While I was finishing up 5 Card Touch I started casting about for ideas for my next iPhone app. I got plenty of suggestions, but the most popular, and perhaps more convincingly, the app my wife wanted to see most was a slot machine. While I do gamble from time to time, slot machines have never really been my thing, but I went ahead and started planning one. The result was Lucky 7 Slots and the response has been way way beyond my expectations. It's been a week since it was released and has steadily climbed the charts on the App Store reaching, at the time of this writing, #23 overall! I can't describe how happy it has made me that so many people are enjoying my application and you have my sincere thanks. Excuse me, having a bit of a Sally Field moment.

OK

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised at the popularity of Lucky 7 Slots. Slot machines are obviously a huge draw in casinos. When I set about to make my own, I wanted to try and capture a little bit of the excitement and suspense of the classic three reel slot machine. The newer slot machine with twenty payout lines have their followers, but every time I've tried to play one I just have to let the machine tell me if I won. I have no idea how people can track all of those lines quick enough to have any suspense while waiting for that last reel to stop spinning. And sometimes even after I've won I'm not sure how. So, anyway a three reel machine was what I wanted to make, and I assumed might have a broader appeal than some of the newer varients.

In order to make Lucky 7 a faithful recreation of the types of machines you'd find in Vegas, I had to learn a bit more about what makes them tick. The Wizard of Odds came through again with a excellent description of how slot machines work internally. This was a nice reference, but the payout described in that article is a miserable. 87.47%.

I wanted a slot machine that paid close to, but not quite 100%. After all I don't want people playing my game and thinking: "Hey this is easy, I'll just take the rent, head to Vegas and double it!". You'll fare much better on my slot machine than you will in Vegas, but eventually your luck will probably run out. This was possibly the trickiest part of the app. I tried very hard to create a table with a nice balance of small payouts and enough large ones to keep things interesting. I wanted it to pay regularly, but not at the cost of never hitting the big payouts. But I couldn't put in too many big payouts and sacrifice the frequency that the smaller ones would hit. As I was creating the tables I found that a change to the probability on a single symbol on a single reel would ripple through the payout table and upset this balance. Oh, and I also hated seeing a blank on the first reel. It's depressing when you know you've lost before while the last two reels are still spinning. So you're less likely to hit a blank on the first reel than the other two. Long story short it was a pain in the ass :) But I think I hit upon a fair balance. Lucky 7 has a 99.5% return and, on average, every 1 in 4.8 spins will be a winner.

There were a couple of ideas for the game that didn't make the cut. The first was a pull handle on the side of the screen that the user could grab and "pull" to set the reels spinning. I don't think I'm breaking the NDA when I say that the iPhone has a resolution of 480 by 320 pixels. Even less if you subtract the status bar which I really like to keep visible if possible. A handle would consume about 10% of the screen at a minimum running vertically along the side. Did I really want to give up all those pixels for a feature that would probably be used a couple times as a novelty? No, I did not.

The other idea was to use the accelerometer and some sort of gesturing motion to set the reels in motion. The excellent MotionX Poker Dice makes use of the accelerometer to roll dice and it is very good, but the novelty wears off fairly soon and I've found myself wishing for a button (a side note about MotionX if you have it, watch the shadows cast by the dice while tilting the phone about. Excellent touch). So again, a novelty feature. What's more, how do you make sure you don't inadvertently trigger a spin when you didn't intend to. What if I win a big payout and in the excitement, my victory dance triggers another spin? And finally, monitoring the accelerometer uses extra cycles even if the app is just sitting there. I try to pay attention to battery usage in my apps and conserve where possible. As a matter of fact, muting the sound in my apps doesn't just set the volume to a lower level, but bypasses the audio methods altogether. In the end, using the accelerometer to trigger a spin just didn't seem worth it.

So there you have it. Lucky 7 Slots. Once again a huge thank you to everyone that has tried it and if you haven't I hope you will and let me me know what you think.

A little over a month ago I was assigned a project to be developed for the iPhone. This project got a little bogged down waiting on some outside resources, so I decided to spend some time familiarizing myself with iPhone development in general. To me a real app is the best way to familiarize myself with how I might employ certain APIs in a real world situations and one of the first things to pop into my head was video poker. It would lend itself really well to animating images, sliding around cards, flipping them over, credits increasing / decreasing. I got far enough along that it would deal / draw cards, evaluate a hand, update your credit total and such in time for the flight to San Francisco for WWDC. So maybe I also wanted something to do on the flight too.

