Matthew Tighe

Super Monaco GP Inspired HTML 5 Canvas Demo

2011-07-18T13:18:00.004Z

Quite a while ago I ported a short 2D racing engine demo I'd done in Flash to Javascript using the HTML 5 canvas object.

While at IOMO I worked on several racing games include Pursuit Squad, Chase HQ and Colin Mcrae Rally 05, FPR Superbikes and Le-mans 2004. By the end I could code a racing game in my sleep (and had too in some cases) ;-)

Anyway, I've put the demo up on my website, link below. It's in no way optimised and for a real game you'd almost certainly use DOM objects for the sprites but, I was surprised how quick it was to port. Basically only a few hours - the major issue was converting a few of the integer calculations to work correctly with rounded floats.

I've only really tried it in Safari on my mac, but it did run on my iPhone classique, although pretty slowly. It nicely heats up my Macbook Pro, so can be used to warm your freezing hands in the current beautiful British summer - if nothing else!

Maybe one day we'll actually make a game out of it at Megadev.

iRacing USB Racing Dashboard

2010-04-29T17:59:00.005Z

I've had a broken leg for a while so I've been finding more and more elaborate ways to waste my spare time...

One such way was to increase my iRacing safety racing so I can graduate out of the rookie class and drive some fun cars. For anyone who hasn't driven iRacing I would highly recommend it, its the closest thing to a real racing I've found. http://www.iracing.com

I've had a Microchip PIC18F4550 microcontroller lying around for a while which was destined for my motion seat controller. So I dug it out and thought I'd see how easy it was to create a simple led dashboard similar to those in current F1 cars, from the minimum of parts on some breadboard.

It doesn't look pretty, but I was really surprised how easy it was to build a functioning USB device. All in all it took about a day spread out over the weekend. I was lucky to find WaitingForFriday.com the wiki of Simon Inns. His article on building a USB pic device was great.

First step was to get the PIC working and hooked up to my PICKit 2 programmer. This was straight forward. It's important to use the power smoothing capacitor otherwise you get programming errors.

After I sorted that I was able to read and program the chips flash memory without trouble. However it had no inputs or outputs so wasn't particularly fascinating!

USB Interface

The PIC18F4550 contains a fully working USB interface. In order to run USB the PIC has particular clock speed requirements - using a 20mHz clock crystal and a couple of small capacitors gave an external clock source compatible with USBs requirements.

I had to build a small adapter to fit the USB plug onto the breadboard. This was a bit of strip board with some pins soldered into it.

In order to test the USB you need to download the Microchip USB framework which is contained in the Microchip Application Libraries. This gives you a fully working USB stack for the device and some PC source code to communicate with it in a variety of examples that are ready to go using MPLAB and the M18 C Compiler.

It took quite a while to get the PC and PIC talking over USB due to a short between the socket case and the adapter board. Once that was solved I was able to program the device with the USB Bootloader.

The bootloader allows you to program the device via USB, so now the PICKit 2 is consigned to my desk drawer. All thats needed is to short a pin when you turn the device on (or add a switch ;-) and the device will enter the bootloader, otherwise it runs your code.

Both the USB stack and boot loader have a configuration file that needs altering for your specific configuration (as you could have switches and leds on any port on the PIC). Choosing the config for the PICDEM2 usb board was approximate to my configuration, I modified this to suit my needs.

The Display

The displays are 7 segment led displays and the rpm indicator is 15 superbright 3mm leds.

7 control lines connect the anodes of each segment to the PICs PORTB output.

PORTA is used as an open collector output to ground the cathode to the relevant display. To do this the output is set to zero, and the TRISA register bit to 0 when the output should current sink (led on) and 1 when it should drain (led off).

The same control scheme is used for the LEDs, arranged into 3 banks of 5.

The firmware I wrote for the PIC multiplexes the output for all the displays, activating the required segments of each display (or led bank) one at a time - switching between them faster than the eye can see to make a solid display.

iRacing Telemetry

Hacking together a quick console app to control the Dash from iRacing was relatively simple too. I took the code from the Microchip USB PC sample (removed it's dependancy on .NET - a case of changing it to use CStrings and the correct Setup API func prototypes) and integrated in into the iRacing sample app to send the rpm and gear to the dash.

Here's the result:

Invocation - Destroy thy-self!

2009-12-30T18:01:00.008Z

I've been working over the past few days to tidy up some code I've done in one of our new iPhone games.
The tools that come with iPhone SDK for profiling and debugging are pretty good for a C based environment. However every now and again you come across a bug that reminds you this is a native language.

