Goodbye 2011

Well, it sure has been quite busy these past two months! I have finished up two iPhone apps, Ellipsis and Azure Nose. (As of this writing Azure Nose is still waiting for review, the link doesn't work yet) Ellipsis is a bit different than what I usually do. Instead of troubling myself with the annoyances and infexibilty of directly writing OpenGL, I used Cocos2d. Cocos2d is easy to learn (I figured it out in 30 minutes) and allows me to separate game logic from the underlying graphics rendering code.

The screenshot that you saw in the previous post was an early version of Ellipsis. My original goal for the app was around the end of 2011 like right now. Since the app was going so quickly with Cocos2d, I thought I might push the release date forward. That didn't work out since the music for the game was unfinished and various levels in the game needed rework.

Here's another look at Ellipsis (the actual music for the game is not piano):


The best part about Ellipsis is that it's free! If you have an iDevice you can download it today!

The Mona Lisa with a blue nose...

The Mona Lisa unchanged

As I mentioned earlier, I just finished up another app for the App Store. This one is called Azure Nose. It's a prank app. You point the camera (left) at the nose you want to take a picture of and then tap their nose so that it becomes shaded. I don't know how well this one will sell but we'll see.

I personally had some trouble with getting this app to work properly. Due to sandboxing (this is done for security reasons, Android does the same thing) I had great difficultly accessing the Camera Roll (right) where the photos are stored after the app turns them blue. After about two days of yelling screaming and bloodshed (not really) I finally managed to access the camera roll from my app. I created a view controller that could specifically access the camera roll. After I clean up the code somewhat and add some common photo album features (delete, email, MMS, twitter, etc), I might post it onto GitHub so that other people will not have to suffer as I did. Plus, I will have ready-to-go photo album access in the form of an independent view controller for future apps that may involve photos.

Since it's done, I guess I should probably show you how I'm celebrating the submission of Azure Nose:


Such an awesome song. I really like the bird calls.