Pie Guy - a free web game for your iPhone
(This post uses formatting and features not visible in the Tumblr Dashboard. If anything below doesn’t make sense or looks plain ugly, consider viewing the post on my website. I love the Dashboard, I hate the Dashboard.)
The Bits
There’s no better home for a fast-paced, goofy arcade game than your pocket. Remember the original joy of gaming - you know, before the distraction of drawn-out story lines, tutorials, endless dialog, and complicated rules? You want to just fire up a game and go, cucumber-cool 8-bit graphics blazing under your fingers. Swipe left, swipe right, eat all the berries, avoid the angry chefs chasing you around their pie kitchen. Then repeat at a higher speed.
The Sweet Solution
And there’s no easier way to get an app than by installing it right from its website - that’s right, easier than the App Store. One tap and you’re set. Because it’s a web app, see. Not one of those where you need to be online either - once you add Pie Guy to your home screen, it’ll run even when you’re not connected to the Internet. And of course, your game will be saved to a local database. Read on.
History
I made pie guy in a fit of WebKit excitement combined with App Store frustration. I wanted a Javascript game that didn’t feel… texty.
Needful Things
Pie Guy will run on iPhone 3GS with OS 3.0 or higher installed. Swipe anywhere on the screen (no need to point at Guy himself) and feel free to queue up your turns as in classic arcade games (meaning, once you swipe, Guy will turn that way next time this is possible.) With each level, the chefs get angrier. Godspeed.
Fringe Benefits
If you find Pie Guy a fun game to play, well that’s grand.
But, I hope Pie Guy will also be an opportunity for the code-savvy among you to learn a trick or two about making serious web apps for the iPhone. Just grab my source code and tweak it. I’m not talking about just a fancied-up webpage here; this is a fullscreen game, with fast gameplay and responsive touch controls. I can’t wait to see what a better programmer does with this stuff (it’s not hard to program better than me!)
Go go go
Pie Guy is available for totally free from http://mrgan.com/pieguy. Hit that on your iPhone, install once, and play forever. By the way, if there are updates to the game and you’re online when you launch it, the updates will be automatically installed. Web apps, dudes.
P.S. If you’d like to tip your developer, why not buy a shirt. Or, heck, buy anything else on my Amazon Store
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Awesome, inspirational read. Time to spend some money on a ‘commuter’ setup.
(via Instapaper)
Birds on the Wires (via Vimeo)
“Reading a newspaper, I saw a picture of birds on the electric wires. I cut out the photo and decided to make a song, using the exact location of the birds as notes (no Photoshop edit). I knew it wasn’t the most original idea in the universe. I was just curious to hear what melody the birds were creating.”
Beethoven 5th Symphony (No. 5, graphical score animation, allegro) (via smalin)
Stunning visualisation!
Adding <base href=”http://ax.itunes.apple.com”> inside <head> is a quick one-shot way to deal with relative URLs while working with a local copy of the file.
Nice touch. Connect a mac with a displayport to an HDTV with an HDMI adapter and get 720p, 1080i, and 1080p as resolution options in Display Preferences
OS X Tip: 1-Click saving of PDF Receipts
Spurred on by this tweet, which was indeed news to me too, I went further down the rabbit hole to Shawn Blanc’s site which ultimately led me to a 2-year old post on Mac OSX Hints
However, after trying the example, it (or I) failed miserably.
The light at the end of the tunnel however came from one of the comments in the Mac OSX Hints article:
“I just put an alias called “Save to Dropbox Receipts” in ~/Library/PDF Services that points to my desired destination folder. This creates an item in the PDF Services menu of the same name.
As far as I can tell, PDFs sent to to this menu item are automatically renamed to avoid overwriting.” -scbarton
Zing! I’ve now created an alias to a folder within Dropbox and there you have it, one-click PDF creation for receipts.
My job is so fucking unbelievable. I’ll try to sum it up by first telling you about the folks I work with:
First, there is this supermodel wanna-be chick. Yeah, okay, she is pretty hot, but damn is she completely useless. The girl is constantly fixing her hair or putting on makeup. She is extremely self-centered and has never once considered the needs or wants of anyone but herself. She is as dumb as a box of rocks, and I still find it surprising that she has enough brain power to continue to breathe.
The next chick is completely the opposite. She might even be one of the smartest people on the planet. Her career opportunities are endless, and yet she is here with us. She is a zero on a scale of 1 to 10. I’m not sure she even showers, much less shaves her “womanly” parts. I think she might be a lesbian, because every time we drive by the hardware store, she moans like a cat in heat.
But the jewel of the crowd has got to be the fucking stoner. And this guy is more than just your average pothead. In fact, he is baked before he comes to work, during work, and I’m sure after work. He probably hasn’t been sober anytime in the last ten years, and he’s only 22. He dresses like a beatnik throwback from the 1960’s, and to make things worse, he brings his big fucking dog to work. Every fucking day I have to look at this huge Great Dane walk around half-stoned from the second-hand smoke. Hell, sometimes I even think it’s trying to talk with its constant bellowing. Also, both of them are constantly hungry, requiring multiple stops to McDonalds and Burger King, every single fucking day.
Anyway, I drive these fucktards around in my van and we solve mysteries and shit.
– http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/97jht/i_hate_my_job
About Me
A random collection of internet ephemera that are of interest to me.