Although the retain/release concept is very simple it often produces confusing bugs relating to premature deallocation of objects. The reason being that the errors thrown up can easily be somewhere down the line as a result of a future memory access/alloc/free failing on the FREED object. Because these errors can occur elsewhere in the code (often seemingly at random locations) - these kind of problems can be *very* tricky to debug.

This particular issue was quite interesting:

One of my UI controls is a Button that accepts an onclick action from script. This onclick action is simply parsed as a selector that belongs to the current screen. It's used to script menus etc. simply and bind them to simple methods of the current screen.


-(void)setOnClick:(id) reciever Selector:(SEL) selector
{
  [ clickInvocation release ];
  clickInvocation = nil;

  onClickReciever = reciever;
  onClickSelector = selector;

  if( onClickReciever != nil )
  {
    NSMethodSignature *sig = [ [ reciever class ] 
               instanceMethodSignatureForSelector:selector ];
    clickInvocation = [ NSInvocation
                  invocationWithMethodSignature:sig ];
    [ clickInvocation setTarget: onClickReciever ];
    [ clickInvocation setSelector: onClickSelector ];

    // If the selector takes an extra argument it's th
    // event source.
    if( [ sig numberOfArguments ] > 2 )
       [ clickInvocation setArgument:&self atIndex:2];

    [ clickInvocation retainArguments ];
    [ clickInvocation retain ];
  }
}

-(void)clicked
{
  if( clickInvocation != nil )
  {
    [ clickInvocation invoke ];
  }
}

You can see form the short code excerpt that when the onclick string is set, it simply creates an NSInvocation which the Button can invoke each time it gets clicked.

This has worked flawlessly until I started doing some profiling in Instruments yesterday.... I noticed that going between 2 menus in rapid succession, after a few times would crash... with seemingly random errors in malloc_error_break or EXC_BAD_ACCESS in many different parts of code.

Finding The Cause

I could see it was something to do with clearing the menus, and after exhaustively profiling the retain/release cycles of my XML parsing and UI code I started to think it must be threading. This was a no-go because all the touch events and drawing happen from the same NSRunLoop - and hence same thread.

Chasing the cause of the seemingly random errors in the debugger led me all over my XML parsing, drawing code and even to main(int argc, char *argv[]) - I was starting to wonder what was going on!

Finally I decided to try to reproduce the problem from a test harness without any touch input. Displaying the menus quickly in succession proved no problems, but as soon as I start to poke the Button's touch events to do it the problems re-occured.

Delving deeper; I started to poke the button's onclick internals until finally I realised what was going on...

At Last!

For Button's, often the selector set on onclick is one which shows a different menu. This means that selector is responsible for removing the current menu from the screen, which in turn will release all of the menus contents, releasing the Button which has just been pressed.

You'd assume that is not a problem, but obviously it is for the NSInvocation - when it gets deallocated before it has returned!

Solution

The fix is obviously to retain the NSInvocation before you call invoke and release afterward in the Buttons onclick method.
It is odd that you can deallocate an object that is part of the current call stack, but understandable I suppose on the grounds that the runtime doesn't want to incur the overhead of retaining each object on the stack.

In any case that's several hours of my life that I won't get back ;-) Now back to the original profiling task!

Motion Racing Seat Update

2009-10-20T17:21:00.009Z

It's been a while since my last post because I'm so busy...(yeah yeah I know everyone says that :-) ).

We're working on an exciting new iPhone game at Megadev which is starting to look great.
That coupled with me trying to sort out the business plan, pitch and tech demo for my new startup idea is taking pretty much all my time outside of the day job.

Anyway, this weekend I did find a few hours to work on my Motion Racing Seat again. After many months ticking over in the background I've finally got the whole thing bolted together properly including sturdy wheel and pedal mounts.

Having the pedals and wheel mounted securely makes a big difference to the feeling of immersion. I've made the horizontal width of the frame quite small deliberately to mimic what it is like for me inside a single seat cockpit. IIt feels great now and I even end up bracing myself with my knee's against the frame as I enter fast corners (exactly what I used to do in my Formula Ford!).

Apart from the frame, I also took some time to finish off the motion algorithms. After a lot of debugging they're finally silky smooth. They are a simple implementation off fairly standard motion cuing algorithms used in larger simulators:

High-pass filtered g-force is scaled and applied directly to the platform angle.

Low-pass filtered g-force is scaled and applied to the platform in the washout.

Finally there is a low-pass output smoothing.