So like I said, I hadn't planned on really doing anything with my app, but after encouragement from several developer friends at WWDC (thanks so much guys), I decided I'd at least talk to some higher ups at Griffin and see what kind of response I got. They thought it was worth a shot and so I set about making it fit for human consumption and sprinkling in a few additional features while I was at it. The result is 5 Card Touch (side note: the name game we had before settling on 5 Card Touch was great. Names such as iPoker, RedHotPoker, Poker in the… you know. These failed to make the cut), and you can get it at the App Store on iTunes or your iPhone / iPod Touch for a measly $1.99. A bargain! There is a screenshot on the App Store, but it's kind of hard to get a feel for how it plays from a static screenshot and so I leave you with a 30 second video clip which for some reason doesn't have audio. Enjoy.

Apart from the pain your likely to experience during a visit to the dentist's office, there's the guilt for not brushing enough or the right way, or flossing, or drinking / eating too much junk food, or perhaps you could find something else to chew with because you're getting these dirty.

Upon entering my "adult" life I never really felt an urgency to see a dentist for all the reasons I mention above. What's worse, the longer I didn't see a dentist the more ashamed I became not having seen a dentist. I certainly didn't want any dentists to find out.

Well, Wednesday evening one of my nightmares came true. I was eating Taco Bell and as if that wasn't horrific enough, something felt not quite right about half way through my tacos. Initially I thought maybe a bit of taco shell had lodged itself in between my teeth, but it didn't take long to figure out that in fact a portion of one of my teeth had broken off! The jig was up. I was going to have to find a dentist, beg their forgiveness and see if they could fix my tooth.

Since the rest of my family (who do not share my dental anxiety) are between dentists, my wife (bless her) scheduled an appointment for me yesterday with a dentist based purely on proximity with my house. This turned out to be Dr. Jacqueline Butler-Mitchell at Integrity Dental Care. I prepared myself, as best I could, for what I was certain would be news that all my teeth were damaged beyond repair they'd have to go. That's not how things turned out.

Apart from the shock that I've not been to a dentist in something like 20 years, Dr. Butler-Mitchell and her staff were extremely nice to me and did their best to put me at ease after I'd explained my anxieties. They couldn't make the cleaning equipment run without that terrible high pitched scream, but other than that the cleaning process was not entirely uncomfortable. It also turns out that dentistry has made some advances in the last 20 years. Who knew?

Apart from being a bit funkified, it looks like I may only have one cavity. The doc wanted to wait until my cleaning was done to be sure. My broken tooth is going to need a crown and possibly a root canal. I have to wait until next Wednesday for a specialist to run some tests that will determine how close the nerve is to the broken part of the tooth. I'm sure neither of those procedures will be pleasant, but so far I'm feeling much better about my perception of dentistry. Hopefully things go well next Wednesday and I'll be able to schedule regular cleanings, eliminating (or at least easing) two of my fears in one swoop.

It seems to me that that tweet I posted earlier needs more than the 140 characters alloted by Twitter. Also I tend not to remember my dreams, so this is a bit unusual and I wanted to write it down before I forgot. My dreams aren't as lucid as Kat's, but I'll do my best.

Near as I can remember I was riding a forklift while being pursued through some sort of warehouse. Or maybe I wasn't being pursued and just wanted to see how fast I could drive a forklift. In any event, I came to an obstacle that the forklift could not go over and so I climbed over and found myself in something like a break room…

It contained a drafting table and Gus Mueller was at the table writing some code or something. The guys from Rogue Sheep were there and I think Jalkut was rummaging through some cupboards. I dunno, but it quickly became apparent that we were in San Francisco getting ready to go to WWDC. Anyway, I was like "Hey Gus, what's going on?" to which he replied that everyone was waiting for the ride to the Moscone to arrive. Apparently Apple was picking up groups of developers in limousines and several people had already left. Oh? I hadn't heard about this I informed him. Someone else asked if I'd registered on Apple's new DTS site. I informed them that I was just on the ADC site and figured that was good enough but apparently not having registered with DTS was why I didn't know about the limousine rides. It seemed kind of silly to ride a couple blocks to the Moscone center, but I didn't wanted to be left out and so I left to go and see if I could register in time to get my ride.

