OttoJotts REBORN!

Once, a long time ago in a land far, far away, there lived a wanna-be game developer who decided oh-so-frivolously that he would write a game based on a game from his youth. One that he had played with his very erudite mother and worked wonders to both improve his vocabulary and his spelling. He thought that he could write the basic game in a few weeks and then the multiplayer version in a few months and be done by the end of summer. But alas - our wanna-be game developer had a case of the hubris.
He was able to complete the core game mechanics in a week or so and then spent far, far too many days working on getting the user interface to work. For, you see, our developer wasn't "graphically inclined" (read: his artwork suxors). So he spent many a day trying to get some basic things looking good enough to play. And then - amazingly - the single player version was complete! And there was much rejoicing!
As he began to work on the two player version, however, he stumbled and stuttered and fell flat on his face, for his game required a "back-end" (read: database and middleware to talk between the device and the database). And he despaired because again, alack, his database skills were "lackluster" at best and his middleware skills were, perhaps, rated "mediocre". He worked diligently, though, trying to connect all of the pieces. And finally, he got some of the information he wanted to get from the device to the database and back again! And there was more rejoicing!
But then came the actual "two player" work. And there was much gnashing of teeth and grunting of exertion and swearing of curses. And the developer grew weary and tired and despaired of ever completing his opus. He feared that perhaps he would always just be a "wanna-be" game developer.
And then the Great Fruit From Which A Bite Has Been Taken decided that the manner in which he getting information from and to the database was Wrong^TM. And it was deprecated (read: removed). And the developer was despondent. Not only would he have to actually finish the work to allow two player games to work but he would also have to change all of the code that worked to do that work. And he despaired. And exerted. And cursed. And gave up.
One day, he found that his current hosting provider was deprecating the product he had grown to love these past 10 years and would require that he move to one that was far more limited or one that was WAY more complicated. He decided to move his website and his databases and his code to a new provider who offered a product more in line with his old product. And it was good.
Then, while distracted with another as-yet-fruitless pursuit, he decided to open up the old code and see whether it was possible to make the needed changes for the new database host and make sure he followed the rules of the Great Fruit From Which A Bite Has Been Taken. After looking at the code and the middleware he decided that it wouldn't be that bad after all. And he poked and prodded the middleware, making a tweak here and a revision there until - it worked! And there was astonishment!
And our poor, despondent wanna-be game developer is no longer so despondent (although he is much poorer). He had Purpose. He had Intent. He had - a real opportunity to actually get back to finishing the damn thing.
So now, to you, my gentle reader who has so patiently put up with this long and purposeless fable, I make claim to the Twitterverse, the Facebookverse, and general Internetverse that OttoJotts is REBORN! And it WILL. BE. DONE! (By Halloween.) (No seriously, I mean this.) (Stop laughing.) (Dicks.)

Alpha 1 Released!

I went home over lunch (the spousal unit is "not well") and decided to take another stab at the installation. I cleaned everything, rebuilt, and sent it back to her email address. When I unzipped everything and dragged it onto her iTunes it seemed MUCH happier - my icon showed up in her Apps list, which was nice. When I click "Sync" it all installed happily and life was looking much brighter. When I ran it on her iPhone and it actually WORKED, that was great (and it connected to the website to get the word list), life was FAN-FREAKING-TASTIC!
I've packaged everything up and sent it out to my alpha testers who will hopefully be able to install it and test it. And I hope they'll be able to read the help screen. In the interest of just getting the alpha out the door I opted to punt on the scrolling help image. It's a placeholder anyway and I couldn't see continuing to hold up the alpha to make it work when it wasn't going to be in the final project anyway. The existing solution is less-than-optimal, but it's also temporary.
In the meantime, my game is now out in the wild. A momentous day for Otto Von. W00t indeed.

Progress and Pakled-ness

One of the pitfalls of technology is that you kind of get used to things working automagically. You don't have to do anything particularly difficult or, in many cases, that require much thought to do some pretty amazing things. A perfect example of this is my recent experience trying to get my application to install via iTunes 8 on Windows.

When developing an app, you need to create what are called "ad hoc distributions" - builds that are not loaded from the App Store and people just just drop them on iTunes and then magically appear on their iPhone or iPod Touch. There are two things required to make this happen. One is a provisioning file that tells iTunes that your device is allowed to load this program and the other is the program itself (which is a directory containing all of your files). It's a simplistic but effective way of distributing applications.

There are two quirks to this process. The first that I ran across was something I had known but forgotten - Mac ZIP files are different from Windows ZIP files. They have extra files that make uncompressing them normally impossible. You have to actually uncompress them by hand (the curtain begins to reveal the real Wizard of Oz). But that's no big deal - I'll just have to repackage them for Windows distributions. The second is that the provisioning files can't just be "dropped onto iTunes" on Windows. Drag and drop on Windows is a relatively hand-crafted experience and files ending in ".mobileprovisioning" don't make the cut for "drop targets". :) What this means is that you can't drop the provisioning files onto iTunes, you need to add them to the Library manually. (Perhaps you can drop them onto the Library itself, but File | Add to Library worked better for me). And now we can see the short man behind the curtain.

So while I was spooked that Windows and iTunes 8 weren't going to work, they do. Because I'm an idiot sometimes who doesn't try more than a few paths to get something working. Because I've become dependent upon the magic working. And I've become more than a little Pakled sometimes.

Regardless of all of that, I do now have things working from Windows and I can stop messing around with iTunes on my Mac (which was taking for-freaking-ever to add songs to the library). And with alpha only 4 days away, I have LOTS to do - especially since I'm taking the 4th off to go to Elitch's with the family and fireworks with my parents. Cogito ergo sum. And I'm a little scared by that. :)