Other than my own motion software, the seat could also be compatible with the open source X-Simulator software with a few minor tweaks - although my motion software is much simpler to use (all automatic).

So while It's not the best motion sim out there, the great thing is that it's produced from mostly off the shelf components, doesn't need any special tools to put together and is very cheap (comparatively). Power comes from a single laptop sized power supply (but 24v at 4 amps), so there is a lot of power but it's not hugely dangerous either.

I'm kicking around the idea of putting the plans on the net and possibly selling the few difficult to source components as a kit with the motion software. I would assume there are some pretty massive legal obligations to fulfil there for safety and public liability insurance? so maybe that will never happen - but you never know.

After watching Jenson Button win the F1 World Championship this Sunday (good lad!) I took the sim for a spin around Interlagos, Brazil in RFactor and it was really great and much more immersive than before by an order of magnitude.

A few things left to tidy up though... the lower frame is a bit to0 small so the sim is not quite as stable as it should be and the motor controller needs the wiring tidied up with the whole lot mounting under the seat somewhere.

Shouldn't be too hard to finish it off... hope I can find the time soon.

Silicon Valley Trip

2009-07-20T14:24:00.004Z

So I've finally decided to bite the bullet and organise myself a trip to Silicon Valley.

It should be a good break from everyday work and what better place to concentrate building up some of my own startup ideas into something more solid.

One idea in particular I'm quite excited about.

Anyway... I'm trying to find a hotel in San Fransisco so I can look around in the evenings with day trips into the heart of the 'valley.

Still building up a list of places, but my first thoughts are in my Trip Google Map.

A lot more research to do but should be very inspiring!

Reinventing The Leaderboard

2009-05-04T19:14:00.004Z

I've been working a lot recently on the iPhone/iTouch version of Megadev's Knightfall it's coming along well so expect some teaser videos to be released soon.

As mentioned previously we've had Time4Cat developed to a reasonable level for a while but I've been waiting to establish an overall strategy before we finish it off as I'd like to make sure our games cross-promote themselves properly.

Getting a game written and released for iPhone can be done in a pretty short time (Bomboozle is proof of that!) but realistically most games now require some server side "App Services" such as Highscore Leaderboards, Adverts, and Downloadable Content to deliver what consumers expect.

For advertising, we had some mild success with AdMob but I think the adverts look amaturish and there's not enough creative control (a tiny poorly resized icon and a snippet of text).

With leaderboards there's a lot of noise about OpenFeint recently but I don't feel like it offers the kind of integration that we want and at the moment I'm not sure what the terms will be once it's not free anymore.

So with a case of not invented here syndrome I've decide we can do better so I'm going to roll our own Mega App Services platform for casual games. This will culminate in a re-release of Bomboozle 1.2 including leaderboards, cross promotion of apps with a high degree of customisation (and a great user experience) and other tbd online functionality.

The same platform will then be used to release Time4Cat which we will be a free title in the lead up to the Knightfall release. All of the new releases will use the latest version of our Objective-C/OpenGL development library which includes some pretty special stuff for handling gestures and XML->Object mapping (Obj-c has some great features in this area). I'm in the process of sorting out my own website where I'll start posting technical articles on the development of all the apps for anyone interested.

Quite a lot of work ahead but hopefully the 1.2 release of Bomboozle wont be too far off, stay tuned for more updates...

2009-04-02T17:20:00.006Z

I had a brainwave yesterday which has resulted in an idea I'm exploring that would involve me creating a service that would produce some iPhone apps via a web console.

No point in me saying yet what those binaries would be, or what they would be for ;-) as I'm unclear on whether the iPhone dev agreements would quash the requirements.

I'm posting here because it may be of general interest to people when/if I do find out... and also because some of you may know already! ;-) The key points are below:

Produce an iPhone app from externally provided content.
Will Apple approve an app if the content was not yours and you are publishing on behalf of someone.

I assume so as this is what publisher's do, therefore I would be acting as a publisher.

Sign development apps with someone else's certificate.
Need some way to allow app stakeholders to test the apps, if they had there own certs then great.

Obviously unsigned for the simulator is one option.

Ad-hoc distribution setup is another option, but it has the draw back of being a manual process (unless someone has automation hooks into itunes connect?) and limited in numbers.

Would Apple dis-approve in general?
Difficult to go into full detail here but the said apps would all be completely unique and creative they would just have aspects that weren't created directly in x-code and obj-c.

I'll be delving in to the Developer and App Store agreements and for anyone out there: Answers on a postcard please...

