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the idea behind this series of tutorials is to form a guide, an online book for all to see. its not all fun and games, we will be starting the right way with the theory. theres too many tutorials and books in the world that just start you off on writing code in an easy to learn language, they rush you through the basics and forget to teach you the art. this is pretty bad for you as a wannabe programmer, programming is an art / discipline that doesnt follow strict guidelines, theres no real right or wrong, once you know the art of programming any language becomes easy to learn (with the exception of binary) and all that really changes is the framework that the language may offer.

update: i should mention this is the first version of the text, it still needs to be changed to suit beginners but the basic outline is there.

take me to the rest of back to the basics - part #1

sat with my macbook pro looking out onto london, dark clouds stretching over the city. london looks a dark place tonight, thank fuck im inside listening to itunes on party shuffle. its strange to think that its august already, the past year is going too quick.

at least december will be with us soon, by far the best month of the year. the first layers of snow hit in the earth, and its time to gather friends to head to the mountains. this season im hoping to go to bulgaria with sam spend a week or so tearing up the slopes. then hopefully go somewhere mid-season (feb / march), i think my signal board will still be strong enough. though i need to repair the damage from last year, hit a few rocks jumping over streams and such. also need to invest in a new pair of boots, my feet seemed to of growed and my lovely thirtytwo’s are abit small for me now, which is a shame. im tempted to get the new thirtytwo’s exus boa in white, boa is an awesome system means you dont have laces in your boots instead an easy turn dial that tightens the thin metal wire around the boot.

the days keep fading into night, lost through time.

got my nike+ the other day, hoping it will help me improve my running since it keeps all my stats and such. the one thing that is annoying is the flash widgets, so im tempted to write a wordpress widget for displaying the data from nike+ then i can style with it with css.

was thinking about writing up a series of programming tutorials, to turn n00bz into programmers and good ones at that. most tutorials around the net, start you off on a simple language like java, really its best to start on a more low level language like C and C++ or assembly if your feeling brave. then when you happily understand the fundamentals of programming the different languages become easier to use and all that really becomes a pain is the different framework names.

again completely changing subjects; shortly i should have subversion repositories for firemint and expose. for other developers that wish to contribute, or developers that prefer to update via subversion and have the bleeding edge builds.

any how, off to see dark knight

well, its finally ready firemint v2b1 and expose v0.2, there both still in beta and lack features that will be included in the full version (firemint v2 / expose v1). at the moment quite alot of stats are missing from firemint, this will change shortly.

before you use either expose or firemint, make sure your comfortable with using beta applications. information on installing each application and download links are below;

http://84degrees.com/firemint/
http://84degrees.com/expose/

knock yourselves out

spent the night yesterday adjusting the look and feel on my blog as well as adding in the sidebar. looks a bit better now, and it’s actually possible to navigate! though I’m still missing the post navigation, hopefully il fix it up soon. im still not so sure on the current “design” im using, wish my design skills were a bit better.

for the past few weeks, iv been using flock 2 beta as my browser. the more i use it, the more annoyed im getting with it. the UI isnt as nice as the rest of my mac apps, the top bar is insanely cluttered, the youtube media stream messages make it impossible to play a youtube video, the twitter sidebar is utter crap; it never updates and the user flow isnt the best. the idea for the browser is brilliant, i like the idea of being able to drag images from the media bar into a textarea, its nice having twitter right in your browser. the idea’s are all good, but the flocksters have implemented them poorly (yes, i know i use the beta. i should expect bugs, but i get the same problems in flock 1). the flock team seem to be pushing more new features in releases rather than bug fixes and improvements on old features, i guess this is what to expect when projects become commercialised, the dark force of money and greed take priority over a decent product. flock fail.

/rant over

btw, wrote this post from the wordpress iphone app, nice to use though not so desirable for long posts.

these days im finding it harder and harder to write posts, can never think of what to say or what to talk about. today its the same, open flock’s post editor, just left it sat there with an empty textbox.

sometime in the future (6 hours or so) …

recently iv been changing my life around abit, trying to improve myself!! iv stopped smoking cigarettes, started running, redesigned my blog, renewed some old projects like firemint, started game development and iv started studying AS / A2 advanced maths from a few textbooks. the aim is to make myself better, and to keep improving my knowledge. w00t w00t!

in the game development area i’ve been thinking about some ideas for iphone games. after watching my flatmate play quake (from cydia) i realised a first person shooter really doesn’t work on the iphone. instead a time crisis game style could work quite nicely, since the user doesn’t need to control the movement of the character (as in moving around a map not aiming). time crisis works by moving the user’s character to points around a map, at each point the user can crouch behind an object and fire at a group of enemies. its generally a multiplayer arcade game that uses a gun as a controller, on the iphone the accelerometers could be used to move the cross hair to shoot enemies, a touch on the screen could simply toggle the crouch mode / change weapon.

my second idea is a bit different, simple game where the user controls a spaceship and can move around a 3d environment to shoot down enemies. the accelerometers being used to control movement, touch on the screen controls shooting and weapons. after i told beef, he had the geeky idea to make it star wars themed, user flies an x-wing star fighter and shoots down tie fighters.

might start one of the ideas as an open source project, stick it in cydia or maybe app store depending on how it goes.

on a different note, last night i decided to add multiple mint support to firemint v2. amazingly it wasn’t too much of pain to implement, xD

sssssssssssssssssssssssshhh