Ok, maybe this isn’t the best route…

I began implementing the Managed Scripting engine into the MUD Creator Tool Kit and found that I wasn’t thrilled with how it was going to work. While the engine provided a simple approach to creating objects, it wasn’t practical for what I needed, and thus I have reverted back to the previous version of the Mud Creator Tool Kit using the XML file formats. I have also opted out of allowing custom expandability as the engine and tool kit are open sourced, so this removes the constraints I had when I was previously working on the Pre-Alpha edition of the kit. The original UI will be re-implemented and the engine will be useable once again by the end of tonight.

Technorati Tags: Mud Creator,Managed Scripting

MUD Creator redesign underway

I started Monday working on the re-write of the MUD Creator. I uploaded a new copy of the source to CodePlex SVN with all the source files deleted and slowly began commiting new files as I worked on them. The user interface will be re-designed from the ground up with the custom UI being trashed for a more traditional Windows UI. The editors will be seperated into seperate forms instead of having everything contained on a single form like the previous versions where. This should help make things a little easier to find and let me work on building a work flow through the menus.
I’ll be spending today working on it, designing the UI and focusing on fleshing out a couple classes that I uploaded to SVN.

– Posted from my iPhone

Apple Restored my iPhone

So i destroyed the screen on my iPhone the other night by dropping it face down on my driveway. I was expecting to pay $499 for a new one but was surprised when Apple told me my warrenty allowed me to buy one at $199. Still expensive but better than paying retail.
I really love how the iPhone works in regards to synchronizing. I went and bought my new phone last night, brought it home & plugged it into my laptop and once it was done restoring and syncing my phone was back to its old self. While it took almost two hours to do the restore and sync my data, it was worth the wait. No othe phone works so smoothly when it comes to restoring back ups.

Apple 1 everyone else 0

– Posted from my iPhone

Custom iPhone Ringtones. Make them Freely

I got tired of searching for free ways to take my existing music collection and create ringtones for my iPhone in a manor that did not cost me $19.99. There really isn’t that much involved in it, just cut up a song, and convert it to an AAC file that iPhones can play back. Seems simple right? Well I guess all the companies out there feel it’s a difficult thing to do, and so they charge you for the conversion process.

After doing some research I found that Nero offers a free set of command line based AAC tools for encoding WAV files into an AAC file. Sweet! Only thing I needed now was to cut up the song, which I can do easily with Audacity. Another free application.

What did I do? I wrote myself a quick little application called iPhoneRingtones that would use the AAC toolset and convert my WAV files exported from Audacity into AAC ringtones, rename the M4A filename to M4R (iPhone ringtone extension) and then copy the ringtone into the iTunes Ringtones folder, launch iTunes and add it to the iTunes library. It’s simple, quick and takes literally seconds to convert and add to the library.

I bundled the whole thing together in a zip file, including Audacity, the Nero AAC encoder Tools, and my iPhoneRingtones application. They can be downloaded HERE

The download includes instructions on setting it up and getting your music converted into an iPhone ringtone, for free! You can use MP3, OGG, AIF or WAV files to load into Audacity, cut the song up till you have what you want for a ringtone, and then EXPORT the song as a WAV file. Once exported run the iPhoneRingtones.exe application, browse to the neroAacEnc.exe which is found under the Encoder directory included in the downloaded ZIP file. Then you will need to select the directory of your iTunes Music Library. This MUST be the ‘iTunes Music’ folder. An example would be C:\Users\Scionwest\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music.

Once those two options have been set, click ‘Create Ringtone’ and select your WAV file. Once you have selected your WAV file, the app will launch the Nero Encoder and convert it into an iPhone ringtone, start iTunes, add it to your Ringtones library and tada! You can now select the ringtone from your iPhone Synchronize settings under the ringtones tab, and sync it.

One last note, I’ve found that ringtones longer than 30 seconds wont show up in the ringtones library. Keep your ringtones to 20~25 seconds so that iTunes will make sure it’s placed inside your phones ringtones library.

Technorati Tags: iPhone,Ringtones,AAC,Audacity

Amazon feeling the pressure

Acording to Slashdot, Amazon is prepping a Windows PC application that will allow windows users to read their Kindle books on their Windows PC, iPhones via Kindle for iPhone or the Kindle device.

This is an interesting twist, and something that I’ve felt Amazon has needed to do for quiet some time. Major players such as Google, Sony and Barnes & Noble are competing in the eBook market and Amazon I’m sure will be risking costumers if they do not follow suit and provide a desktop application for reading eBooks.

Personally for the cost of the Barnes & Noble Nook, Sony eReader or Amazon’s Kindle people can purchase an iPod Touch for less money, and download for free the Kindle of iPhone and download the Barnes & Noble for iPhone, both of which will read the entire library of Google Bookes, Barnes & Noble books and any other website that supports the widely popular ePub format.

Amazon is going to see some serious competition from Sony, Barnes & Noble and Google, and will have to offer ePub as a supported format on their Kindle device if they want to compete.

Technorati Tags: Google,Sony,Barnes & Noble,iPhone,Amazon

Follow me!

I have two different twitter accounts I have setup, one for random tweets about what I’m doing, and another for the Managed Scripting Engine. Come follow my tweets!

Scionwest Tweets

Managed Scripting Tweets

Technorati Tags: scionwest,twitter

Blogging\Tweeting from anyplace.

I spent the night setting up my laptop and iPhone so I can blog and tweet from them both while I’m at home or out and about doing things. For tweeting I have three different twitter apps on my iphone but found that Tweet Deck works best on the phone.