The registration process was edited from my dream as was the trip from the warehouse break room thingy to a hallway in the hotel or the lobby or something. Anyway after I was registered I started getting messages from the DTS site like "Flying Meat wants to be your friend". This new site was some sort of Facebook / LinkedIn mashup for developers. It was terrifying. And yet I dreamed on…

There were displays in the hotel showing what appeared to be Twitter updates from various conference goers. Mostly these seemed to be updates from people that had arrived (via limousine) at the Moscone center. One tweet, and I couldn't figure out who it was from, said "Calling somemomintn". somemomintn is my wife's unused Twitter name, so naturally I was thinking who the hell is calling my wife!? And where is my limo!?

So what does this all mean (besides that my wife is clearly having an affair with a Twitter user). Near as I can tell Apple must be buying Facebook and I assume Mark Zuckerberg will be using the proceeds to ferry all the developers to the conference via limousine. You read it here first.

Overview: Apple sold lots of stuff in 2007. iPods, iPhones, Leopard, etc. That's good. Keeps me employed and all. Get to the interesting bits.

Time Capsule: A wireless base station with a 500GB or 1TB hard disk for use as a Time Machine backup. It looks like it can be used as a generic drive as well so maybe I can finally consolidate my family iPhoto libraries in one place. $299 for 500GB or $499 for 1TB. I expect I'll continue to procrastinate.

iPhone SDK: Aha! I'm extremely anxious to find out more about how applications with be keyed, deployed, etc. But it looks like I won't be finding out today. the only news regarding the SDK is that it'll be out in February, which isn't really news. Sucks.

iPhone: Updates to maps, webclips, multiple SMS, etc. All availablevia a free update. 3G later this year? Anyone? Bueller? I don't have an iPhone and nothing is mentioned that compels me to buy one... Yet.

iPod Touch: Apple finally adds all the applications from the iPhone that should have been on the iPod Touch to start with. But they're charging $20 for it?! But there is no corresponding increase in the price of a new iPod Touch, which will come with all these new features. Grr.

iTunes Movie Rentals: $3.99 to rent new releases, $2.99 for "library" titles. My first thought is how long is a release new? I don't expect I'll take advantage of this very often, but I can see it for people that travel a lot and would rather avoid the price of hotel movies. An "all you can eat" monthly pricing plan might work better here, especially when I compare the value of this to something like Netflix.

Apple TV (take two): The original Apple TV suffered from requiring a connection to a computer to synchronize or stream content from. Not so with the new version. You can rent titles directly from iTMS (including HD content), you can also watch skateboarding dogs, browse Flickr, download podcasts and more all in a redesigned interface, albeit with the same crappy remote. Well if iPod Touch owners are paying $20 for a few widgets that are essential the same apps that run on the iPhone, I can only imagine what Apple will be charging for this. Oh, I see, it's a free upgrade for old Apple TVs and the new models will see a price cut. We joke in the conference room that the upgrade will be subsidized by iPod Touch owners and their $20 upgrade fee. This would be funnier if I hadn't purchased an iPod Touch for my wife recently.

I have to admit the Apple TV looks far more compelling that the first attempt. I already have lots of boxes hooked to my TV with the Tivo, Wii, HD-DVD player. Until the purchase of a new box eliminates one of the older ones, I'll have to give the Apple TV a miss, but probably the most tempting announcement in the keynote.

MacBook Air: A very thin notebook computer. Apart from thinness, nothing revolutionary. What's worse, it appears that you will be unable to replace the battery or upgrade the memory. Sealed for your protection. The audio and USB connectors connector are recessed in such a way that some of your usb / audio devices may not work without an adapter. No ethernet connector either, but you can buy an adapter to plug into your single USB port for $29. Unless you were using that for your external optical drive that you can buy for another $99. If you buy a MacBook Air, expect to carry around a bag full of crap to make it work in those situations where you have to have a optical drive, or wired ethernet connection, etc. Or, better yet, buy a regular MacBook which is effectively only 0.25 inches thicker, 2 pounds heavier, and includes a firewire port, 2 usb ports, a replaceable battery, DVD drive, faster processor, more memory, and anywhere from $300 to $2000 cheaper.

Randy Newman: The keynote ended with a performance by Randy Newman. And while I wasn't at the keynote, I nevertheless have "You've Got a Friend In Me" running through my head for the rest of the day. Thanks a lot.

So no big surprises in the keynote and that $20 iPod Touch upgrade thing just soured me for the rest of the presentation. I know it's only twenty bucks, but what the crap? Anyway, nothing I'm going to go out and spend any money on right away. I suppose I should probably consider that a good thing.

