nominations for their favorite Open Source project. Now in its sixth year, the Awards continue in its aim of encouraging, supporting, recognizing and rewarding all Open Source projects.

The 2010 Open Source Award Winners included the Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award winner CMS Made Simple, Open Source JavaScript Libraries Award winner jQuery and Pimcore the winner of the Most Promising Open Source Project Award.

The 2011 Awards will feature a prize fund of $24,000 with several new categories introduced and the vote of the public becoming more influential.

Packt has opened up nominations for people to submit their favorite Open Source projects for each category at www.PacktPub.com/open-source-awards-home. The top five in each category will go through to the final, which begins mid-September.

We just finished Puzzle Star HD, our latest game at Geardome, and it’s now ready for download from the App Store!

We took the iPhone edition and improved it with high resolution graphics and some new music and sounds.

Now it’s also fully integrated with Game Center, and well… it’s really fun and challenging to play

For only $0.99 / €0.79 / £0.69 it’s a real bargain

So give it a try!

I just finished reading the NetBeans IDE 7 Cookbook by Rhawi Dantas.This book is a collection of recipes addressing common tasks you will face writting applications with Netbeans. These recipes are small, direct and concise tutorials that will show you, step by step, the procedure to achieve those tasks.

There are more than 70 recipes grouped by several topics like GUI, Mobile, Web Applications, Refactoring and so on.

Each recipe has four different sections: an introduction, the how-to of the recipe, a description of how it works, and some text about additional things or procedures you can use to extend the procedure of the addressed task.

You can download a free sample chapter to get an idea of how the recipes are written.

One of the good things of the book is that it is not bound to any language at all. It shows all the main features of Netbeans available for any language and technology, covering how to create the projects and how to use the common tools to all the languages and some others that are language specific.

In the other hand it does not cover all the things you can do with Netbeans (obviously!), but is a good introduction of the main things you will find on the IDE.

I have to say that I am a Netbeans user since 2005 and I am very used to it. With that in mind, I feel this book is not well suited for advanced users or people already familiar with Netbeans.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. The book is indeed for those coders who are making their first steps into this IDE and need a tutorial for quickly getting things up and running.

All in all, this is a very valuable book for beginners or for people that is currently starting up with Netbeans. It will teach you the basics steps to quickly start developing applications with Netbeans.  The concepts and recipes are basic so more advanced users may want to pass.

I decided to open source my two Chip-8 emulators for J2ME and iOS in GitHub.

The code is quick and dirty but fully functional and the emulation part is quite good. All the games I could find for Chip-8 and Super Chip run fine.

In fact, the iOS Chip-8 emulator was published as a paid application on the App Store during more than a year, before Apple kindly told me to remove it from the store due to some infringements of the terms (no emulators please )

So here it’s the repository for the J2ME edition: https://github.com/ignasan/J2ME-Chip-8-Emulator

And this is the iOS port: https://github.com/ignasan/iPhone-Chip-8-Emulator

Thanks to the people at Packt Publishing I’m currently reading the Netbeans IDE 7 Cookbook that was recently released coinciding with the release of Netbeans 7.

It’s looking quite good, and seems to be a nice collection of solutions and a good starting point for Netbeans newcomers.

Once I’ve finished reading it I will be writing a review here so stay tuned.

I came across a new book from Packt Publishing about Netbeans Platform.

In some of my game projects I have the need to write some custom editors, (world editors, material systems, particle editors, AI tweaking…)

Although I am very used to make my game editors in C#, Netbeans Platform could be a very valuable option to write this kind of editors rapidly.

We found a new level editor for Ozone…

Planet Gamedev is a new feed aggregator that collects every relevant game development blog from the web.

If you blog about game development or you know a great blog you can suggest new additions and subscribe to its RSS feed.

http://www.planetgamedev.com

I am very proud that many people are impressed with Ozone!

Touch Arcade has just made a review, wow!

http://toucharcade.com/2010/04/12/ball-roller-ozone-is-a-puff-of-fresh-air

Try it yourself: http://ozone.itunes.geardome.com

After one year of hard coding and long periods without sleep I finished Ozone with my mates at Geardome!

http://ozone.geardome.com

Some curiosities about the game:

- 1 year of development (not full time). Although we based the game in a previous game of us (Hydrium) we started completely from scratch, both art, audio and code.

- Full 3D game engine coded in C++ and fully optimized for portable devices (iPhone, iPad, PSP, Nintendo DS…), easily portable, with cool features, effects, particles, culling, but lacks some things like materials and animation (maybe for the next game).

- 60 FPS on iPad, iPhone 3GS, and iPod touch 2nd gen and above. 30 FPS on old models.

- Fully integrated with Bullet Physics Engine for physics simulation. Bullet runs quite fast indeed! We are definitely using it in future projects.

- 3D sound based in OpenAL.

- Modular design, based in episodes. Ozone currently ships with 5 episodes but it will be easy for us to add more episodes.

- Online MySQL database for storing world wide scores.

- iPad edition is on the way.