--- Update ---
Looks like Adobe got there first and added an iPhone compiler to the next version of Flash.
Oh well - great minds and all that ;-)

I was proposing to just compile code written for our Flash game framework into the associated iPhone version. Adobe's solution is better compiling the Action script directly and using LLVM to optimise and translate the code to ARM machine code. Will be interesting to see what the porting implications for app developers are due to the hardware constraints on the iPhone, memory foot print will be a big one I suspect as most flash apps are pretty hungry.

Time4Cat: Next iPhone/iPod Touch Game

2009-02-02T21:32:00.002Z

Been pretty busy at work recently but I've managed to get a decent WIP demo done for our next iPhone/iPod touch game.

Called Time4Cat (it will become clear below) the Flash game is already available here, but the Apple version will include accelerometer control, new animations and hopefully a 2 player mode.

"A stray city cat finds a mysterious time-controlling collar and uses it to steal dropped food during a busy lunch break. Don't get stepped on!"

Apple Love...

2009-01-06T18:56:00.002Z

On another note as it's MacWorld Keynote day and probably the last one it's my duty to say get well soon to Steve jobs and then to mention a couple of great things for Mac history lovers out there.

I'm faschinated by the birth of the computer industry particularly the dawn of the graphic age and the Mac was right there as the guiding light.

Some time last year I got a great coffee table book called "Revolution in the Valley", written as a series of anecdotes compiled by Andy Hertzfeld - one of the original Mac team. It's a great read with really nice presentation and some good photos of various stages of software and hardware development. For me it captures the essence of creativity that is born from those steps into what was essentially a virgin area. Check out Andy Hertzfeld's website which is the inspiration for the book.

The reason I'm dredging this up is that my DVD copy of "Welcome to Macintosh" finally arrived this morning timed perfectly for Macworkd :-S Check out the website at http://welcometomacintosh.com/Welcome.html for more information.

Looks like it'll be a "bad tv" night for my girlfriend tonight ;-)

Bomboozle Lite, App Store Experiences So Far...

2009-01-06T18:08:00.005Z

As we have now launched the Bomboozle Lite (the free version) on the App Store I thought I'd share some of my first experience of the app store.

Bomboozle has consistent daily sales however its certainly nothing to write home about. If I compare it Pursuit Squad (which was my first ever commercial mobile game sold), the return on the effort to develop it is quite low. Pursuit Squad, developed in 2002 in the evenings when I wasnt working, if I recall managed to earn about £7000, and bagged a job at IOMO (one of the leading Mobile Studios at the time). Bomboozle certainly wont earn me that in the same timeframe, especially as the earnings are split between art, design, code etc. We've yet to see how quickly the sales will drop off with age, this will be the ultimate limiter on earnings. In contrast, some of the mobile games we worked on back when I was at IOMO I'm pretty sure would have almost paid my salary for a whole year!

Another area of interest is App Store pricing. Many people are waxing lyrical about 59p being the ultimate price point. Bomboozle sells almost exact the same at £1.79 (which I think is what it's reaistically worth) and 59p (way too low). The only difference being you make 3 times the profit at the higher price - it's less than a coffee for heavens sake!
Anyway like I said, good news developers you can charge more than 59p for your apps ;-)

The traffic and sales on the App Store, in my opinion are purely related to the discoverability of your app. This makes it vital to get your app at the top of the "Release Date" list so that casual browsers have a chance to see it. Doing this is easier said than done because of some oddities around Release Dates and Submission of App Store Applications.

Spending time sending out press releases to review sites seems to be of utmost importance too, but it's quite difficult to get features amongst so many other games especially if there are larger releases happening at the same time, so time your releases carefully. Spending some time in forums of the various sites seems to be a good move, as does give away promo codes. (I gave away 10 free copies of the game on Touch Arcade forums and that got us some much needed good reviews in the US store).

So... Release Date... for some reason the Release Date of your app is the Date of Approval by Apple OR the Availability Date you set when you post the app whichever is earlier. This comcially means that if you set a availability date in the future giving enough time for submission, press releases etc. - your app will have its Release Date set to the time of approval (which could be days before it is set to become available). This robs you off the eyeballs and your rightful place in the first page of "Release Date" listings in the app store - bad times :-(

You can get your app onto the first page by carefully monitoring your emails and iTunes connect. As soon as the app is approve you can set the availability date to that day and then fingers crossed you'll get a shot at that front page ;-)

Finally... we have seen some decent success by releasing the lite version. Mainly I suspect because it drives a whole new set of eyes towards your app. In many cases a free app seems to be the best advert for your main app. Other forms of advertising seem hap-hazard for all but the game fans that are checking the review sites. We were getting thousands of click-through from the ad's in our Flash game.. but the conversion rate is super low as those people are not likely customers. The best bunch of potential customers are the people trawling the app store on their iPhones. A quick note on the iTune affiliate scheme... very low revenue (single digits dollars so far), plus different schemes for each country so overly hard to setup.