I'm writing this down as much to reinforce the process that I (sometimes) follow as much as to (hopefully) provide some benefit to others out there. This post kind of assumes you know something about GTD.

I first read David Allen's "Getting Things Done" in the summer of 2006 and found that it was a decent approach to organizing the variety of disparate tasks that come up in day to day life, as well as the things that I'm supposed to be attending to at work. So I set about trying to incorporate some of the principles from that system into my life. This went well for a while and I either was more productive and organized, or I had the feeling that I was anyway, which is almost as good. As time went on I followed the GTD method less and less and as a result chaos began to take root again. The trouble is that once this starts to happen it's easy to become overwhelmed with the mess and continue sweeping stuff under the rug rather than tidy things back up.

Recently I came across Things which is made by Cultured Code and though the screen shots look very nice, it is still at the alpha stage of development so I've no idea how well it works. This did get me thinking again about getting myself organized and staying that way this time. Before I went back to my old system, I looked at some of the other GTD apps such as OmniFocus and iGTD. While these are all fine apps, they just weren't quite flexible enough for me.

When I originally began considering GTD, I realized that I needed an application to organize all the notes, images, pdfs, and whatever else might by relevant to a particular project. Flying Meat's VoodooPad fits the bill perfectly. As it says, "You put your brain in it". Next I needed to come up with an organization structure I could apply to VoodooPad, email, disk drive, del.icio.us, etc.

Reporting bugs, at least when done correctly, isn't just pasting a stack crawl into some report with the description "I think I was checking email or something and this happened". Good bug reports require detailed descriptions, regression testing, and often times, a test case demonstrating the problem. A little bribery may come in handy as well. Doing all this takes time and unlike the folks that fix these bugs, the reporters don't get a dime for their efforts, at least not directly.

So to everyone out there that took the time to provide your feedback to Apple during Leopard's development, thank you so much for your contributions to our beloved little operating system.

No, tonight I write to share with you my experiences with fifth grade math homework. My daughter, who just happens to be in the fifth grade, brought home some math homework last night which I checked, as I'm sometimes called to do. Now I'm pretty good at math, not great, but I think I can handle fifth grade math. That is until I ran across this question:

Your friend Tamyra is buying a good-bye card for the coach. She bought a card and then returned it, got her money back, and bought a card for $1.50 less. She ended up with $.75 change in her pocket. What was the price of the first card?

It took quite some time before I realized that I was not losing my mind and came to the correct conclusion. My wife was a bit more skeptical, and so she called several friends and relations to see if they could solve the problem. None of them could. Can you?

Have you figured it out yet?

There are three possible answers:

A - The question is nonsense.
B - The card shop has a $.75 restocking fee.
C - Somebody screwed Tamyra out of $.75 in change.

Poor Tamyra.

Next comes the happy ending.

My wife was able to talk to my daughter's teacher about the problem and found out that the answer is $2.25 according to the key. She gave my wife a bit of good natured ribbing to go along with it, asking if she was smarter than a fifth grader. That is until she read the question herself. To her credit, she didn't simply give the kids credit for that one if they got it wrong. Well, she did, but she also decided to have a discussion with the class and let them figure out what was wrong with the question and how it needed to be changed so it matched the answer in the key. During the discussion they were able to figure out that the word "less" needed to be removed from the question to make the answer correct.

Today I posted an update to Proxi. This release could almost be called version 2 given the user interface changes, but I'm calling it version 1.5. Here's a list of the changes:

• Changes to make Proxi a better Mac OS citizen such as:
• UI changes which fit better with established conventions especially in Leopard.
• Moved ProxiLib.framework into the application itself.
• Moved ProxiCore.bundle and skype.bundle into the application itself.
• Added Application Monitor trigger.
• Reduced startup time and memory usage.
• Added an alert to the Key Press task when selecting a "Press" style stroke.
• Added icons to trigger and task menus.
• Added "game mode" to PowerMate trigger
• PowerMate trigger icons now indicate type of trigger
• Added editing commands to trigger and task menus
• Added Duplicate function for triggers and tasks
• Skype should no longer ask permission to allow Proxi to work with it on every launch.
• Added ability to set Skype mood in Skype task
• Bubble text color now defaults to black.
• Fixed a problem where unknown components in a blueprint could cause data loss.
• Other minor changes and fixes.

