iTouchBall 1.0

July 1, 2009

Here we go!

We developed a simplest game for iPhone and iPod Touch devices. The game is very easy to learn and master. The game is available at App Store. Please download and give a good rating. This might help my company to get some service oriented work :P :P

It can be downloaded from here.

screenshot1

The life cycle of the development of iTouchBall is as follow:
Our iPhone Application Development team worked on an application for about 4 months and at last it was sent to Apple for review and unfortunately it is still in review process. Our management lost hope for further development in iPhone, but then I came up with a simple game which had a ball bouncing off the walls or your finger. Then we were given another chance by our management to modify the game and get it ready in 2 weeks.

The first idea was to modify the game into a game in which there is a moving ball with higher radius which bounces off the walls and if player touches the ball it divides into 2 and so on, until all balls are eliminated from the screen. In first week, this game was completed. Levels were introduced and in each level the number of divisions increased. Simple graphics were used.

Now when we played the game, it was very monotonous. We  scheduled a meeting with our management and informed them that we need to rethink the game design, level designs and come up with some addictive game but we were not given any extra day. We were pushed to reach the already set deadline. So we modified the game. We restricted the number of divisions, increased the speed in every level. We named the developed game Eliminator and added a functionality of merging together. We developers, ourselves, introduced another game Protector where player will have to protect the ball from hitting the screen walls. After completing the games, we added the score comparison thing, so that every player around the world can see what is the highest score ever made in particular game. In 2 weeks, we were done with the game. Due to lack of interest from our management, we did not even push our graphic designer to come up with any fascinating graphics. He tried his best to come up with the current ones and we appreciated his effort because he is not game graphics designer, he has his expertise in designing graphics for websites which is totally a different domain. Our QA department spent about 3-4 days on the game and then we submitted it to Apple. We got a couple of genuine issues from Apple and we fixed them and resubmitted it. With in a weeks time after last submission, we received an email from Apple that it has been launched.

No hard feelings but we need to be patient in doing everything. It is good to have an application at App Store but we know that we have the capabilities to make 150% times better game than this. There are hell lot of things you can do with a ball moving around the screen. But still, lets see what reviews does this simple game receives. I will be working my brains out to come up with a game which will be more presentable, logical, exciting and addictive than iTouchBall. For the time being, I feel proud that we have atleast something on App Store. Cheers! ;)


Pakistan wins ICC 20-20 2nd World Cup

June 25, 2009

Pakistan Flag

After 17 years, Pakistan has won another mega multinational cricket tournment. A very important success at a very right time for Pakistani nation. We, as a nation, have suffered and are still suffering through a lot of setbacks; and this accomplishment of our cricket team has given the nation to smile for something; they have provoked patriotism in our hearts and almost every Pakistani feels like that he/she has gained independance again.

Pakistan - ICC 20 20 Champions

Due to terrorist acts in our homeland, we are neither neglected in sporting world but also in business world. A lot of investors have pulled back their hands. Even RentACoder also displays a ticker that Software Buyers should rethink before signing a contract with a Pakistani programmer because they have electricity issues. :D But everyone should not forget that, even the current most successful nations today were far worse than us in their dark ages about 5-6 centuries back. If we compare us with them, we are still new and by the grace of Almighty Allah, we will bounce up as the most successful nation; and our touch will turn dust into gold….

Good luck Pakistan.

ICC 20-20 World Cup 2009 – 1st SEMI – FINAL

The copyrights of this video belongs to ESPN Star.

ICC 20-20 World Cup 2009 – FINAL

The copyrights of this video belongs to ESPN Star.


Game Development in iPhone using Cocos2d

June 18, 2009

A couple of days back, I got a chance to explore Cocos2d and I found it very useful and easy to understand if you want to jump into Game Development for iPhone. I would suggest all newbies to go through the white paper by Monocle Studios which gives an introduction of how to convert your project into Cocos2d environment. Its been fun and I hope everyone will like it. Lets hope I come up with couple of games of my own too :D

Happy iPhone Development ;)


Apps Amuck – 31 Days Tutorial of iPhone App Development

June 11, 2009

I came across this great and helpful site AppsAmuck and it contains 31 sample codes for 31 days. A new bee can start iPhone Application Development from here. Nice work by Apps Amuck Team. Keep it up!

Happy iPhone Development ;)


Nowtees

June 2, 2009

Last year, I submitted a T-Shirt Design in Nowtees, and yesterday I received a letter from them that they have accepted my design. I signed an agreement, according to which my design is the property of Nowtees but they will put my name as designer in T-Shirt’s tag. I said to myself, why not? I designed it to submit at Nowtees, otherwise I would have never designed it, so it’s theirs ;)

As soon as the T-Shirt comes in market, I’ll upload picture of that too. This incident has made me believe that we must try our best in all those areas which are in our range and Allah will give us positive results when we need them most. No doubt, God works in mysterious ways. Thanks Allah Almighty.


Wag the Dog….

May 28, 2009

Why does a dog wag its tail?

Because a dog is smarter than its tail.

If the tail were smarter, the tail would wag the dog.

The above part looks funny but it’s true and it is very well presented in a classic film Wag the Dog. I usually suggest this film to all my friends, but they rarely find and watch it. But today, I found the movie in youtube and therefore I am uploading all the links here ;)

more at: IMDB

more at: WikiPedia


Now I lay me down to rest…

May 27, 2009

This is an old small stanza, which I used to recite after spending a lot of time on studies :P I still remember those days.

Now I lay me

Down to rest,

A pile of books

Upon my chest.

If I should die

Before I wake,

That’s one less test

I’ll have to take.


Murder or Suicide?

May 22, 2009

Last night I received a mail form friend with this subject. I thought that it might be a riddle or some problem for which I will have to spare some time and find solution. But when I checked it, I was surprised to see the following story:

Its still a mystery whether this incident took place or not? The same thing has been filmed in a major Hollywood Movie named “MAGNOLIA“. Here is the clip from  the movie of the same scene, of course the name of the characters as well as the dates are different from the one mentioned in your attachment.

Murder or Suicide


[iPhone] Program exited with status value 101

May 4, 2009

My application had a UITableView with about more than 250 rows and when I scrolled through it completely twice or thrice; the application CRASHED and a line appeared at my application’s status bar that “Program exited with status value: 101″. I ran the application in Leaks tool from Instruments option in XCode. It did not show any leaks, but then again application crashed and I received same message on my status bar of application, i.e. “Program exited with status value: 101″.

After a lot of googling, I found that status 101 indicates that there is a memory issue; meaning that no more memory was available for the application. The application did not crash because of any memory leak, but it crashed due to too much memory allocations…sounds logical. So I optimized my code of populating the cells and voila, the application lived happily ever after and did not crash :)


[iPhone] Learning OpenGL ES for iPhone Application development

April 29, 2009

This week, after completing our first application, I was given permission to explore and learn openGL ES for iPhone Application Development. This has been a great week and I have come across various forums and tutorial sites. I am thinking to keep my blog updated with all the steps I am taking in exploring graphics programming in iPhone. So here is the first post. I came across this blog post via iPhoneDevelopmentBits. The post is very resourceful and the first link I visited is iPhone OpenGL ES Series.

This post is for those, who don’t know where to start graphics programming in iPhone. Happy iPhone Coding ;)