New direction

Well, it has finally happened. I have succumbed to the lure of the mobile market. I spent the last week teaching myself to program games for Android devices.

It turned out to be easier than I was expecting. Apart from getting my head around the Activity lifecycle, I thought it was quite straight forward.

This does not mean that I will be abandoning desktop platforms, I am hoping to produce desktop and mobile versions of future projects. I will also be looking at applications that will use both desktop and mobile devices in tandem, but more of that at another time.

As I am talking about mobile devices (actually, I'm typing this on my tablet), I have begun to use Evernote to store code snippets. This service, available at http://www.evernote.com, is a marvellous way to synchronise data between devices. I whole heartedly recommend checking it out.

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Back to work

Christmas is finally over and after a slightly extended break from coding, I am back at it.
I am revisiting an old project that I abandoned last year, Senet Collection. This time, I am using my framework, which is allowing me to concentrate more on the game, rather than the mechanics, although I have found a bug in the framework that causes labels to shift when a dialog is displayed over the top. Not sure what is causing this, but until I can find the problem, I have created a work around solution.
"What is Senet?" I hear you cry.
It is thought to be the forerunner of backgammon, as played by the ancient Egyptians. Unfortunately, the actual rules of the game have been lost in the mists of time, however, several people have attempted to work them out. In light of this, I have decided to create my computerised version with four sets of rules, as created by Gustave Jéquier, Timothy Kendall, R. C. Bell and Professor John Tait. There are other variations, but I will be sticking to the four mentioned.
Here are a couple of screen shots to wet your appetite.