They have Tweet Deck iPhone and Tweet Deck PC, and between the two I am able to update my twitter account, and monitor the people I follow without much of a haste. Both applications are free to download and use which is a plus.

For RSS reading, I used Google Reader to act as a hub, allowing me to store all my RSS feeds there, then I downloaded RSS Bandit for Windows and monitor my feeds from my desktop as RSS Bandit allows for Google Reader synchronizing. For the iPhone I downloaded RSS which synchronizes with Google Reader as well. Now all of my RSS readers are synced together and I have all my basis covered. Like my Twitter apps, both RSS Bandit and RSS are free applications to download and use.

For blogging I use Windows Live Writer to post blogs from my PC, and I use BlogPress to post blogs from my iPhone. While Windows Live Writer is a free download provided by Microsoft, BlogPress costs $2.99. It’s well worth the cost, and there is a free version available HERE to try prior to buying.

Technorati Tags: iPhone,Blogging,RSS,Google,Twitter

Favorite 5 iPhone/iPod Touch Applications

Technorati Tags: iPhone

I currently own 243 iPhone applications, which caught me off guard a little bit when I was reviewing the apps within iTunes tonight. After realizing this, I decided to count the number of apps I actually have installed on the phone. I counted 6 pages, and after doing my math was surprised that the number came to 85. You don’t realize that there’s that many applications installed on your phone until you actually do the math. It’s quiet impressive that the phone runs so smooth with 85 applications sitting on it. Makes me glad that Apple restricts the phone to running only one app at a time. I could see the phone easily becoming lagged down by several memory intense applications running in the background, such as an RSS reader, Tweeter client and streaming radio. The phone would crawl to a stop.

With that having been said I decided I was going to look over my list of installed iPhone apps and plug a couple of them. Five to be exact.

1. MemoryInfo
   This app works great for quickly clearing the phones memory, I use it several times a day to clear it up and it greatly increases the speed and response time of the phone. As a side benefit it also shows the battery charge remaining and its current state.
2. Pocket Informant
   For those of you that have a Franklin Day Planner this app works great for letting me create calendar events, todo tasks and it syncs with Google Calendar which makes it even better. I purchased it while it was on sale, but at $12.99 it’s still a pretty good deal considering a Franklin Day Planner will run you roughly $60. They do have a LITE version that’s free, you can give it a test drive before buying it HERE
3. Pocket Tunes
   I spent the last year waiting for a solid app to come along that let me listen to streaming music in the background while I continue to use my phone for other things, such as sending a text message or reading my RSS feeds. It took 8 months, before I got Pocket Tunes and I have loved every minute of it. It is a little pricey at $6.99, but having the ability to listen to hours of streaming radio from 16,000+ radio stations is the best. Pocket Tunes can only play MP3 or AAC+ content in the background, so not all of the stations in Pocket Tunes can do it, as some are WMA, but for the most part, the stations that I’ve found and enjoyed listening to have all been MP3 or AAC+
4. Shazam
   Ever been in the car listening to the radio and wanted to know who sings the song that’s currently playing? Shazam takes care of that. Hold the phone against your speaker and it listens and tells you who the artist is, what song is playing, what album its from and even provides links to buy the song in iTunes, watch on YouTube or read the lyrics. It works very nicely.
5. RSSRunner
   This app works great as a stand alone iPhone rss aggregator, allowing users to search for feeds, import Google Reader feeds and import OPML stored files. It’s free and runs quickly, however if you are wanting to synchronize between Google Reader online, your desktop and iPhone the I prefer using RSS which is also free.

ATT is in trouble

AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega mentioned in a conference call earlier this week with analysts that he believes AT&T will continue growing strongly without the iPhone when the exclusivity of it ends sometime in the future.
A statement like this comes as a bit of a surprise after seeing the quarterly numbers from AT&T this past week. 4.3 million new phones were activated on the network — 3.2 million of which were iPhones. If AT&T thinks it will continue growing at its current rate, it will need to keep dreaming, without the iPhone, the companies growth will be reduced considerably.

Mud Creator Beta 1

The Mud Creator Beta 1 is currently in the planning stages, with a revised user interface planned, an improved in-editor testing setup, a re-write of the way objects will be created and stored and a scripting engine implemented.

Currently the engine supports either hard-coding the objects within the developers game source code, or pre-creating the objects and serializing them out to XML files that the engine can load during runtime and use, similar to how the Tool Kit handles it.

Mud Creator Tool Kit utilized the XML serialization/de-serialization features of the engine, storing all of the games objects as XML files. It worked out very well, but I have since developed a managed scripting engine that supports C# and VB syntax and I’ve decided to implement it into the Mud Creator engine, and I’m considering re-writing the internals of the Tool Kit to support it as well. I’m not sure if this is a good route to go or not, and will need to do some looking into it.

Beta 1 will introduce a scripting engine that will let developers create their game objects via scripts, that the engine will load during runtime. The scripts can be stored server side while the client just receives the text needed to inform them of their current location and surroundings preventing any object modifications. If the project is a single player/local only game, then the scripts can be compiled into a standalone .dll file in order to prevent the end users from having access to developers scripts.

Finally the Tool Kit will be overhauled a little bit as well, working on improving the user interface and adding all of the missing elements. Development on the Tool Kit will resume once the engine has been updated with the changes I have scheduled, and these changes can’t take place until the Managed Scripting engine is updated to support the features I need such as dynamic re-compiling of scripts during an applications lifetime.