Mar 092013
 

Been a busy couple of weeks.

Relesed two private betas of Tunemio. Unless something fatal crops up, this baby is headed towards the App Store in a week or two.

Changed working schedule to accommodate more wake-up time with Elmo at home. This means working long evenings. And that, obviously, has meant a far slower update frequency here (glacial, I would say).

But here it finally is, the first released screenshot of Tunemio:

Tunemio, the first screenshot

Dec 302012
 

Skrolli logo
Most computer gaming/hardware/whatever magazines have slowly but irrevocably turned into vehicles of consumption, only rarely do they contain anything singnificant on creating something or understanding things any deeper than the surface.

The new marshall in town, Skrolli (in finnish), aims to correct that.

The zeroth issue (a four-pager .pdf) is out already, and the first proper magazine should see daylight in early 2013.

Sep 022012
 

One of the things that didn’t go according to specs in the departure from Mother Nokia was my publishing account.

It’s now locked out, despite the promises that the account would remain valid after the departure.

So no updates on the download figures of published content yet. Last time I checked Fingerporilainen was somewhere below 7k downloads, the others far lower.

Jul 242012
 

A List Apart’s summer reading issue provides plenty of interesting articles. Some of them more than a decade old, others containing ideas that are still very much top-shelf quality.

It would have been even more interesting to have a commentary track for the individual articles, pointing out details that have been taken care of by standardization or browser evolution, of newer documentation supplementing the original and so on. But even as it is, the collection is a treasure trove.

Apr 062012
 

Fingerporilainen, the second step in my continuing campaign for world domination, is now available in Ovi Store for Harmattan devices (which is to say that it works on N9 and N950).

It is a very simple application that provides easy access to the six-strips-a-week content published by Helsingin Sanomat.

Fingerporilainen

And yeah, before you ask, I’ve written similar apps for Viivi & Wagner and Wulff-Morgenthaler as well.

Mar 052012
 

With the impending arrival of iPad 3 on Wednesday, it will be interesting to see whether the quadrupled resolution of the screen generate a third branch of iOS software.

After all, the current iPad crop no longer is the highest density in the land.

Then again, going retina didn’t fragment the iPhone offering – the applications just adapted the two resolutions within to serve both the new and the old devices.

My bet is on the same happening again.

But the attraction of graphics 2048 pixel wide cannot be underestimated, hence the prospect of a “Full HD” qualifier. Which would, indeed, be appropriate, since the device can play Bluray content at full resolution.

Feb 152012
 

I published Platform Version a couple of weeks ago.

It is the first piece of application software I’ve published professionally.

It is an excessively simple piece of software. It does one thing, and one thing only: it displays the version of the Harmattan platform running on a Nokia N9 (or an N950).

The information is obviously available for users via the settings of the device, this application just provides as easy a way to view it as possible.

Sep 122011
 

My Secret Hideout logoAndrew Plotkin’s My Secret Hideout is a textual software toy for iOS.

It is a procedural text generation device – where the description of the eponynmous hideout is generated from the various symbols placed on screen by the user. The generation is deterministic (so two trees built from same symbols in the same location are alike) and very wide (up to a googol variations).

Despite the author’s long history of interactive fiction – My Secret Hideout is not really interactive, and definitely not a game.

But it is an interesting concept and a nicely languid way of spending time.

The interface is smooth. Which is promising, considering that Hadean Lands is inbound soon, and I have great expectations for the first commercial piece of interactive fiction on the ipad.