So what's the bottom line... don't quit the day job, keep the team very tight, try and get some good press/reviews and most of all use the app store release date and lite version to get some eyes pointing towards your app.

Hopefully the fingers will follow!

Bomboozle on App Store

2008-11-29T13:50:00.007Z

Only a few days after submission to Apple, Bomboozle has gone live on the iTunes App Store.

The whole process of putting an application onto the App Store has been really easy and a testament to Apple's setup. When you realise that your app is now for sale across the world and they handle all the payments and reconciliation it's pretty impressive and once again Apple leveraging an existing platform to great effect.

Use the button below to take you to the Bomboozle page in iTunes.

Bomboozle iPhone Complete

2008-11-24T21:25:00.008Z

My first iPhone game project with my colleagues at Megadev is now complete. Bomboozle is a fiendishly addictive puzzler which has proved to be very popular on the flash gaming scene.

The iPhone port has all the original game modes, a great touch interface which feels really intuitive and several tweaks specifically for the iPhone version.

For the tech-heads out there; its written in Objective-C using OpenGL for all the graphics. I'll be writing some articles soon on a few areas of interest that cropped up during the development. All in all it's been pretty smooth as iPhone/OSX is a great platform to work on.

All being well the game should be submitted to the iTunes App Store tomorrow evening and available to buy at a reasonable price very soon!

Motion Seat - Fully Loaded

2008-11-16T16:34:00.004Z

Quick update as my new Sparco race seat arrived and I was able to get it bolted to the frame to test out my motion sim prototype fully loaded.

The test went well, I was driving for around an hour with no problems and able to increase the range of movement which can all be seen in the video. There's certainly no shortage of power and you can see I get shaken around a bit on a few gear changes ;-)

My focus now will switch to the software development; at the moment its basically mapping g-force directly to deflection of the seat. Next I'll be mixing in the attitude information and perhaps rotation cues. Speed of movement is also important to human perception of motion so I have several experiments to do to settle on the best mix of motion cues.

Full Size Motion Seat

2008-11-09T19:25:00.005Z

Finally... its been a long time coming but the firsts tests of my full size motion seat for racing simulators have been quite successful.

Its taken a long time to try out the various methods for positioning and motor control, along with coming up with a suitably strong design for the frame. The video below shows the movement in conjunction with Live for Speed using a updated custom outsim app that I wrote previously for my small scale test. I'm holding the camera and driving so its not that easy to discern all the motion.

The seat is still not bolted to the frame securely but, I couldn't resist gingerly sitting down into it in order to turn a few laps in Live for Speed. It's a great feeling as you accelerate off and the sit tips back, quite realistic. What surprised me is how little actual movement is needed to create the feeling of motion. The motion has quite decent resolution (you can see gear shifts tipping the seat in the video).

The platform design is very compact and is using Permanent magnet DC motors with hall effect position sensors. At the moment its hooked up to a 4 amp 24v power supply which seems to provide more than enough juice with my 13 stone frame sat in the seat ;-)

It needs a little extra bracing to stop some unwanted movement and a better seat that can be bolted down. I hope to be able to produce a kit which will include the motion base pre-assembled and ready to go... so all the consumer does is bolt on the seat of their choice and race.

Bomboozle iPhone

Some of my ex-IOMO workmates have founded a studio working on casual games in flash and across other self-publishable platforms. Check out www.megadev.co.uk, I've started work with them on a few projects. One of which is an iPhone port of their popular flash game called Bomboozle, the original flash version of which can be found at www.mindjolt.com/games/bomboozle.

It's pretty close to being finished and our Apple App Store contact is inked, stay tuned for some screenshots and details of a release date.

Apple Macbook Event, Blackberry cooking up a storm...

2008-10-10T07:52:00.005Z

A Storm Brewing...

With the announcement of the Blackberry Storm, its seems Rim are after a slice of the iPhone pie. After all with ActiveSync licensed and therefore Exchange push email completely free for use on the iPhone they must be worried about the stability of their core business.

As the device goes it looks ok and I'm interested to see how the touch manifests itself as the word is that the screen offers "tactile" feedback. Whether thats just a little vibration as Nokia use with the new 5800 tube phone is of the most interest to me.

