Why I hate my new (retina) iPad

April 18th, 2012 4 comments

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 [...]

Using Corona SDK with REST API Services

April 15th, 2012 3 comments

  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 [...]

Kindle Fire — A hands on review

March 31st, 2012 1 comment

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 [...]

Need to save your game data in Corona SDK? Check out this little bit of code.

February 23rd, 2012 9 comments

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 [...]

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Geek Cuisine — Making Cornbread

January 14th, 2012 No comments

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 [...]

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Happy Holidays!

December 25th, 2011 No comments

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. [...]

Collision detection without physics.

December 14th, 2011 7 comments

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 [...]

Understanding “SCOPE” for beginning programmers.

October 14th, 2011 1 comment

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 [...]

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Why my SEO sucks.

September 9th, 2011 1 comment

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, [...]

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The Beatles – Let it be! Music Perfection?

August 2nd, 2011 No comments

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 party [...]

Photo Sharing — a Rant

July 31st, 2011 No comments

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 [...]

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Implementing a Game Center button in your Corona SDK Game.

June 13th, 2011 6 comments

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

May 30th, 2011 3 comments

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 [...]

So you want to build an iPhone Game….

May 27th, 2011 1 comment

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 [...]

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CES: Understanding all these iRumors – new iPad, new iPhone blah blah blah… Real Predictions for Apple’s products.

January 5th, 2011 No comments

Cut out of hand holding telephone from Yuri Arcurs Website As with many in the tech and gadget industry, we depend on trade shows like the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to provide us a hint of what we will be spending our money on over the next few months or even years. While most [...]

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Geek Cuisine — Peanut Butter Fudge

May 26th, 2010 No comments

Prepare: Grease a 9×9 baking dish with the extra stick of butter to keep the fudge from sticking. Spoon the peanut butter into a measuring cup. Have the confectioners sugar open and ready to pour. Have your mixer with beaters ready. Cook: Melt the other stick in a sauce pan (quart size?) Stir in 1/2 [...]

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Review of the RIM BlackBerry Twitter App

April 9th, 2010 1 comment

My life as a BlackBerry owner has seen me through three handsets. I started with a Verizon 8703e, a reasonably functional handset. The browser was terrible and there were not a lot of apps for it. TwitterBerry was my app of choice early in its infancy. But as the developer’s added features (including fetching 200 [...]

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My 2009 Social Stats

January 7th, 2010 4 comments

crystal numbers from Crestock Royalty Free Images Today as I was archiving old email I got an idea to figure out just how much information I created or processed for the year. I’m an e-mail pack rat. I keep most every message sent to me. I do not keep spam, most mailing list messages, etc. [...]

Happy Holidays!

December 22nd, 2009 1 comment

Christmas Tree: Red-Green from Crestock Images From the entire OmniGeek family we wish you and yours a Happy Holiday Season and Prosperous New Year!

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Odd MacBook Restarts — Maybe I’m trying to create Higgs Bosons

November 4th, 2009 2 comments

Portable Office from Yuri Arcurs Website Over the past couple of days, I’ve been working on a PowerPoint presentation for an upcoming training session for my day job. I’m using Microsoft Office 2005′s PowerPoint on a recently upgraded to Snow Leopard (10.6.1) MacBook Pro and I’ve had a couple of odd crashes that I’ve not [...]