Downloads

Not too shabby for a game that can bring out some serious arachnophobia:

Revenue

We had no intentions of “making it big” with AC however we did want to try and recoup some of the costs that come with buildings apps (marketplace signup fee’s, domain name, Android books, etc). Earning enough for a free lunch wouldn’t hurt either.

We decided to try a free (with ads) and paid (without ads) revenue model. Ads are displayed on each level on the bottom of the screen. We adjusted the spider spawn locations to make sure that they didn’t spawn underneath the ads thus making the levels more difficult for the free version. We also remove spiders as soon as they approach the ads so try and limit the chance for a accidental click.

Paid: $10.38
Ads: $17.49
Total: $27.87

It looks like we’ve earned back our google marketplace fee and we’re on our way to a free lunch!

What’s next?

We’re currently working on a new mode for AC; endurance. Endurance has no real objective except to simply crush as many spiders as possible. The mode will progressively add more spiders and powerups as time goes on to help keep it entertaining. In the future we may add a leaderboard so you can compete against friends to see who can crush the most spiders.

We’re also working on 10 new 4th of July themed levels that include new spiders, powerups, and backgrounds.

Here’s hoping our second month is at least as successful!

We have an additional mode and new holiday themed levels in the pipeline.

Check out my Arachni Crusher portfolio page for information and grab a copy from the google market.

We’ve bounced a few game ideas around and have decided to go forward with a simple tap game called Arachni Crushers. The game objective is to crush spiders that run across the screen by taping on them. We’re planning to have 10 levels that increase in difficulty and ending with a boss spider. Difficulty will be determined by the number of spiders on the screen at one time, speed of the spider, and spider type (poisonous for example). Arachni Crushers will have two game modes: Endurance (crush spiders forever to achieve an all time high score) and Time based (crush x amount of spiders within a timeframe).

I’ve never written anything for Android but I’ve done a fair amount of Java in the past and Android has been on my radar for quite some time. After spending 2 months I’ve managed to churn out a very early alpha build of the game that consists of the basic game mechanics:

I have a goal to complete most of the code by the end of the year so I can focus on testing the game against a wide array of hardware while my roommate completes the art.

I’ve been using an extension to scrobble turntable tracks that Gabek created and I decided to simply clone his project and replace the turntable detection with Pandora.

After spending a few hours learning how chrome extensions work I ended up with my version of a Pandora Scrobbler.

Running it is simple:

• Install the package
• Open Pandora in a new tab
• You’ll be prompted to authorize the scrobbler via last.fm
• After authorizing, simply reload your pandora tab.

Once you’ve authorized you won’t need to authorize again unless you remove the extension or remove the app from your last.fm account. You can click on the “PS” icon in chrome to sign in as a different user or see which user you’re logged in as.

I need to add a delay between when the song starts and when the scrobble request is sent (currently the song will be scrobbled as soon as it begins playing).

Github repo.

There are quite a few VPS providers out there but after a few hours of research I’ve decided to go with Linode due to the high customer praise, affordable prices, and a great community.

Facebook users will start to see this change immediately (the link in the wall postings will now point to your profile instead of the main X360 Share site). Twitter users will need to add the %u flag to their update strings, for example: Unlocked “%a” worth %p points in “%g” – %u #X360Share. I’ve implemented a Bit.ly URL shortener so the URL in the tweet will be as short as possible.

Next I have a few bugs to squash, as always let me know if there’s a feature you’d like to see or if something isn’t working quite right.

X360 Share works by creating a link between your Facebook, Twitter, and Xbox Gamertag. I’ve implemented single sign on for Facebook and Twitter so creating an account is very quick and painless; simply sign in with your Facebook/Twitter account, enter your Gamertag and you’re done!

Services like this exist however I’ve always ended up turning off updates due to the high frequency of messages posted to my streams when unlocking multiple achievements in a short period of time. With X360 Share I’ve solved this problem by allowing the user to combine multiple unlocks into one message and furthermore allowing the user to choose the interval they would like their account to be checked for updates.

The user is also free to customize the messages that are sent to their streams. X360 Share provides a handful of tokens that can be used to create dynamic messages, some examples are: achievement name, point value, game name, and Gamertag.

Give it a shot and feel free to leave feedback or suggestions.