If you've not heard of Proxi, I could describe it, but I've always had trouble summarizing Proxi in a few sentences. Happily Proxi is mentioned in a new book by Rick Ralston called The Designer's Apprentice: Automating Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign in Adobe Creative Suite 3. Rick provides a great description:

Proxi resembles Automator in both interface and function; however, it differs in two important respects: It includes an automated trigger system that Automator lacks, and it's geared to system and application events (while Automator is focused more on file processing). With Proxi, you build a set of tasks (like Automator's workflow) called a Blueprint and assign a trigger to it. Triggers can be time- or event-based and included filters to included or exclude conditions when the trigger fires.

You can grab version 1.5 here.

In a nutshell Apple has me (and Shipley) a little worried. Shipley explains.

Which reminds me. I had one other (crazy?) theory recently regarding the iPhone and relative ease with which it was hacked. In this past Apple hasn't shown much remorse when it comes to "borrowing" ideas developed by third parties and incorporating them into the Mac operating system, no? Everyone remembers Watson, Konfabulator, etc. At least they had the decency to buy CoverFlow. While Apple isn't encouraging iPhone development (unless it's web based), they haven't yet made a concerted effort to put a stop to it. Perhaps Apple is watching closely to see what proves popular so they can incorporate it into the next release of the iPhone / iPod Touch without worry of guilt, compensation, or acknowledgement. Probably far fetched. Not the bit about Apple stealing any good ideas that might come from the iPhone development community. No that's not far fetched at all. But surely this isn't part of some master plan... or is it? [Cue: dramatic chipmunk]

Every now and again, I'll get an email from someone that has seen this picture on flickr and they are looking for more information on how to write their own code or just curious how what's being used to drive the keyboard, etc. In the past I've answered each person individually, but it probably makes more sense to write it up once here where Google, and hence everyone else, can find it.

The software being used in the picture is an experimental plugin for Proxi. It works pretty much like any other message task (Screen Message, Bubble, etc), so you can push information to it using any Proxi trigger. I decided not to include it in the main release because I didn't think it was that good, and because I figured there were only a handful of Mac users with Logitech G15's. Perhaps there are more than I originally suspected?

So Proxi is one way to use the G15 with a Mac, but if that doesn't do it it for you, maybe some code will. I pieced together an application that demonstrates how to write to the display and also how to read the 5 buttons immediately below the display. I'm using this to clear and navigate the display and they are, from left to right, clear display, home, scroll up, scroll down, and end. The demo app mirrors the whatever the tiny NSTextView is showing in the G15 display. The demo seems to work well enough, but it was cobbled together pretty quickly so if there are any problems with it just let me know. Also please let me know if this was helpful to you, maybe I'll put more stuff like this up in the future.

Grab the code here: G15 Demo w/source

Acorn is a new image editor built with one goal in mind - simplicity. Fast, easy, and fluid, Acorn provides the options you'll need without any overhead. Acorn feels right, and won't drain your bank account. Don't let Acorn's size fool you; it's a powerful little guy. Fancy math to keep your pencil strokes from having sharp edges, squeezing all the performance out of your computer's GPU as possible, and simple innovations to make your life easier.

I was going to mention this when in my last post, but thought better of associating a new software release with things bursting into flame. Though Acorn is unlikely to start fires, it is a lightweight, but powerful, image editor for the Mac that's easy on the wallet. If you've been looking for something that fits that description, go check it out.

This is not a happy sight unless their happened to be an unscheduled parade in going through my neighborhood. I saw no Tootsie Rolls.

Actually there were more than just this one. This was one of about five La Vergne fire department vehicles. Later that number grew to include a couple of La Vergne police cars and someone from the water company maybe? Whatever, this was not good. I didn't smell any fire, but I rapidly finished dressing to see what was going on (My apologies to the fireman that saw me wearing only a towel as I was looking out the upstairs window. This probably burned his eyes more than any smoke ever has).

There was no fire in my house and my vicious guard dog lay placidly in the dining room, probably dreaming of driving my car. From my front porch I saw:

I could also see my next door neighbor standing in her driveway looking distraught. All the windows in her house were open along with the front door. A fireman was using an industrial strength fan to drive the smoke from the house. Not good, but the fire was apparently out. After talking to her I discovered there was an accident, a small corner of their living room burned and everyone has frayed nerves, but everyone is also okay, which is the important thing.

For the record after having tried to train myself to use the Dock on the bottom, I've gone back to the side despite the vertigo.