Today we officially launch the Rethink Ink Contest. The Zoom Creates team has created six sets of super fresh temporary tattoos and we want you to dream up the next one.
What’s your inkspiration?
Head over to the Zoom Creates Facebook page and submit your best idea for a tattoo design. The concepts that inspire the Zoom team the most, will win all six sets of our temporary tats. Plus, the grand prize winner will get their idea produced by our graphic design team and will receive a set of their tats and a stylin’ T-shirt to show off their design to all of their jealous buds.
We’re not stopping there
We want to make sure everyone’s devices stay rockin’ too. Drop by the Zoom Ink site to spice up your laptop or mobile phone with backgrounds inspired by the tats. You won’t want to hide these from your mom! To see the whole collection and score some amazing free downloads, make sure to hit up the site!
For the duration of the contest we’ll be featuring a “Tat a Day” on the blog to give a little background on where our inspiration came from for the Zoom Ink tats. So, tune in, get inspired and don’t forget to show off your inkspiration!
Did you buy someone an internet-connected gadget for Christmas, such as an iPad, Android tablet, eReader, or netbook? Chances are it can take advantage of Google’s eBookstore that offers millions of free and pay-for ebooks. Google announced and opened the eBookstore today which combines the selections from some of the big ebook providers with Google’s own library of digitized books. One nice feature of Google eBookstore is that the ebooks that you add to your collection remain on the web, so you can read them on your smartphone and then switch to your netbook without having to download your book again. Your whole library is available to all your internet-capable devices. It also remembers where you left off, even when switching between devices. (more…)
The story of a killer robot traveling through time to knock off John Connor is pretty far fetched. Everyone knows time travel is very expensive, and robots just don’t have that kind of dough. But will there be a Skynet self-aware network that turns machines against humans? Yeah, probably. But rest assured, before the Terminator movies become reality, we’ll all have robot servants that go haywire and Will Smith will save us. Then they’ll take over, disguised as the Governor of California. Then we’ll wake up, connected to a matrix, and realize we’re being harvested by machines for energy. Hollywood has been trying to warn us of these inevitable events for years. If you need proof of what’s coming, check out the video below. Just in time for Halloween, here’s a creepy robot to chill you to the bone (and other dancers to warm you back up).
After working with the Rokon Android game library for a few weeks, I’ve been able to wrap my brain around it. This is a great library that helps set up your development to work with Sprites and Layers, helps you set up views and more. I ran into some problems, and the documentation is vast, but there are very few tutorials.
Pros:
Very easy to set up your view in either landscape or portrait mode, and lock it that way.
Moving sprites around on your display is easy, and the game loop makes complete sense.
Very active community, quite helpful and responsive in the forums.
Integrates Box2D physics.
There are many other pros to using this library, and as I’m new to Java I’m sure that I am taking many of it’s strengths for granted. I did run into a few cons though, so lets go over those.
Cons:
Collision detection isn’t great – There are a few ways to check for this, but in my game I was getting some inconsistencies that kept me from properly debugging and fixing the issue.
Display text on screen – There is no object that I could find to print out debug messages to anything other than Android’s built in Log class. This was also something that I was hoping for to make displaying game information easier.
Simple shape drawing – Drawing simple objects like squares, circles, or even line segments was either undocumented or not implemented.
For reference I was using Rokon 2.0.3, and by the end of my development with it, there was a 2.1 version release. I didn’t switch to it because I had read that many games were failing when the core libraries were updated. While the library didn’t end up working out for me and my current project, I wouldn’t write off Rokon completely. It’s a great tool set and could be perfect for your project. Look forward to my next blog post where I try to code the same game using AndEngine, and let you know the pros and cons of that engine.
As you can probably tell, my recent obsession has been with the Android platform. I’ve been doing a bit of research on different libraries to make things easier on Java developers, like myself. Here’s a collection of things that I’ve been working with, some with great success and some with less than stellar results.
andEngine
AndEngine is an Android game engine that has very little documentation. It has a bunch of examples that help show you the use of the engine, and has many games and apps in the market that use this library.
Rokon
Rokon is a 2D game engine that I am currently using to try and port a flash game I wrote last year. I will be blogging about the success of this over the next few weeks.
Shiva 3D
Shiva 3D is a 3D development engine, IDE, and tool set that helps you build full 3D apps and games.
Mages
Mages is a multi-player platform that helps developers make apps that work over the internet. A chess game is included in the source to show how player turns are handled, and other features.
There are many other libraries and platforms available for Android development, with new ones popping up all the time. With the growing number of Android devices, these libraries are going to mature and develop into real tools to help with app creation. Leave a comment if you’ve used these tools, or any others that you’d recommend.
With September right around the corner, Samsung is (reportedly) getting close to rolling out the Android 2.2 update. This version is called FroYo and supports many speed enhancements and updates. One big one is including Flash 10.1, so now you can visit all those sites that won’t work on the iPhone or iPad.