The interesting thing is the proposed BlackBerry App Store and Mac sync software which is taking probably the most direct swipe against the iPhone in this product.

But once again as with the Nokia 5800 UI - the overall polished feel of the iPhone looks absent. Nobody lives and breathes user experience like Apple I suppose. Obviously until people have used the device in anger we must reserve judgement on the whole experience but it certainly looks like a bold new step for Rim though and I'm eagerly awaiting working on the device.

New MacBooks!

Now the best news I've had for a while! Looks like Apple are set to introduce the new notebook range next week. I'm a Macbook (white) user at the moment, great little machine - love the design and very solid. Yes - I've craved the keyboard, extra power and dual-link DVI of the MacBook Pro range but parts of the case styling seemed a bit coarse to me.

It looks like they've made the speaker grills finer according to posts at Apple Insider which was one of my main beefs, although I hope they don't move the the slimline Air style keyboard on all models. The 13" range is also due for an update so I'll be eagerly awaiting the announcement.

Finally I'm working on a independent iPhone game project with some of my ex IOMO colleagues, details soon but it's pretty cool and I'll be looking to share some of my development experiences.

iPhone Developer Program: First Steps

2008-05-15T20:18:00.004Z

On Monday I checked my mail and to my surprise, I had an email from Apple saying my request to enter the iPhone Developer Program was accepted.

So I dutifully headed over to the Apple website, paid my £59 and waited a day for them to return my developer portal access.

Since then it's been pretty interesting... being able to put apps on the device has renewed my interest in iPhone development. Objective C is still taking some getting used to but it's actually quite elegant in some ways.

For example, the thing that strikes you first is method calling/declaration. You define the method as an english-language template with placeholders for the parameter arguments.

- (void)showAlertWithMessage:(NSString *)message ErrorCode:(int)errorcode

Defines a method with complete name showAlertWithMessage:ErrorCode, that has to parameters defined in place: message and errorcode.

[myobj showAlertWithMessage:@"Hello" ErrorCode:0]

Invoking the method on an object "myobj" is as simple as writing the template with the parameters in place indicated with colons. The interesting thing is how the first parameter description is built into what you initially think of as the method "name" from C/Java. In this case "showAlertWithMessage".

The method name in the Obj-C runtime is actually the complete concatenation of all of the descriptive parts.... quite elegant once you realise it is not a straight function/arguments type of statement.

However, the -/+ thing meaning instance/static(class) methods is still a bit odd though ;-)

Parsing an XML file looked straight forward and actually was once I realised that the Application is a bundle and therefore you need to use the NSBundle class to determine the path to it's resource directory (where all your files get placed when you build). I find that the documentation while in-depth is not always that easy to navigate.

After being used to Java and Eclipse, Xcode is also not quite as good it feels a bit old-skool (lot's of key pressed and window switching required.. but then hey... that's osx for you;-) ). The debugger works well and Xcode has some nice touches, like taking a screenshot from the device over the cable.

I'm currently doing some experiments on a driving game (surprise surprise) I have a steering mechanism using the accelerometer and the basics of 3d model import/display going. It's harder to program than something like XNA but it's definitely interesting and, it's reminded me how much fun learning a new platform can be...

Videos of My Beloved Formula Ford Car

2008-04-06T16:05:00.006Z

I finally got around to getting some videos of my old Formula Ford day's uploaded onto youtube. Editing the clips with iMovie on the Mac was really simple it's a great interface and very fast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq1cezLmb1o

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CTlIWBuaVY

The clips are from 2004 when I had just managed to cobble together enough money to get Steve Mole Motorsport to build a new car to pretty much the same spec as the works RaySport team. Silverstone was the 2nd outing for the car and I qualified 3rd finished 5th which was a pretty big step up for me. I was near the sharp end finally!

Sadly I ran out of money half way through the season and ended up selling the car a couple of years ago as I wasn't using it.

I'm hoping this year to be able to get a new car either in Formula Ford or hopefully BARC Formula Renault to get some slicks and wings action.

iPhone SDK

2008-03-09T22:59:00.004Z

So it's finally here, the official iPhone SDK that Apple said they would never need to release ;-)

Late last year I managed to get the un-official iPhone toolchain running on my Vista PC and I build a couple of simple demos. It was a mammoth task and although there was a thriving dev community documentation was a bit lacking (compared to my GBA hacking days).

Now thats all changed, Apple Developer connection has some good docs and video tutorials. Luckily I bought a Mac just in time because the SDK utilises Xcode for all development.