Getting Started

First we’ll begin by writing the list we’d like to sort. Create a new PHP file with the following:

<html>
<head>
	<style type="text/css">
		.menu li {
			list-style: none;
			padding: 10px;
			margin-bottom: 5px;
			border: 1px solid #000;
			background-color: #C0C0C0;
			width: 150px;
		}
	</style>
</head>

<body>
	<ul class="menu" id="menu-pages">
		<li id="page_1">Home</li>
		<li id="page_2">Blog</li>
		<li id="page_3">About</li>
		<li id="page_4">Contact</li>
	</ul>
</body>

</html>

Next we need to include Jquery and Jquery UI so include the following in the head of the page:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.3/jquery-ui.min.js"></script>

Making the List Sortable

Let’s add the Jquery will enable the list to be sorted, in the head add:

$(document).ready(function(){
	$('#menu-pages').sortable();
});

This tells Jquery that any object with a parent object id of “menu-pages” will be sortable.

Try and resort the pages, everything seems to work great right? Not quite; once you refresh the page any changes you have made to the list are lost. We need a way to save the state of our list after for future page loads.

Save the Sorted State

We’ll use PHP, MySQL, and the following sample database to save the updated list order (run the SQL to generate the required database/table/data for this tutorial):

CREATE DATABASE  `sortable_tutorial`;

USE `sortable_tutorial`;

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `menu` (
  `id` mediumint(8) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `order` mediumint(8) NOT NULL,
  `name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=5 ;

INSERT INTO `menu` (`id`, `order`, `name`) VALUES
(1, 0, 'Home'),
(2, 0, 'About'),
(3, 0, 'Blog'),
(4, 0, 'Contact');

Essentially we’re adding an “order” column to our menu table and after every list sort we’ll make a quick update to this table.

Lets change the sortable() interaction to perform an ajax call to “ajax.php” and pass an updated order for our list:

$("#menu-pages").sortable({
	update: function(event, ui) {
		$.post("ajax.php", { pages: $('#menu-pages').sortable('serialize') } );
	}
});

First we use the sortable “update” argument which is fired after an element is moved to a new location. Inside this function we’re making a simple ajax call to our PHP script to pass a serialized version of our list that contains the updated order. Here’s what the serialized data looks like:

page[]=1&page[]=2&page[]=3&page[]=4

Next create a PHP file called ajax.php and connect to your MySQL database. We’ll start with using parse_str to transform our serialized list data into a nice PHP object to work with:

parse_str($_POST['pages'], $pageOrder);

The $pageOrder array now contains the following (left column = order, right column = record id in database):

[page] => Array
	(
		[0] => 1
		[1] => 2
		[2] => 3
		[3] => 4
	)

It’s important to setup the ids for the items in the following manner:

id=”page_1″ (incrementing the number for additional pages)

This allows parse_str to properly build an array and allows us to keep track of which page corresponds to which database entry.

Next we need to update the menu table to reflect any changes. Using the array we constructed earlier, we now have a nice key value pair that can be used to update each database entry:

foreach ($pageOrder['page'] as $key => $value) {
	mysql_query("UPDATE menu SET `order` = '$key' WHERE `id` = '$value'") or die(mysql_error());
}

Display the Sorted List

Now we can use the database to display our list in order. Be sure to include your database connection code at the top of our original file and then update the list code to match the following:

<ul class="menu" id="menu-pages">
<?php
	$result = mysql_query("SELECT id, name FROM menu ORDER BY `order` ASC") or die(mysql_error());

	while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
		printf('<li id="page_%s">%s</li>', $row['id'], $row['name']);
	}
?>
</ul>

First we pull all of the menu items out of the database sorted by their order.

Next you can see that we’re programmatically generating the page id’s to use the database row id, this allows us to easily add/remove menu items without changing the display code:

printf('<li id="page_%s">%s</li>', $row['id'], $row['name']);

That’s it! Now you can move the items around, refresh the page and your changes will still appear.

Keep in mind that “sortable” can be applied to any container object (such as div’s) and isn’t limited to only lists.

Helpful Links

• Example Source Code
• Jquery UI Sortable Documentation
• parse_str Manual

I enjoy looking at my age group to see how I rank when compared to others near my age so I decided to write a quick script to generate age groups for the race: http://www.xmech.net/Leopards5kAgeGroups.html

I did much better than my last 5k (4th out of 5th in my age group) and I hope to be in the top 10 next time.

Being able to look back at your collection of photos will allow you to build an idea of how your life unfolded through a given month, year, and beyond.

To start things off I snapped a picture Sunday night:

Jamie and I decided to try and make some Gnocchi for dinner (it’s always nice to spend some time together cooking) and it turned out great.

I’ll be posting my photos to my picasa album and hope to continue this indefinitely.