There are no official dates that have been announced, but Samsung has had a few releases of FroYo available for the international Galaxy-S on their website. These were mostly beta tests and bug fix releases, and wouldn’t work on any of the branded phones (T-Mobile’s Vibrant, AT&T’s Captivate, etc.) but once the platform is solid, you can be sure that each of these vendors will be hard pushed to release their update over the network.
I for one, am very stoked. Check out this site or this site for more information.
Speaking of the iPad, Samsung is getting very close to releasing their own pad based on the Galaxy-S hardware. It’s a 7 inch tablet that will roll out with Android 2.2, and it looks very nice.
My roommate recently got a new toy in the mail. It’s a Chinese product called the APad which is a little tablet computer running Android 1.6. Yes, you read that right, there are other tablets out there not created by Apple, running a variety of different platforms. The two most popular platforms are the iPhone OS and Android, but there are some newer tablets predicted to come out by the end of the year that run Windows 7 or Windows CE, and even a rumored Blackberry tablet. There are also projects like MeeGo that run on mobile phones, tablets, netbooks and carputers.
The early 1990s had a big rush of Tablet computers, and a lot of money was thrown at tech companies to develop handwriting recognition software, and tablet-style interfaces. These were the days of Windows 3.1, with big clunky machines running at sub-Ghz speeds (we had a Pentium 2 90Mhz computer with one gig of RAM at my house). Now that we can all hold a >1Ghz computer in our palms, the tablet rush is back. Add the ability for anyone to write an App and get it into the hands of millions of users, and it’s no wonder why this time around the Tablet rush is looking to explode.
I’m curious to see how this Tablet trend is going to effect the future of programming. Will we begin to see mobile app development courses show up in CS degree programs? What do you think? Is this just another fad?
In my last post, I talked about the neat little phones that me and Justin picked up (not the phone that Justin won, lucky…), the Samsung Vibrant. It’s an Android powered phone, with an awesome screen and all that jazz. Feel free to check out that post for all my hype, because this post is about writing Android apps.
Most beginner tutorials out there that I found over the last few weeks have just regurgitated the Hello World demo app from Google. I found that pretty useless, because Google has a perfectly fine demo on how to print text to the screen. I set out to build a little app that displays an image, has button, can update the screen, and gives user feedback (I used the vibration feature of my phone). I even had enough time to set up a basic options menu, so that will be in this tutorial too.
I won’t be covering how to set up your development IDE, as Google has done a great job with that too. I followed the tutorial on setting up the Android API in Eclipse, and was up and running without a hitch in about 30 minutes (there was a lot to download). I developed this app on Ubuntu 10.04, but I’m pretty sure that you can use this code on any platform. Click through to get started! (more…)
Please take a moment and look back through a few posts from the Dev team here at Zoom Creates. I think that you will come to find that we seem to love Google. It’s quite true. This also includes Google’s mobile operating system, Android.
Justin has had an Android powered phone for a while (he picked up T-Mobile’s G-1 when it first came out) but has been stuck with version 1.6 of Android for quite some time. Kris and I also have T-Mobile, but neither of us had taken the plunge into the smart phone world for various reasons, but the time has come.
Last week T-Mobile bumped up the release date for their newest Android Powered handset, the Samsung Vibrant. To avoid any confusion, the Vibrant is T-Mobile’s release of Samsung’s Galaxy-S line of phones. All Galaxy-S phones have similar specs, but each carrier is allowed to modify the basics of them to suit their needs. Both Justin and I have been using our Vibrant phones for almost a week, and here’s what we think: (more…)
We want to make sure everyone’s devices stay rockin’ too. Drop by the Zoom Ink site to spice up your laptop or mobile phone with backgrounds inspired by the tats. You won’t want to hide these from your mom! To see the whole collection and score some amazing free downloads, make sure to hit up the site!
After working with the 
As you can probably tell, my recent obsession has been with the Android platform. I’ve been doing a bit of research on different libraries to make things easier on Java developers, like myself. Here’s a collection of things that I’ve been working with, some with great success and some with less than stellar results.
With September right around the corner, Samsung is (reportedly) getting close to rolling out the Android 2.2 update. This version is called FroYo and supports many speed enhancements and updates. One big one is including Flash 10.1, so now you can visit all those sites that won’t work on the iPhone or iPad.
My roommate recently got a new toy in the mail. It’s a Chinese product called the 
In my last post, I talked about the neat little phones that me and Justin picked up (not the phone that Justin won, lucky…), the Samsung Vibrant. It’s an Android powered phone, with an awesome screen and all that jazz. 
Please take a moment and look back through a few posts from the Dev team here at Zoom Creates. I think that you will come to find that we seem to love Google. It’s quite true. This also includes Google’s mobile operating system, Android.
