Ziray Studio Labs » projects

NetRef – New iPhone App

Mike — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:15:20 +0000

NetRef is our latest iPhone app, published through LTZ. With NetRef, you can look up all default passwords and IP addresses for those new or old routers. Once you set up your router, you can use the built-in Ping feature to ping and test the connectivity of the router. The Ping feature also includes DNS resolution so you can ping a web address as well as a IP address.

We developed the app with the help of Jonathan Cost who has a strong expertise in networks and network hardware. Check out http://netrefapp.com to download the app. We’re always adding more routers and features, but if you have any feedback, we’d love to hear from you!

Initial App Design

Router Manufacturers

Router Detail View

Ping a Server

Reference Material and Tips

Router Manuals in PDF

All models available

NetRef – New iPhone App is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Dive Centers, iPhone apps and More

Mike — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 22:26:55 +0000

For those of you who follow, you always want to know what I’m up to.

Some might think I’ve spent all this time opening a dive center here in the New River Valley. In fact, I think I’ve only spent about 10% of my time doing that.

iPhone Apps

We have two that are completed and awaiting final testing. This is usually the longest part of creating any application. We haven’t had any of our live apps crash yet, and I prefer to keep it that way. So, we do a lot of testing. And when we think we’re done, we test some more.

Lab Work

One must think I’m getting my PhD in Environmental Engineering. I do have a degree from the College of Engineering (Computer Science), but Environmental? I would never have thought. But Ana is finishing up and I’m helping out. That means preparing batch reactors, measuring gas production and writing a thesis. Luckily I’m only helping in small quantities and the lab work is completely done. Now it’s just data analysis and finishing off that thesis. I guess it’s science, and we use a computer, so it’s kind of what I went to school for.

Businesses

As I mentioned, we opened a dive center in Blacksburg. But we also created a state of the art website for it that’ll allow the company to grow into something much more than a dive center. We had the awesome team from HellowYellow design us the site, and they did an amazing job. We’re working on a ton of new features to the site like class registration, videos, etc. How hard can all that be? Well it’s part of a much larger picture, so a little harder than you think.

Part of that larger picture is this: It’s not about opening a dive center and sharing our passion for scuba. It’s about taking a business, any business, and making it the best at what it does. Most dive center websites look like theirs were created in 1996, by a dude with 10 minutes of html experience while sitting on a beach, drinking coronas.

So we started something. That something has grown to include several businesses, several partnerships, several clients and a lot of change. That change will upset a lot of people, namely those on the other side. How many, will be our measure of success.

Dive Centers, iPhone apps and More is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Avalon Dive Center – Blacksburg, VA

Mike — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 06:14:39 +0000

Ever since December of 2010, I’ve been working hard on helping to open a scuba dive shop in Blacksburg. I’ve done my fair share of retail before, but my role has largely been on the technical side.

We’ve realized that the usual way things are done are: scuba instructor opens a shop, creates a website and attempts to make a living doing what they love. The problem is, these people are usually not business people, they’re not designers, they’re not programmers, they’re not using the latest technology. Take business people, programmers, designers, marketers, and influential people who all use technology on a daily basis and have a passion for scuba diving and combine them into one package. That’s what I feel the Avalon Dive Center is. We’re many people with many talents getting together to share our passion with others in the best way we know how.

Avalon Dive Center – Blacksburg, VA is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

iOS Development Code Kitchen

Mike — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 18:53:34 +0000

I’ll be putting on a workshop on iOS and iPhone development this Saturday from 9AM to 5PM on the Virginia Tech campus. The event is free so if you’re in the area feel free to sign up:

http://www.ltzllc.com/2010/11/ios-development-code-kitchen/

The event will run all day and will be hands-on programming, but all levels of experience are welcome and encouraged to come.

iOS Development Code Kitchen is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Photos of the Week: Faces in Places

Mike — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 14:15:32 +0000

We went to a Latino Festival in Roanoke, which was filled with Colombians. The food was great, the people were interesting and the displays were very beautiful. We met a mother from Colombia whose little girl dress in the traditional dress from Antioquia, the state that Ana is from. Then two Colombian girls danced a traditional dance from the coast area of the country.

The next two photos are of ours and a friend’s dog on our recent hike to McAfee Knob.

Colombianita

Colombian Dance Team

Kiara

Ollie

Photos of the Week: Faces in Places is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

I Am Not an Entrepreneur

Mike — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 14:13:34 +0000

Many people throw around the term entrepreneur. It seems most people put that in their bios. Don’t tell me you’re an entrepreneur, show me. What have you done?