Getting your head around Objective-C is interesting; the frameworks provided seem pretty good. Apple have really followed a different path to most other platforms developing the OO technology of the NeXT days to it's fullest conclusion so far.

The inclusion of a new version of Dashcode for building widgets portable between iPhone and OSX is exciting. Widgets really seems to be emerging as the killer app for mobile 2.0 (a lot of my "day job" at Surfkitchen is focused around developing our white label mobile widgets solution Surfkit Phonetop recently debuted at MWC Barcelona).

Sadly it transpires that the OpenGL API doesn't work in the emulator and Apple are being a bit stingy with the hardware developer certificates but it should prove the source of some interesting blog posts in future...

How do you them... Apples

2008-01-26T11:53:00.000Z

After being a Microsoftie for many years, I finally bought an Apple Macbook this week to go along with my work iPhone and my new black turtle-neck ;-)

I've always followed the Mac's progress as it's roots are seated deeply in GUI history which I have always been fascinated by.

Coming to OSX from Windows Vista is an interesting experience.. I actually LIKE Vista it offers definitely productivity improvements over XP too. Initially Leopard looks a little bland now in comparison and the heavy font anti-aliasing used takes a bit of getting used to initially.

To begin with the weird "Zoom vs. Maximize" thing got on my nerves a bit and the Macbook lacks some keys like pgup/pgdown, delete and my beloved right mouse button!

In some places using OSX is a bit like a step back in time for various reasons that I can't fully articulate; with it's foundations in NeXTStep it's trodden a different path to most of the crowd.. This becomes VERY evident when you start looking at programming Cocoa and is very interesting (more on that in a future post).

But, soon you start to feel the real magic of the platform; the anti aliasing of the display really adds a "print" quality to the display... which with it's glossy coating looks beautiful. Harnessing the power of OpenGL throughout, the UI is very smooth and responsive. Apple have really got this right compared to the others who have tried in the Linux and Windows space.

The supplied software is great too, responsive and simple (I can see why Macs are so popular in the consumer space). The simplicity of the hardware and software design shows the trademark Apple flair throughout.

The bottom line is that I will still always have a place in heart for Microsoft, their software has enabled me to work well for many years and I think I will always use Windows PC's on a day to day basis but has gotten steadily more complex over the years for little gain.

The Macbook on the other hand is like a breath of fresh unpolluted air and I'm sure I will get many hours of great use out of it. I'm particularly interested to start programming for the platform especially as there is now a new outlet for OSX software on the iPhone (and I finally got the toolchain running before xmas!).

Insanely Great!....indeed.

More motion experiments

2008-01-06T17:07:00.000Z

Quick update on the motion stuff...

I created my own driver software that interfaces directly with LFS and hooked the motors up to Pulse Width Modulated outputs on the USB board.

The result is much smoother motion with better resolution. Video can be seen here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXh_3_sT8Z4

I'm starting to investigate micro-controller based positioning implementing the closed loop control inside a PIC microcontroller. I've also got hold of some full size motors and successfully tested them with my motor driver board. Next step is to work out some method of connecting a decent crank to the real motors...

Seat of the Pants

2007-12-30T15:24:00.000Z

As many of you know, I'm an avid racing enthusiast and I've got a pretty good setup at home for playing PC based racing simulations. One of my particular favourites is Live for Speed (www.lfs.net).

Most of these games are now realistic enough calculate the forces acting on the car/driver and many people have developed home-brew "motion seats" allowing the player to "feel" the car in the simulation.

One company in Japan (www.frex.com/gp) offers a commercial kit for building a home motion seat. I was particularly interested in this but concluded it is over expensive with prohibitive shipping costs and production delays.

I've decided to start out on a project to build a simpler kit providing a motion seat for home racing enthusiasts here in the UK and Europe. During my research I discovered a great piece of software called X-Sim (http://www.x-sim.de/) which already contains links to Live for Speed and connects to a variety of hardware interfaces. So with X-sim and a basic design in my head I set out to build a small model prototype of a motion seat...

The video above shows my first attempt at getting motion from a crude cardboard platform (complete with Teddy that my girlfriend Lucy got me during a holiday in Gozo ;-) ). The PC interface is a Velleman K8055 USB i/o card connected to a dual h-bridge motor driver IC. The 2 servo motors are basic RC servos with the electronics removed.

Although the X-Sim software is great (I would recommend it to any diy motion builder) it has a couple of constraints that are causing the motion not to be completely accurate. Also the servos used here are relatively slow and only driven at a single speed currently.

