Dan's Blog
Friday, March 28, 2014
Monday, February 24, 2014
Jumpy Fox
I have just released an Android game called Jumpy Fox.
Obviously, this game was inspired by the Flappy Bird hype, but birds are out and FOXES ARE IN!
As a player of the game you have to help the little jumpy fox to jump over the trunks.
* Easy to get get started, yet challenging to get a good score
* Game speeds up after a while to make it even more challenging
* Beautiful charcoal drawing style UI elements
* Compare your highscore with opponents and friends world wide via Google Play Game Services
Obviously, this game was inspired by the Flappy Bird hype, but birds are out and FOXES ARE IN!
As a player of the game you have to help the little jumpy fox to jump over the trunks.
* Easy to get get started, yet challenging to get a good score
* Game speeds up after a while to make it even more challenging
* Beautiful charcoal drawing style UI elements
* Compare your highscore with opponents and friends world wide via Google Play Game Services
Sunday, September 29, 2013
ColBrix
I have finally released ColBrix, a tile-based game for Android.
It's inspired by other apps and tile-laying board games like Scrabble, Qwirkle, WordFeud, etc., but it has its unique set of rules.
The code for the game has been untouched for more than a year, for the following reason:
I wanted to make a really good tutorial, and I knew such a tutorial would require a lot of time to implement. But I've never had that time.
Until I (yesterday) decided to turn a missing tutorial into a feature. I think, that deliberately not offering a tutorial makes the game actually more attractive. There's space to explore the rules, the way the points are calculated, and keeps the game play interesting for a longer time span.
Actually, it became the slogan of ColBrix: Finding out the rules is part of the game!
With that decision, I could release the app in less than a day (after polishing up some parts of the app). I'm very glad that it's finally out (I hate unfinished projects ;)), and hope that you like the game.
Actually, it became the slogan of ColBrix: Finding out the rules is part of the game!
With that decision, I could release the app in less than a day (after polishing up some parts of the app). I'm very glad that it's finally out (I hate unfinished projects ;)), and hope that you like the game.
Labels:
android,
colbrix,
family,
free,
game,
puzzle,
qwirkle,
tile-based,
tile-laying,
wordfeud
Monday, April 15, 2013
Arduino-Powered Maneko Neki
Yet another very practical project that will enrich your life. Extremely hard to make, believe me (just look at the complicated circuit, and you can guess how complicated the code is).
Check out http://arduino.cc and get started yourself.
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Arduino Project - Screen's Brightness Determines Sound (or: JavaScript powered Light Theremin)
I just finished my first Arduino project. Its individual components are very basic, but I love the combination of them.
Check this out:
The Arduino code is fairly simple, it takes the light sensor's value (a value between 0 and 1024 (well, in fact it's a smaller range, because the screen's black is somewhere around 900, and white is about 200)) and maps it to various tones (again a value between 0 and 1024) that I send to the Piezo speaker.
What you can see on the screen is a simple HTML page, whose background is changed for each tone. Here's a sketch of how it works:
var c4 = 0, cs4 = 1, d4 = 2, ds4 = 3, e4 = 4, f4 = 5 ... as5 = 22, b5 = 23; var melody = [ e5, ds5, e5, ds5, e5, b4, d5, c5, a4,a4,a4, c4, e4, a4, b4,b4,b4, e4, a4, b4, c5,c5,c5, ...]; function playSong() { var intervals = 24; // supports 2 octaves for(var i = 0; i < melody.length; i++) { var note = melody[i]; var lumin = 100 - 100/intervals*note; // http://stackoverflow.com/a/6425113 setTimeout( (function(lumin) { return function() { changeBackground(lumin); } })(lumin), i*250); } } function changeBackground(lum) { document.body.style.backgroundColor="hsl(0,0%,"+lum+"%)"; }
Edit 2013-03-09:
I put the source code on GitHub - https://github.com/bodnerdan/js-arduino-theremin
Looking forward to get some feedback, or even pull requests.
As you can guess, it didn't take me very long to implement this code, but I'd rather see it as a seed for inspiration for better, bigger projects. Let me know if you have used my code as a basis to create something more sophisticated.