When we started LTZ, our mobile and web app development company, we didn’t need any venture capital funding. We didn’t need a fancy office to rent. We didn’t need to do the whole fancy company launch. We just sat down at our computers and started coding. And when we finally had a product to ship, we did all the legal paper work and got ourselves a little LLC.

Sure there were risks. The risk of becoming single again was always there. Sure there were long days. 16 hours seemed to be the norm. And sure there were a few new technologies that we created. But when it came down to it, we just had a simple plan: work really hard and make some great products.

The business model we had, seemed like a great idea: become an authority and gateway for indie developers to develop their apps with. Sort of like a record label for mobile app developers, but without the whole ripping them off bit. We’d mentor and direct them to a finished product and take a minimal cut from the net profits. Any programmer can attest to the numerous projects that never make it to a finished, polished, tested app. But that’s exactly what separates the professionals from the amateurs: finished products.

Now, we’re looking at things differently and adjusting our model. We’ve found out a little more about what works and what doesn’t in this new space. When you’re such a small company, the saying, “If you want things done right, you gotta do it yourself,” turns into, “If you want something done, you gotta do it yourself.” It’s really hard to concentrate on writing good code when you’re the tester, the project manager and the client manager all in one.

I’ll talk more about the new direction we’re heading soon. In the meantime, we’re still working on the details and we’ll update everyone as soon as we finalize everything.

I am not an entrepreneur. I just create stuff.

I Am Not an Entrepreneur is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Photos of the Week – Food

Mike — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 14:15:58 +0000

Took some simple snap shots for this week’s topic. We made some pumpkin pancakes and Ana made some edible cake decorations for a friend’s birthday cake. They’re absolutely adorable.

Photos of the Week – Food is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Photos of the Week: Living Things

Mike — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:40:42 +0000

We got a new puppy this past weekend. We finally decided on naming her Kiara. Her shelter name was Lupe, but we wanted something that we picked out since she was going to be our dog. Ana checked out all the shelters, petfinder.com, Craig’s List and everywhere else she could think of online. We had actually went to the Franklin County Humane Society looking for another dog that Ana saw, but she had been adopted that previous weekend.

Instead, we found Kiara in a cage outside, scared to death of the other barking dogs around her. She wouldn’t even come out, but instead cowered into the corner. Ana climbed into the cage and Kiara instantly cuddled up to her. Kiara had actually been returned to the shelter two days before by a women with health problems who couldn’t handle the activeness of a collie puppy. Real intelligent. She was also infested with thousands of ticks, which the humane society had over looked because of her fluffy hair, the fact that the vet was on vacation and that she had only been there for two days.

But she’s adjusting well and Ana has already begun training her in various things and taking her on long walks.

Photos of the Week: Living Things is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Photos of the Week – Motion and Speed

Mike — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:37:41 +0000

While I took a lot of photos this week, since we have a deadline fast approaching I didn’t have time to specifically take photos for this theme, so the last one is a bit of a stretch. But, in the very least, they’re still photos of the week. Enjoy!

Here’s Sam’s submission.

Photos of the Week – Motion and Speed is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Building a Game

Mike — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:29:48 +0000

A lot of my peers went to school to become game developers. Instead, most went on to work for big software companies in northern Virginia. I studied human-computer interaction and wanted to fix everything from poorly designed user interfaces to frustratingly complex household items. Instead, I became a Mac, iPhone, Flash and game developer. In a way, we both went where the money was.

How to start your game

I’ll assume you already have a game idea. No matter how ambitious you want to be though, think in milestones

Display some graphics.
Animate your graphics, either manually, or with basic input controls
Get hit detection working.
Everything else! (level loading, artificial intelligence, etc.)

If you can even make it to the fourth milestone, you’re farther than 90% of most game developers. If you make it past milestone four, you’re farther than 99% of game developers. Only the passionate, motivated and able ship. This is how I’ve started all of my games and it’s important to achieve tangible results to keep yourself motivated. In fact, this same step-by-step process can be used in regular application development as well.

Design

Start your development with a skeleton application. This does one of two things: first, it forces you to plan the architecture of your application by creating the objects (in files) that you’ll need in your development and second, it provides an outline for you to work from. So first, think about what display controllers and object controllers you’ll need, what model objects you’ll need and then go ahead and create the files for those. Also go ahead and fill in some functions too for the basic functionality. The point is, make sure you break up the functionality into bite size chunks. It’ll make your life easier, trust me.

Put in the functions you think you’ll want and then just put in print or trace statements to make sure they’re being called correctly. Then, just build it piece by piece, usually starting with getting something like a player character on the screen (DisplayController, PlayerController, GameController), then getting him to move, moving him via inputs (InputController), then applying constraints like hit detection or getting him to jump (implementing basic gravity), etc, etc. Just keep introducing and implementing new features, one at a time, playing the game, realizing you want to tweak something and playing it some more. This is called iterative design.

