Happy Christmas-Lists!

Before everything stops for the holidays and the only chores we have on all our lists are "Eat" and "Sleep" for a few days, I just wanted to wish everyone a really good time and thank you so much for all your support for EpicWin, a bit of silly fun from me and Tak, that happily seems to be quite helpful for some people out there :)

Have a brilliant time, and see you in the new year (hopefully v1.5 will have been approved by Apple by then!)

Version1.4 released!

It's out in the AppStore! Hope you enjoy the new features like the alarms, the mega repeating options, calendar picker etc. For a full run down of the newness, have a look at this post.

Enjoy it! Use it! Rate it! Thanks :)

Update 1.4 Submitted! What's in it?

Just submitted 1.4 to Apple - will be a couple of weeks while they approve it. Just in time for Thanksgiving for the USA-ians that use it! So what's in this update you may ask? Well I shall demonstrate the new features by using the power of Words and Screenshots:

All the Repeating Options In The World Ever (except for those not included)
Upon clicking "Repeat" options in the task screen - you will be presented with these options:

As you can see, you can pick from "Never", "Given Period", "Days Of The Week", "Days Of The Month" and "A Day Of Each Month". Those options are explained below:

Never
Never repeats - a one time task - like fighting the Balrog in Lord Of The Rings.

Given Period


















Any combination of [1 - 99] [Days/Weeks/Months/Years], with shortcuts to Daily, Weekly, Fornightly, Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly options.

Days Of The Week


















Any combination of the days of the week.

Days Of The Month


















Any combination of the days of the month - look at all those checkboxes!!

A Day Of Each Month


















A choice of [1st/2nd/3rd/4th/Last] [Monday/Tuesday/etc] day of the week.

For all of those options - you can even specify the interval of repeat - so you can have for example, every Monday/Wednesday of every 3 weeks.

Man it's like a game in itself!

Alarm



















So now you can also set an Alarm for a task. These (for the techies) are Local Notifications, and in order to use these you need to have iOS 4.0 or better. Otherwise its a right pain to set up as I have to set up a server for remote Push Notifications, which isn't really fitting for something like this.

Better Calendar Picker


















So I've also hacked together a basic Calendar Picker thing. It does exactly what it says on the tin and I hope it's a bit better than the previous standard picker (which is actually the ONLY Date Picker the iPhone provides to programmers by default - rubbish!!).

Fix To Daylight Saving Time Bug Of Doom
If you have experienced the nonsensical Daylight Saving Hours bug where your tasks have gone "mad", this update will revalidate everything in the database and lock the dates down properly. Although they may remain a day behind - they won't experience the problem again and as long as you move them back to the right day it should no longer go mental when DST happens in the Summer. Note to coders: do NOT add 24*60*60 seconds to the time when you want to add a day of time on. Sometimes, its 25 hours in a day, or 23 (*cries*).

I hope you enjoy the update. If you listen to The Bloodhound Gang's "The Bad Touch" (the Do It Like Mammals one) there is a line that goes "To make me rise an hour early just like Daylight Savings Time". The song has been RUINED as I twitch everytime I hear that now.

Computer-Arts Article Art

So, Tak has been doing lots of juicy posts with lots of words and no pictures, so to break things up a bit here's a post from me that's almost all pictures and no text...

The current issue of Computer Arts magazine (November) has a nice big piece about the creation of EpicWin, the behind-the-scenes on how the app was designed, the art style formed and how it was all planned out before coding started - might be interesting for some folks out there. You should be able to find it in most newsagents amongst the daily-scrolls and fizzy health-potions...

Here's a peek:

And another:

So - multiplayer quests?

So today Fable 3 is out for XBox360 - and I am going to the launch in Game in London like a proper fanboy (and also because I worked on Fable 1 & 2). So while I take a little break to see some old friends - I want to throw out a quick BRAIN BURST as to what the first Pre-Alpha Version Zero of the web interface would be like. Basically I was going to do a website where you can register yourself and get an account for a bunch of "Special People" - like this dude: EpicWin Questmaster. Then those special people can invite a bunch of their "followers", and then through a super basic interface (think GeoCities era websites) they can submit tasks that will be sent out to their followers to do in the app. And since it's a super-pre-alpha-special-people-only feature - the app will probably pop these tasks up in a fairly ugly but functional way for testing out.

I think that's a good "first step" in the technology to do this. Right now I have my old university room-mate/neighbor doing a Ruby-On-Rails network server thingybob to do this. Once we have the authorization and registration framework in that would be VERY exciting!

Any tips or whatever stick them in the comments! GO EPIC FOLLOWERS!

Next up...1.4 Update with more features!

Well - I'm kinda back - still got a hacking cough and bizarrely - spot under my nose (on my filtrum - painful!) but well enough to make a post on ....Update 1.4! Thanks to everyone with their well wishes, whilst getting better it made for a warm feeling knowing that not everyone wants me to die ;)

As an aside - whilst I was getting better - I have been playing a game called "Game Dev Story" on the iPhone by Kairosoft (http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/game-dev-story/id396085661?mt=8). It's basically an iPhone sim game, where it is simulating - game development story. Brilliant. It would appear whilst ill from developing games, I spend my recovery time playing games that simulate....developing games. One hell of a fractal (RIP Mandelbrot).

Anyway - today I shall talk about one of the big additions to 1.4, which is the much wanted "Better Repeat Mechanism Robot" (well it's not really a robot). Essentially the current repeat pop up box will be replaced with an all new pop-up box with options such as:

Every X Days
Days of the week (with an option of intervals of how many weeks inbetween)
Days of the month (with an option of intervals of how many months inbetween)
Every X Years

To go with this - there will also be a setting for Local Notifications ("alarms") if you so wish for the task.

Incidentally - I have actually found a real live humanoid who will be helping code EpicWin on the iPhone. He's the same guy who ported MiniSquadron to Android for me and he is Daniel Smith of Gray Fin Studios (http://www.grayfinstudios.com/ - named after both his kids!). I have also re-discovered my old college room-mate who has been experimenting with the "network server" and doing fun social task thingies....but that's very early stage at the moment!

More posts on 1.4 features as I continue to get better! (Also hopefully more pictures)

Update 1.3 Out!

Whew - Apple was pretty sweet and got it out quick! Interesting note to iOS Devs - when I set the Update to "Release By Developer" (so it doesn't automatically gets released on approval but only after I click a button) - it never sends me an email so I only knew when I logged back in....

Anyway - this as requested is a quick update addressing specifically the issues with weirdo repeating tasks missing days, and also to come up with a save/restore option on the net for people concerned with losing their data due to no fault of their own. Also, some people have asked specifically how it does this, so I thought I'd list a few limitations here for people to understand:

1) The data is saved to Google, using their Google App Engine. This basically provides a free service for saving/processing data to a big database, and charges only when the bandwidth goes *really* high.

2) For the moment at least - this service is an emergency last ditch Save/Restore thing to give people ease of mind. It is NOT a proper calendar sync NOR a proper sync to other todo lists. If you read the last blog post you can see it is something coming in Update 1.4 (the next one).

3) This save is PER DEVICE. It is relatively easy to register multiple devices to one account, but I think I'll do that after Update 1.4 as it may be redundant when that is done - since this is really a stop gap to at least have some safety of data backed up elsewhere.

4) Currently it saves all game state including your tasks.

So hopefully this will at least give people ease of mind when they think about their data, if you have any questions throw them in the comments and I'll answer them!