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My first iPhone app!

March 23, 2010 •

MicroPoints, my first iPhone app! On Sunday, I submitted my first iPhone app to the Apple App Store. 🙂 Named MicroPoints, it’s a pretty small, quick app that lets you convert various world currencies to Microsoft Points and back.
I posted about this on my Twitter a little bit, and am now thinking my actual process for building this thing would make a nice blog post. ^_^

So last year, I decided I was going to learn how to write iPhone apps. I already had a few neato ideas for some apps, but figured I’d better start really small since both Objective-C and Xcode were totally new to me. XD

At about the same time, I remember checking out Major Nelson’s blog for some new release on the Xbox Live Marketplace. When I saw the price of the release in Microsoft Points, and promptly shuddered at trying to convert the price to Aussie bucks, I started thinking, maybe it’d be cool to have an iPhone app that could do that for me. 😀

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Pokémans HeartGold! Gotta buy ’em all!

March 19, 2010 •

I’ve been sitting on this post like a crazed gunman with an itchy trigger finger. XD

The newest addition to the Pokémon  line of games is finally upon us, HeartGold and SoulSilver. It was released in America a few days ago and will be released here in Australia in a few days time. When it came out in Japan last year, one of my Japanese teachers was able to pick me up a copy and bring it back over, of which I’ve been playing ever since. ^_^
At the time, my blog was offline, so I figured I’d hold onto this lovely post until the time of the English version release, where people might find some of this information useful (As opposed to posting it during Japan’s release, where it would be all but forgotten by now). 🙂

My Japanese import copy of HeartGold

When my Japanese teacher was on exchange with some students in Japan, I emailed her and asked if she could pick up a copy of the new HeartGold over there. I chose Gold over Silver since Silver is what I got for the GBC originally, and wanted it to be different than before. She said she checked out a Sofmap on her last day there, and found this copy of HeartGold, which was the last one they had. Suffice it to say when HeartGold/SoulSilver came out, they were selling like hotcakes!

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Randal sent me a Clerks 2 script sheet!

March 10, 2010 •

One of the pages from Jeff Anderson's (Randal) shooting script for Clerks 2.An interesting item arrived in the mail today. It was an A4 envelope addressed to me, sent from a PO box in Los Angeles.
As I opened it, I was wondering what the heck it was… until I noticed the yellow highlighter markings. 🙂

It’s a signed page from one of the copies of the shooting scripts to the movie Clerks 2, specifically, the one that belonged to Jeff Anderson (The character Randal). ^_^

Now while I am overly very thrilled to now own what I’d like to call ‘a piece of film history’, I must remember that the origin of this script page coming to me is quite a sad one indeed. Instead of re-paraphrasing what happened, I’d like to quote the story that Jeff has written:

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Regex Tester, online and now with AJAX!

March 9, 2010 •

Regex-Tester.com - Online version of TiM's Regex TesterWhew. Sorry about that. I was doing some server maintenance in preparation for this new system and I inadvertently broke the backend of my blog. It’s  still a bit hinky here and there, but thankfully we can now return you to your regular program. XD

So, I bought the domain (STILL can’t believe it was still free haha), and then spent a good chunk of the weekend getting it all working. 🙂
As a follow-up to the regex tester script I wrote and released last week, I’ve now created an online version, free for all to use anytime!  ^_^

So, presenting: http://www.regex-tester.com/

If you were wanting to test out the last script but couldn’t set it up locally, you can try it out online now. 🙂

In contrast to the last versions, I modified this one quite a bit:

-Broken up the JavaScript, CSS and PHP into separate files for easier reading/editing.
-Rewrote the JavaScript code using jQuery (Soo much cleaner).
-Added AJAX functionality so the page doesn’t have to refresh each time.
-Added a couple of default regex strings to get you started.

So feel free to use it at your leisure! Depending on my situation, I’ll probably wind up using this one more often than the offline version.
If you do have any suggestions on how to improve it, be sure to check out the UserVoice page as well.

Enjoy!

Well I might let you get back to it then hehe. 🙂
I just saw you online for the first time and thought I

Tokyo Game Show ’10 Announced

March 3, 2010 •

From the TGS 09 Poster. GAMEは、元気ですって聞くと嬉しい。 ;DI was really thrilled to hear this. So much so, I think I might put it on my blog and break into the world of using my blog to comment on current gaming events. XD

So I’m a little behind the 8-ball here, but the Tokyo Game Show for 2010 was announced recently, and will be held from the 16th of September. Of all of the game shows out there, TGS is probably the best of the high profiling ones that I can actually afford to go to, and so this year, if all checks out, I’m seriously considering going. 🙂

After a little bit of Googling the topic though, I’m a little wary of one interesting tidbit that Kotaku raised… it seems that being held in September, TGS is less than a month behind the Gamescom event in Germany, which will most undoubtedly force the majority of games companies to choose between presenting at either one or the other. Since Gamescom is much higher profile, it is quite likely that TGS may get shafted by a lot of companies as a result of this.

That being said, I’m still happy to give it the benefit of the doubt. Since I’ve been hearing that Japanese games companies do prefer to announce new projects in their own motherland events more often, I would bet that a lot of those companies will still be presenting at their main content at TGS. And even if many companies decided to pick Gamescon over TGS, I would still assume the event will be huge, and definitely worth the trip… especially since I can’t really afford a ticket to Germany haha. XD

And, there’s always the off-chance that all of this discussion about Gamescom might convince the TGS organizers to push the date back as well. To that end, I’ve decided to hold back and wait before doing any bookings. 🙂

Either way, I’ve already spent my life up until now not going to any huge game development events. This is something I definitely want to change. XD

Is anyone else considering doing TGS or Gamescom or both?

/Regular Expression[s] Script!/

March 1, 2010 •

TiM's Regex Tester after a successful query.I think it’s fair to say that since graduating from univeristy, I’ve wound up doing a LOT of web development. XD

With heaps of small-time client work, building dynamic web apps at a company in Japan as well as pimping out and maintaining WesternAustralia.com for Tourism WA, and now developing for several web apps and web sites at ECU… so far it’s looking pretty diverse hehe. But in any case, I’m totally not complaining here; I love every minute of it! 😀

One thing I’ve found myself doing quite a lot of recently however is content migration. A lot of my work revolves around content management systems, and when it comes to upgrading to a new platform, it usually means having to copy the blocks of text/code out of the old one, re-twiddle any custom tags or syntax inside it, and then paste it into the new one.

But that being said, I quickly discovered a tool which eased the pain significantly: regular expressions! (Or regex, after you get tired of saying regular expressions all the time hehe XD)

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