Thanks for reading!
Labels:
arduino,
CSS,
html,
javascript,
light sensor,
light theremin,
piezo,
theremin
Monday, July 2, 2012
Miniature Photo Album with ImageMagick (montage, convert) and Some Shell Scripting
How to develop photos smaller than 13x9, 15x11...
The fork is just there to indicate the size of the photos |
Important: The shell script shown below does not touch the original files (it copies and rotates them). However, I don't give any warranty that you don't lose or ruin your original files, so make sure to have a backup!
Prerequisites
- A set of JPEG images (optimally the same aspect ratio in order to get a seamless montage)
- An installation of ImageMagick (the executables have to be in the
$PATH
) - A bash-terminal
How to do it
- Move all the JPG files in a directory
cd
into this directory and create an executable script with the content from below- Execute the script and wait
- After that, the subdirectory
generated
contains the files you might want to upload to your online photo service
#!/bin/bash g=generated t=$g/tmp mkdir -p $t ### STEP 1 - cloning/rotating the file to 'portrait' ### into the temporary subdirectory(0.jpg, 1.jpg, etc.) i=0 IFS=$'\n' for file in `find . -type f -iname "*.jp*g"` do echo "rotating file $file into $t/$i.jpg" convert "$file" -rotate '90>' $t/$i.jpg let i=i+1 done ### STEP 2 - take 4 JPG files at a time ### and compile them into new 2x2-images i=0 nroffiles=`ls $t/*.jpg | wc -w` let nrofiterations=nroffiles/4 while [ $i -lt $nrofiterations ] do ## helper variables to access file names let f=i*4 let a=f+0 let b=f+1 let c=f+2 let d=f+3 echo "creating a$i.jpg ($a.jpg $b.jpg $c.jpg $d.jpg)" ## compile the 4 separate images into a 2x2-grid. ## please change the parameter 768x1024 if you ## don't have a 3:4 aspect ratio montage $t/$a.jpg $t/$b.jpg $t/$c.jpg $t/$d.jpg -tile 2x2 -geometry 768x1024 $g/a$i.jpg let i=i+1 done ### remove the tmp directory rm -rf $t
The images created by this script look somewhat like this one (individual pictures taken from http://www.freeimages.co.uk/)
Not very advanced stuff, I know, but I think it's a nice combination of some handy tools to make a nice present.
P.S. 1: I know that there are more elegant ways to write the shell-script, but for my purposes and skills this was the quickest way to go.
P.S. 2: I think the 7.5x5.5cm format is optimal for a flip book. Wouldn't it be easy and fun to create your own flip book story with the continuous shooting mode of your digital camera?
Labels:
bash,
convert,
develop photos,
imagemagick,
miniature,
montage,
pragmatic,
useful
Friday, April 6, 2012
ImageUploader as Java Web Start
In older blog posts I reported about my ImageResizer/Uploader appplication.
A while ago I turned it into a Java Swing application, startable via Java Web Start.
Short description
It's a tiny but very useful software to resize and upload a bunch of JPG-files to a Google Picasa Web Album. It´s perfectly suitable for travellers in countries with slow Internet connections. The idea behind this software is the following: A full-sized JPG files on a digital camera with (let´s say) 3 MB has only 300 KB if it is resized to 70% of its original size, but has (nearly) the same quality. So Internet-backups can be made 10-times as fast.
You can find it here:
https://sites.google.com/site/dbimageuploader/home
Please don't forget to read the "Background" section:
https://sites.google.com/site/dbimageuploader/background
A while ago I turned it into a Java Swing application, startable via Java Web Start.
Short description
It's a tiny but very useful software to resize and upload a bunch of JPG-files to a Google Picasa Web Album. It´s perfectly suitable for travellers in countries with slow Internet connections. The idea behind this software is the following: A full-sized JPG files on a digital camera with (let´s say) 3 MB has only 300 KB if it is resized to 70% of its original size, but has (nearly) the same quality. So Internet-backups can be made 10-times as fast.
You can find it here:
https://sites.google.com/site/dbimageuploader/home
Please don't forget to read the "Background" section:
https://sites.google.com/site/dbimageuploader/background
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)