A September Rambling Post

If you follow me on twitter (please do) you will know I have been purging and trimming my web stuff. I have removed ads off nearly all my sites. Closed my other blog and greatly simplified the design of marblemice.com

Basically a while ago I started to feel weighed down by all the stuff I had on the web. It was also a distraction for me as I was checking stats all the time and thinking way too much about it all.

I want to regain focus.

To do that I need to simplify or remove everything I can. Ads had to disappear on most pages as they were not generating any income and as that is their only purpose it seemed pointless having them there. They have survived on a few pages on marblemice.com.

I am still a little bit undecided on what to do with spiderflock.com. The site is a terrible looking weebly site. It only really gets visitors from people who follow the link from the android market place. Perhaps I should just set all the links on the market place to marblemice.com and just let spiderflock dies off.

Mmm, while writing this post I headed off to see if I could change all the apps to point at marblemice.com as their home page. Because some of them have not been updated for such a long time they all require new high resolution icons and so on. Bit of a pain when all I want to do is update the web address.

I have now decided to leave them as it is and just lets spiderflock expire as a domain name when its time is up.

What have I been up to? 

Pretty much this month I have spent a reasonable amount of time trying to simplify everything so I can get back to thinking about fun stuff. By that I mean building apps for android and making some simple games. At this moment in time I don't want to be maintaining different websites.

Having said that I think I am done. I can start focusing on the fun stuff.

As I mentioned previously I have a fair number of JQueryMobile built android apps ready to be put on polished and released. The trouble, as mention previously, is page transitions are buggy on android and it is not really JQueryMobiles fault. I have had an idea as a way to get around this, basically use native transitions and have each page on these simple apps as a native activity. It is pretty easy to call from Javascript back into the java.

This is my back up plan. If the next version of android still contains bugs with the transitions I will go native. The next version of android is rumoured to be coming sometime in October and will hopefully make it to my phone (a Nexus One). Why don't I take this route straight away. Well it is a bit of work to do so and I would prefer not to if I can just do other stuff for a month and then return to all the android app fun.

Time away will let me look at my apps with a fresh pair of eyes and spot the bad bits in them.

I continue to play with PlayN, I am still in play mode and failed to get a web version of a little worms game working. Not sure why but that is part of playing. I have also been practising Inkscape and my new Twitter avatar is a testament to my increasing skill (it was originally really really bad). I now rate myself as equal to a 6 year old :) I can live with that and can make games with that skill level. For the most part the art part of my life has been confined to practising at lunchtimes. I am now starting to look at blender again.

It has been a while since I touched Blender and the UI looks a lot better. I feel like I am playing with an application that is built for professionals. Funny how a re-skining of the UI can do that. Basically I am seeing September as a bit of an experimentation month where I try out new stuff.

Will I prefer making graphics in Blender or Inkscape or a combination of both?

Will I find PlayN to immature at the moment and decide to head back to coffeescript for this type of stuff?

Ok, sorry for a long and rather winding post. It is sort of a dump of all that is going on in my brain. As you can probably tell I am feeling energised about developing stuff in my spare time and certainly have a clean out has really helped.

So the rest of the month is for playing. Probably the first couple of weeks of October as well. I would then like to either produce a very simple game using PlayN (targeting the web) or get some of my android app polished up and published. Which of those actually happens depends greatly on when the next version of android is released.