Okay, it’s not quite yet the Fourth of July. But I don’t usually post on Saturdays so it’s a bit early. Anyways, I’ve always loved this holiday as a kid because it’s so magical. I mean, sure, I loved Christmas because of the presents and I loved Thanksgiving because of the cranberry sauce (and I’m talking about the stuff that comes out of a can without any bits of real cranberry because really, who wants actual fruit in their sauce as a kid?).

But what other holiday is celebrated by blowing stuff up? (Okay, there’s Guy Fawke’s Night but I didn’t find out about that until much later.) This was the one holiday where I was allowed — nay, encouraged — to set things on fire. And as amazing as fire was by itself, it was taken to a whole new level with fireworks. Not only was fire bright and dynamic, it was also multi-colored and capable of propelling and spinning and sparkling!

Fourth of July probably had something to do with my desire to work in the effects industry and, truth be told, my slight prediliction for pyromania. In any case, I have fond memories of those hot summer days and the nights that came with them because the world seemed almost magical then. So many things seemed possible on those nights and it was all the sweeter for only happening once a year.

Happy Fourth of July!

Things are getting pretty busy at work, but I’m still doing a bit of work on Boom Dice. I’m working on a system to unlock new dice and a computer opponent. Here’s what the silver dice will look like eventually!

Over the weekend, I saw a fantastic low-budget science fiction movie called “Moon” starring Sam Rockwell, featuring the voice of Kevin Spacey, and directed by Duncan Jones. I don’t want to say too much about the film because I don’t want to give anything away (in fact, avoid the trailer and reviews if you can) but if your sci-fi preferences run more towards 2001, Moon is definitely worth seeing. That said, I understand that movie tastes are very subjective so I’ve devised a handy test that helps you decide.

Complete this sentence: “I saw Star Wars Episode I and felt that it needed …”

a) “… more boobs, exploding giant robots, and wacky ethnic characters like Jar-Jar.”

b) “… a plot.”

Occasionally, I’ll get a request to port Mach Dice to other platforms (Palm Pre, LG Touch, HTC Diamond, Google Android, Virtual Tabletop, etc.). But with a full time job, I barely have enough time to just work on the iPhone. So it isn’t likely any time soon. Still, I am curious. Do any of you have one of the other smart phones? Or does anyone have a sense of how many people own each of the devices? My impression is that iPhone has the biggest app customer base out there, but I’ve only ever seen anecdotal evidence.

Over the weekend, I upgraded my iPhone and the corresponding SDK to OS 3.0. So far, things seem to be working pretty smoothly but I did run into one problem when recompiling Boom Dice. Some of the sounds stopped working. In the sound allocation command, I got back a result of “kAudioServicesSystemSoundUnspecifiedError”. But then I moved the sound files to a subdirectory, ran afconvert on them and then they worked. Here’s the command I used:

    afconvert -f caff -d LEI16 $x ../$x

And here’s the old broken sound file and the new working sound file.

I tend not to update my iPhone OS because I like to make sure my apps are backwards compatible. But it seems like OS 3.0 is getting a lot of buzz. Is it more important to test my apps with OS 3.0 or OS 2.2?

I took the last three month off from my day job to do some travelling, work on a couple iPhone apps, and take care of some other stuff. But now I’m back! I’m looking forward to seeing everyone at work again but it also means less time developing iPhone apps and shorter blog posts for a while. Like this one.

This past week, I went to a bunch of WWDC parties. I’m too cheap to actually attend WWDC (it’s over $1000!) but the parties are free and sometimes they have cookies. I met a bunch of other iPhone app developers, saw some neat upcoming apps, and managed to get into the iPhone Launch Party with special guest Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple and creator of the Apple I and Apple ][.

Now, I’ve noticed that Holograms generally gets a pretty positive reaction but it definitely has a certain “geek” factor to it. I figured that if anyone at the party would appreciate Holograms, it’d be Steve Wozniak. So I snapped a photo of him, used my app to turn it into a hologram and showed it to him. Sure enough, he and his wife, Janet Hill, got a big kick out of it! That would have been cool enough but then he asked for my business card and when I gave him one, he gave me one of his. And let me tell you, Woz’s business card is nearly as awesome as he is. It’s a sheet of metal with laser-etched holes for his logo and each individual character is engraved and painted white. Also, the edges are quite sharp. I think I could kill an elephant with that thing.

I had lots of fun at all the WWDC parties but that was certainly the highlight of the week for me. He and his wife are both very sweet people and it was a pleasure meeting them.