Pop

Just finished a new game for my kids, Pop. There seems to be a lot of kids games on the Play market that are laden with ads or in-app purchases that snare my kids into clicking. So I created Pop with no such gimmicks. Its a simple game with a simple purpose. Keep my kids distracted for a time. The whole game was inspired by a favorite LDS children's song "Popcorn Popping" by Georgia W. Bello. The kids pop the cherry blossoms and more grow back in its place. I originally intended to have the Popcorn Popping song playing in the background but I have currently failed to get copyright. It takes 4-6 months I'm told to get approval. If and when that comes I'll update the game to include the song as I originally intended.

Clover Sense LTE on Google TV

Turns out getting Clover Sense to work on the my google TV was very easy. So I went ahead and released a new version called Clover Sense LTE. All the same great game play but with ad support. I also tied into the remote since a touch screen is usually not present in such devices. Surprisingly there isn't mush competition on the TV market so mines is the only clover game. One thing I noticed is that its a lot harder to find clovers when your sitting 6 feet away. Lets just say the channel up and down buttons are your friends as they zoom you in and out. Happy hunting!

Clover Sense on the Android Market!

Well it took awhile but I finally released Clover Sense into the wild! I must say I find this to be exciting. The idea for this game came to me a little less then a year ago when I was taking my daughter for a walk. For years I have always scanned every clover patch I walk by looking . Luckly while I was walking with my daughter I found one and it got me thinking that such an activity would make a great game. From there I was off with proto types and wild ideas of exploding clovers. And now today we will see if that clover I found will provide me with any real luck. Here's hoping for a million downloads. Check it out if you have the equipment.
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.nutech.games.cloversense&feature

eNumerate

I finally created my first android app. I recently found myself in need of a decent counter to help collect statistics data. Unfortunately all of the free counting apps on the Android market all seemed to force the user to click a tiny virtual button. As a result it was very easy to miss count. After I started codeing I did find another counting app that used the entire screen to count (tallybee) which was nice but it really wasn't fun to use. I decided that if I  was going to be counting that I wanted something fun to use. Thats why I created eNumerate.
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.nutech.eNumerate&feature=search_result.
The idea is simple. Attach a sprite fountain to a internal reference counter. Every tap on the screen spawns a new sprite which then randomly spirals out into the distance. I figured the more animation I had the more fun it would be. The only down side is that I sometimes forget what I am counting and just watch the animation. It can be distracting.  I also added some minor features to round out the experence. First I added the ability to count up or down. I'm not entirely sure why anyone would want to count backwards but I do change the animation to a yellow sphere with a minus sign. Although now that I think about it I should have reversed the animation as well. That would have been cool. Perhaps a future release. Anyways the color change is enough to let the user know that something new is happening. The next feature I implemented was to change the total count display to also indicate the direction of counting. Green for counting up, Yellow for counting down and Red for making a correction. I then added some menus and state saving info noting fancy. If I think of it at a time when I am more motivated I'll post some of my code and perhaps make this blog useful to someone other then me. For now you will just have to check it out on the market
 https://market.android.com/details?id=com.nutech.eNumerate&feature=search_result
At the time of this post I am up to 25 downloads. For some reason I thought that a free app would have alot more attention, but then again I guess my app is only one in a million. Also unfortunately eNumerate is one of those apps that you really need to try because the screen captures don't show anything useful. So maybe I am loosing peoples interest before they even try to download it. My other theory is that the name is too witty. Perhaps i should have calling "counting chaos" or something more descriptive the eNumerate. This is why I am a salery engineer ... marketing and sales is not within my skill set.

Time to Engage

I've finally started a blog. My goals in this is to try to document my adventures in Android application development as well as my other various side projects. Unfortunately I rarely feel the urge to document. I rather just program and build. However as I tend to forget things from time to time it will probably be a performance boost if I provide some notes here and there, now and again. That being said I think I will come back later to write about my first android app, eNumerate, and my progress on the lawn mowing robot, LawnBot.