When I started this blog four years ago, my very first post The Long and Winding Road was the story of the journey of an Earthworm I encountered on my daily lunch time walks. Those walks have gone by the wayside as my lunch is spent, fingers typing away, learning more about the world around [...]

bal·ance /ˈbaləns/ Noun: An even distribution of weight enabling someone or something to remain upright and steady. Verb: Keep or put (something) in a steady position so that it does not fall: “a mug that she balanced on her knee”. When my brain got going this morning, it was churning on this week’s American politics: [...]

It’s a Wednesday morning and I’m driving to work.  It’s no normal Wednesday, but the Wednesday after the 2012 Presidential Election.  It’s not my normal route, but my normal Wednesday route since I have to swap vehicles with my wife.  In front of me I see a car with a bumper sticker that reads, “I [...]

There will be plenty of sites doing the whole unboxing thing, so I’m not going to waste your time (or mine, I want to get to the phone too bad to take photos……  UPS arrived punctuational on time this morning around 9:12 or so, well before their 10:30 deadline.  I heard the truck pull up [...]

In Part 1 of this series about computer programming for beginners, we examined a simple program that added two numbers together and printed out the results, which isn’t all that useful. If we think back to the tire changing example, the steps we wrote are far from complete. We have to remove multiple lug nuts [...]

What is a programmer? The lure of creating a great mobile app or building your own website can captivate people to dig into the world of programming, only to be met with frustration because programming is different than most anything people have tried before. Unlike your auto mechanic, who has something physical to work with [...]

I know that’s probably not what anyone would expect to hear about this incredibly amazing device. I mean the screen is freakin’ mind-blowing sharp.  The battery life is impressive.  It’s a great form factor to carry around and actually use. That’s the problem. You see, I’ve been in a two year, very hot relationship with [...]

People frequently ask on the Corona SDK forums about how to make their mobile apps connect with some Internet web service or if it’s even possible.  Corona SDK has various ways of interacting with Internet based services and depending on the service, you might want to use one over the other. The three main ways [...]

I have been building mobile apps for over a year now and I’ve recently started building for Android as well as for Apple iOS. Android provides some interesting challenges since there are three major markets to sell your app: Google Play, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color/Tablet app store. In addition to three markets [...]

A very frequent question in the Corona SDK Forums is “How do I save my game data?”.  There are several published solutions in the Community Code and while I they are good, they don’t help you learn how to program or carry extra functions that you may not need. I (and several other’s) frequently suggest [...]

Growing up in the heart of Kentucky farm land, a staple of our diet was Cornbread. For those who have never had cornbread. it is really more cake like than bread.  You don’t slice it in to thin slices and put sandwich meat or peanut butter and jelly on it.  Instead its typically baked in [...]

I’ve been trying to think of something good to write on.  Being a geek blog, it needs to be geeky and with my focus on mobile apps, my posts have all been on that topic lately, I don’t want to overwhelm the blog with those posts.  So I decided to venture into a dangerous ground. [...]

A frequent question that comes up in the Corona SDK forums is how to detect when two images on a screen hit each other. This is known as a “Collision”. The ability to determine when two things have bumped into each other is called “Collision Detection”. Within Corona SDK, being that its an event driven [...]

Scope is a term used to describe where a particular asset, be it a variable, object, array or function is available to be accessed. It’s an important concept that needs to be grasped to avoid bugs and reduce the amount of time you spend developing code. Since the primary audience for this will be posting [...]

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the tricks that webmasters and content producers do to get their websites and articles to rank as high as possible in sites like Google, Bing and Yahoo when people put in words and phrases to find content.   Some people consider it an art form, others voodoo, but its magical, [...]

  Like most people, I have several playlists for my Audio Collection.  I listen to a lot of music at work and I’ve dedicated playlists to each day of the week.  Monday is mostly dark and depressing songs (Daniel Powter’s “Bad day”, songs that reference Monday (Bangles “Manic Monday”).  Friday is loaded with beach and [...]

We love our social networking…  Let me count the ways (and in no particular order): Google+, Facebook, Plurk, Twitter, Model Mayhem, My Space (yea, I still have a My Space account) and of course, being a photographer Flickr. We love our different social nets for various reasons and frequently our friends are with us in [...]

I’ve been trying to figure out how to do a Game Center button for my game and be able to link to the Game Center leaderboards and achievements directly from my Corona SDK based game. I had not found much information on the Internet on how to do this. Most examples were involving Objective C [...]

Implementing a Health Status Bar in Corona SDK Many games need a way to show the players how well they are doing. It could be a simple counter to show the number of lives left or a bar that decreases and increases as a players energy goes up and down. There are as many different [...]

It was August of 1979.  I was a freshman at the University of Kentucky and one of my classes had me in the computer lab where I found people sitting in front of a DecWriter, a big machine with a keyboard and 18″ wide paper spitting out of it.  They were playing a game called [...]