Theoretically, if the accelerometer is perfectly accurate, you should be able to calculate exactly how far it moves as you move it. It just involves a little “x = x0 + v0*t + .5*t*t” action. (MMmmmm, high school physics … oh yeah.) In practice … it’s not that accurate.

I was hoping to write a little app that did something based on that, but it looks like the accelerometer isn’t quite accurate enough. So I might have to scrap my original idea. But over the weekend, I’m going to try some heuristics to compensate enough for the inaccuracies and give it one more go.

Welcome, Touch Arcade readers! And for everyone who wrote a comment or sent me email, thanks for the great feedback! It makes the whole effort worthwhile. (Well, that and the bump in sales.) And a special thanks to those of you who donated a little something extra. You really didn’t have to, but it’s much appreciated. Nothing says, “Hey, I like what you did there!” in quite the same way as cold hard cash… =)

If you’re new to my site, welcome! This is where I post about stuff I’m working on (which lately, has just been my dice application).  Please check out the MachDice page for more information on that app (including demo videos!). Or feel free to check out the blog entries if you want to find out more about how I created this app.

Otherwise, hey everyone! I just got notification that the MachDice 2.0 update has been approved! So, I’m expecting dozens (if not several dozens) of new visits to this site (hence the earlier paragraph) in addition to my regular readers (hi, Mom!). Soon, you’ll all soon get to check out the new features that I’ve been working on for the past several weeks. I hope you enjoy them.

Phew … this makes developing for the iPhone a bit easier.

Still no word on the MachDice 2.0 update. But in the meantime, I thought I’d try whipping up a quick little app. I’m not sure if it’s going to work or not so I don’t want to give too many details. But it’s completely unrelated to dice, it’s very simple, and it uses the accelerometer.

I put up a new demo video on YouTube. Hopefully, Apple will approve the update soon but in the meantime, you can see all the cool new features that are awaiting you!

I’ve submitted my update for MachDice! Here’s a review of some of the new features for 2.0:

• colored dice!
• multiple backgrounds!
• dice locking!
• dice throwing!
• history of rolls
• settings window
• 6-sided pips or numbers
• 4-sided graphics fix
• 2-sided coins
• One-Roll Engine
• and much, much more!

Wait, I hear you asking: “What’s the One-Roll Engine?”. Check out the wikipedia article. It’s a neat system that involves counting matches instead of totaling values and a special “wiggle die” so it was an interesting system to implement for this device. I’ve also implemented subtotals for those of you that want your dice totaled separately (like a d20 to hit and 3d4 for damage) and bucket counts to do things like rolling 30d6 and counting the number of 5s and 6s. All of these things will be accessible through the new settings window.

The update will be free for anyone that’s already purchased MachDice! But since a number of people have asked … yes, I will accept more of your money.

Thanks for your comments, people. It helps keep me going, especially during times like this past week where I’ve been trying to track down bugs instead of adding new features…. geh.

So, I haven’t exactly found the problem. But I’ve learned a couple things:

• sometimes, hitting a switch seems to stops further events from happening
• the new SDK crashes if I use “Arial Bold-MT” (which I was using before)
• my wav files on OS 2.1 sound really tinny

I’m continuing to look into the first problem, which is a biggie. I might just have to not use switches in my preferences. The second one is easy to work around. The third one … well, I’m hoping that converting my wav files to mp3s or something will help.

In any event, moving to OS 2.1 didn’t seem to help, so I’ll try to revert to a 2.0 build.

Hey, I noticed a little bump in traffic from the MacRumors site. (Thanks, Arn!) And welcome to those of you who are new. This is just a blog where I talk about what I’m up to, which is currently trying to figure out why my app is crashed when I toggled certain values in my settings subview.

I thought upgrading to the iPhone OS 2.1 would help but now my app just crashes as it loads. So … the update may take a bit longer than I initially thought. Sorry, everyone, but I thought I should let you know.

I am almost ready to submit an update. Like, it’s so close, I can taste it. Part of the holdup was that I decided I needed to implements pips (the little dots on a 6-sided die) again. See, implementing colored dice with corresponding colored text labels wasn’t too bad. But in order to do pips just right, I had to tint the pips but not the shadow or highlight areas. There isn’t really an easy way to tint using the image calls that are available, so I had to write a bit of code to do it myself.

Anyways, the end result is that you’ll now have the option of displaying 6-sided dice with pips or numbers. There’s a setting for that. Oh, right, I’ve implemented settings over the weekend, too. More on that later.

Hopefully, the update will be submitted in a couple more days (I have a few bugs I need to work out). Then, it’s up to Apple to decide how long it takes to get on the store. But it seems to be between a few days and a couple weeks.

As I was working on my settings view last night, I stumbled across the wikipedia entry on singletons. I had planned on creating a global settings view variable for all my other views to access. But I was concerned that the settings view might not be allocated at the right time or become deallocated. Using the singleton was a much better approach because it allowed me to explicitly control the initialization.