Advice on Reliable SSD Chipset? « bunnie’s blog

Advice on Reliable SSD Chipset? « bunnie’s blog

I didn’t really need another reason to go with Intel SSDs over the competition at this point, but it is disturbing that Crucial is putting their name on these.  For RAM, I’ve used nothing but Crucial for the past 6 years or so.  Hopefully I won’t need to reconsider that…

Nov 16, 2009 Read More »

Manton Reece: The only 2 fixes for the iPhone platform

Manton Reece: The only 2 fixes for the iPhone platform

Something definitely needs to be done here.  These two options are the only reasonable ones.  Apple will never allow any app on the App Store, so that just leaves allowing users to install apps obtained from other sources.  That absolutely needs to happen.

Nov 16, 2009 Read More »

Hi!

My name is Dennis.  I write (Dead Link: software). I have a family. I like playing games. I like taking photos. I like camping.

More to come…

Nov 16, 2009 Read More »

Ballies for the iPhone

Today Ballies (and Ballies Lite) for the iPhone was released on the App Store. I started working on Ballies at the start of July and finished it in the first week of October. It was very much a learning experience for me – this being my first released iPhone application and my first game that’s actually moved to the published state. It also happens to be a fun game as well too. If you are interested, please go check it out on the (Dead Link: App Store).

Oct 30, 2009 Read More »

Custom Animations Between UIViewControllers

Apple has really done a lot to make it easy to use multiple UIViewController objects and to move between them easily with some stock animations. The “normal” behaviors for iPhone applications are relatively straightforward to achieve – some requiring just a line or two of code.

But what if you want to do something different? For example, you are working on a game that has it’s own navigation hierarchy. Not only are you not using the normal UINavigationController usage model, but you also want to do something different visually besides sliding in the new view? Read on for one possible way of handling this.

Aug 07, 2009 Read More »

NSInvocation Tip

NSInvocation certainly gets a bad rap at times. If you use it naively, you will get some horrible performance with it. Doubly so on the iPhone where there is much less CPU power than on MacOS X. But for some things, it is very useful. For example, say you want to pass a field name to a method and then call the setter and getter for that field on an object. Using a selector and an NSInvocation object, you can dynamically call them:

Aug 05, 2009 Read More »

iPhone and Widescreen 2D with OpenGL

For a project that I’ve been working on, I’ve been using OpenGL ES on the iPhone to do 2D in widescreen. Since I struggled a bit to get it setup, I’ll go ahead and share how I got things going.

First up, you need a project to work in – I’m using the OpenGL ES Application template in XCode for this. Also, I’m using the 3.0 SDK. This should apply just the same to earlier SDK versions, but there may be minor differences.

Aug 04, 2009 Read More »

Why I Hate C++ - Reason #47

What do you expect this code to do?

#include <stdio.h>
 
class Foo {
public:
    void doStuff() {
        printf("hi from Foo!\n");
    }
};
 
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
    Foo *f = NULL;
 
    f->doStuff();
    return 0;
}

If you said it would crash because of the NULL pointer, you are wrong. This code will actually print “hi from foo” to the console. Why? Because as long as you are not calling any functions that use instance variables or are virtual, the NULL pointer is never dereferenced. And if you know how C++ handles member functions, you should know exactly why.

Aug 01, 2009 Read More »

VideoNow Playback Code

We picked up a VideoNow player over the weekend for a dollar at a yard sale. It immediately was a hit with the kids, but I was curious about the video format. It took me some searching around, but I was able to find enough information to bang out a quick and dirty player for the Mac using OpenGL and CoreAudio. It doesn’t have a GUI, but it works pretty well for a few hours of work I think. If this is something you were looking for, enjoy!

Oct 20, 2008 Read More »

UMPC from Dell

Over at Dell’s blog, they have some pics of a new UMPC that they are apparently working on. Looks pretty good for Dell – I would love to have something of that size for travel. Though I have to wonder why PC manufacturers still insist on putting a VGA port on laptops when a DVI port with a $2 VGA adapter provides a better digital output without sacrificing compatibility – are we that tied to legacy ports that we can’t bear to give them up even when the replacement includes backwards compatibility?

Jun 12, 2008 Read More »