Anyway, it works pretty well for a quick design test. Obviously being made from cardboard and paper clips it is not perfectly calibrated but as a first foray into PC controlled motion... quite exciting!

Whats the RISC? Go Minimal...

2007-11-18T12:35:00.000Z

The new Intel Penryn Core 2 Duos are out now incoporating SSE4 that adds another 50 or so instructions heavily targeted at video codecs.

Whatever happened to RISC? Often touted as the next big thing it seems to have disappeared with the advent of ever more complicated systems.

The nice thing about the approach of risc was the finesse... rather than the sledge hammer approach we seem to take to problems these days (just throw some more code, ram, transistors, power, cooling at it).

Anyway, it's nice to see a couple of technologies around that show all is not lost. You may have read recently of Microsofts internal re-factoring of the Windows kernel into a minimal core:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=842

We've also seen Sun working on ways to reduce the foot print of the JRE to that which is actually relevant to the user in the Java Kernel project. http://weblogs.java.net/blog/enicholas/archive/2007/05/java_kernel_unm.html
Maybe I'm old fashioned; but I still like to think that efficient clever solutions can triumph over brute force.

Formula Ford Looses a Great Asset

2007-11-03T19:27:00.000Z

I've always had a passion for motorsport; the trouble is it's a rich mans sport!

Having said that after I left university, for several years I competed in Formula Ford Zetec races here in the UK scraping and blagging what cash I could here and there. I was lucky enough to hook up with Steve Mole Motorsport and eventually cobble together enough bank loans to buy my own car.. a 1999 Ray GRS99 Formula Ford Zetec.

Over the years I upgraded the car to full works spec (GRS2004) at the same time watching a truly great battle for the UK National Championship as the Rays became the class of the field with drivers such as Alx Danielson and now Nick Tandy.

I'd never have had a chance to go motor racing at that kind of level without the help of several key people especially Burt and Gavin from Ray race cars. Always eager to chat, give advice and generally accommodate my dodgy finances Burt was a true gent and hugely knowledgeable. You would struggle to get such a relationship with any other race car manufacturer unless you were on your way to F1.

So I was saddened to open this weeks Autosport magazine and read that Bert Ray passed away last week shortly after finally winning the UK Formula Ford Festival. I'd like to wish his family and friends well and hopefully the marque will continue to exist at the pinnacle of FFord for years to come.

Pushing Forward with User Interface Design

2007-05-07T20:04:00.000Z

A friend of mine from my days creating mobile games at IOMO has a knack for finding interesting snippets on the web. In his blog (www.glennbroadway.com) he recently posted a link to the website of Bret Victor.

Last year, Bret produced a truly thought inspiring thesis on user interface design. Check out the Magic Ink paper here.

It's a clever take on RAD and far departed from the CASE tools so popular in the 80's (from what I remember ;-) ). Definitely worth a look for anyone interested in contemporary user interface design.

Imitation: the sincerest form of flattery

2007-02-08T14:03:00.000Z

In an industry dominated by giant corporations, driving the prices of ever more encompassing software to rock bottom the little guy has found it hard to compete... show me more than 2 or 3 popular office suites?

Even the awesome powers of Open Source, IBM and Sun combined don't seem to be a match for the might of Microsofts dominance of the Office sector.

So the thing about Web 2.0 that excites me is the ability for small software companies to produce products that are truly useful... the model of an all encompassing suite of apps seems to be diminishing in front of our eyes. The web and online applications can be combined in all sorts of interesting ways with consumers able to pick the functionality they actually need!

Not only do the consumers get what they want, but a monopolized market where small vendors have been forced out many years ago get's revitalised. It's now viable for a small startup to come up with a good idea and maybe make some money. In the past you couldn't have got anyone interested in the business case for a new Word Processor.

With google looming on the horizon it's my hope that developers will start to use this time to innovate in application design; rather than just "ajax-ising" existing concepts.

The first step was imitating ease-of-use from desktop apps giving quick, hassle free access, anywhere.

We've done that.

Surely the next step is to try and evolve the whole user experience, free from the shackles of traditional corporate desktop thinking. Let's take some inspiration from the great past innovations at Xerox Park, Apple and Next and create some truly exciting stuff... What is the web if not the greatest melting pot of ideas?

Welcome

2007-02-08T13:56:00.000Z

Welcome reader!

In this blog I hope to present my take on the "future" of application based computing relating to the takeup of Web 2.0 and other various technologies.

This is an exciting time of change and this blog is partially just a sounding board for me to get all my ideas out rather than have them clutter up my head! So bear with me, you never know I might have a point once in a while.

Cheers,

Matt