Posts tagged oscon
GovHack 2016

For the fourth year in a row we went to GovHack, the world's biggest open-data hackathon, and made a game. We (Paris and Jon) teamed up with Rex, Seb, Matthew, Tim, Arabella, and Josh, and build Beat the Press, a game about news (sort of?) Check out the video, and the website for the project! It was a great way to spend 48 hours.

We're looking forward to coming back to GovHack next year! Thanks to all the organisers and volunteers in Hobart, as well as the other participants. Everyone made it such a great experience as usual!

In London, in October, we'll be giving a talk about our experiences turning open data into video games at OSCON; it's one of our favourite conferences, and we'd love to see you there!

The Mün and back – a Kerbal tale

“When I realised what the engineers had done, my head LITERALLY exploded…,” said Jon to the other Kerbonauts, waiting for their turn on the Kerbtrifuge, an odd part of training that persisted even though it was universally agreed that G forces had no effect on Kerbal physiology.

Paris would normally have a great rejoinder to his, but he had just entered the training capsule. The rest of the crew were eager not to think about that, and were swapping horror stories to keep their mind off things.

“That’s nothing,” said Tim. “There was one time when they confused apogee and perigee, and rather than a nice circular orbit I found myself heading out past the orbit of Jool. It took me SIX YEARS to get back home.”

Tim had been with the programme for less than a year, but that didn’t stop him embellishing stories like the rest of the crew.

“Al, how about you?” asked Paul, who was next in line for “endurance training,” and was clearly fidgeting with nervousness, “what’s your scariest moment?”

Al looked up from the console which he was soldering. “Mine? It was when they decided that even though more boosters had been added, it still wasn’t enough. I was in a ship made of nothing but boosters.”

From the room next door, the sound of the Kerbtrifuge spinning up could be heard. Everyone held their breath, Paris’s cry could be heard through the thin metal walls…
“WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Join Paris, Jon, Tim, Paul, and Alasdair as they regale you with tales of their adventures in the Kerbal Space Program, the increasingly popular and disturbingly realistic space programme simulator game enjoyed by geeks around the world. Learn how and why you should go to space, and what you can learn from it! Science will be involved.

OSCON 2014

We just finished another fantastic week at OSCON 2014 – this was our fourth year attending and speaking at O'Reilly's Open Source Convention, and we (as usual) had an absolutely amazing time. It's rapidly becoming one of our favourite conferences.

We presented twice at OSCON this year: a session version of our How Do I Game Design? workshop, and our three-hour Android-focused mobile design tutorial (along with Chris Neugebauer, as usual).

The slides for How Do I Game Design? are available now on Speaker Deck. Interesting and related links for attendees are:

The games we mentioned in the talk are:

The slides for our mobile design tutorial Unfortunately Design Tutorial Has Stopped ... and other ways to infuriate people with mobile apps are available now on Speaker Deck. Interesting and related links for attendees are:

Please don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions!

Books, and training, and conferences! Oh my!

First, books!

We're very pleased to announce that our latest two books are now available! The first, Learning Cocoa with Objective-C Fourth Editionis an update to our previous third edition book, this time co-written with our frequent collaborator and co-conspirator Tim Nugent. It covers everything existing programmers need to skill up with the latest in iPhone, iPad, and Mac development technologies. 

The second new book is the iOS Game Development Cookbook; it provides a huge range of recipes for common things you need to when building a game for iOS (or any other platform, if you're willing to translate the examples out of Cocoa and Objective-C, or even for things that aren't games if you're creative!)

We're really proud of both of these books, and hope you find them useful and enjoyable! Let us know what you think, or if you have any questions. You can find more details, and links to sample code, on our books page.

Second, training!

If you like our books, then why not try our training? Check out our previous blog post to learn more about our upcoming Melbourne iOS developer training.

Finally, conferences!

We're very pleased to be speaking at the (very awesome) O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) again this year – for the fourth time in a row! We'll be presenting our mobile app design workshop “Unfortunately, Design Tutorial Has Stopped”, and Other Ways to Infuriate People With Mobile Apps with frequent collaborator Chris Neugebauer, as well as the session How Do I Game Design?, exploring the basics of game design

Additionally, Tim Nugent (our co-author on the latest Learning Cocoa book) will be presenting the session My Friends Keep Leaving and it is Ruining Board Games Day, which explores the state of augmented and remote board gaming; Chris Neugebauer is also presenting the session Portable Logic/Native UI exploring best practices for building mobile apps that need to run on multiple platforms. It's all sure to be excellent! Do try it.

 

Mobile UX Design and Development
OSCON 2013

We also ran our Android UX and development tutorial ("Level Up Your Apps: Mobile UX Design and Development") for the third year at OSCON! We had a great time presenting alongside our friend Chris Neugebauer (who devised much of the content).

Finished OSCON 2013 app from Secret Lab tutorial

Some links/information for those of you who are interested:

  • Final APK (suitable for installing) of the OSCON 2013 app we built
  • GitHub repository for the code from the tutorial
  • The tags, corresponding in order to the start and finished states for the application: talk_listing_start, talk_listing_end, schedule_start, schedule_end, day_list_start, day_list_end, navigation_start, navigation_end, data_end, tabs_end, theme_start, theme_end, navigation_refresh, talk_listing_update, themeing_finished
  • You can switch between these tags by using git reset --hard followed by git checkout and the name of the tag you want. Note that you will lose changes.

Slides are available on Speaker Deck:

Slides for OSCON 2013 Tutorial
Slides for OSCON 2013 Tutorial

If you have any questions or comments, please get in touch!