Get those milestones done as quickly as possible, keeping your code organized in your skeleton application. Don’t worry about graphics at first. Personally, I stick in multi-colored boxes instead spending a lot of time on graphics I may not use in the end. Objects will be added as you realize you need them, but the idea is to keep it organized, simple and cohesive.

When designing your class structures and diagrams, keep the low level functionality, like file access and keyboard inputs, abstracted and hidden in wrapper classes. The reason you abstract objects is for a couple of reasons: One is to be able to add in hooks before and after a part of code. For example, instead of calling the system clock directly, you want to calculate the elapsed time if your game was paused or suspended on the computer. If you abstracted this in the beginning with a GameClock object, you’d only have to change it once, in a single place. If you called it directly, you’d have to go back to every place in your code and calculate that value. Keep object responsibilities where they belong!

Start Programming!

To start you off, check out a game template designed for the Corona SDK (free 30 day trial), written in Lua. I recommend you create a template of all your project tyes as it’ll help jump start your next big idea and also keep you organized from the start.

Building a Game is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Photos of the Week – Summer

Mike — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:30:59 +0000

Our photo challenge was “Summer.” Luckily I was in Jersey with a pool so I got some easy shots.

Here’s Sam’s submission.

Photos of the Week – Summer is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Naming Conventions – Why Your Code Sucks

Mike — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:38:04 +0000

I’ve seen a lot of poorly written and ugly looking code in my time. That’s not even considering the undocumented and uncommented code. We all know we should comment our code but how many of us do it consistently? I admit, when I’m in a coding frenzy, stopping to write comments just gets in the way of my thought process and can be distracting. I will however write a bunch of comments before I write the code, of the operations I think I need, in order to give me an outline of where I need to get to. For example:

// Get URL string for video file
// Load video file from URL request
// Load video file into video player
// Set up video player
// Play video

I may not know all the APIs to load and play the video just yet, but at least I’ve given myself an outline and as I fill in the code below each comment, I can see exactly what I’m doing and where I need to go.

Why Your Code Sucks

The point of this article is not to talk about comments, but how to avoid writing them in the first place within your functions and still be clear for everyone else, for the most part. This is your code:

newPlPt = crt2pl( nmc.x, nmc.y );

Not even a comment could concisely convey the meaning of that hideous statement. Instead, why not:

newPolarPoint = cartesianToPolar( newMediaContext.x, newMediaContext.y );

Well written code is self documenting. Let me restate that: if you can write code so that someone can jump to any point of that code and understand what’s going on at that point, read it like a sentence, and not have to decipher minute details like what each variable means, then you don’t have to comment most of your code.

There’s no reason you need to shorten the names in your code. Most programmers have never had file size limitations to deal with, so there’s no reason for it. Stop pretending you live in the 1960s and embrace nearly infinite file storage. To save keystrokes perhaps? Please, use a real IDE with code completion and stop doing stupid things like:

public function updateP( p:Player, d:MovieClip, b:MovieClip, t:Textfield);

Function Names

Also, because your functions are essentially actions, they need to reflect that in the name, so put a verb in the beginning of your function such as: getData(), setStatus(), enableWiFi(), hideControls(), handleGraphicException(), launchBall(), etc.

Class Variables

Get rid of the underscores in front of your class variables. For example: _dg; _myNumber;. All class variables should be private anyway, so why do you need that ridiculous convention? It’s a hold over from C where there was no “private” keyword, so you’re using it and you have no idea why.

Also, what’s with the “my” naming convention? You sound stupid when you have those: myInstanceName, myMovieClip, myGraphicsContext. Of course it’s yours, whose would it be, if not yours? If you’re programming with a colleague, do you refer to his variable references as yourInstanceName? Or hisVideoFileURL? Of course not. Don’t be that stupid; you’re reading too many stupid online tutorials by uncreative people who only code because they have nothing else better to do while living in their parent’s basement.

In the very least, be consistent with your naming conventions.

Hungarian vs. Polish notation

Depending on which language you’re coding in, you may need to use a notation to help you with type casting. Let me rephrase that: if you’re using a loosely typed language, use Hungarian notation. You should probably use this with strongly typed languages anyway because with abstract types, you never know what you could get into and it’s just generally less confusing.

Hungarian Notation: vendorNameTextField or vendorName_txt

Polish Notation: txtVendorName or textFieldVendorName

Why not Polish notation? Not only is it ugly, but why would I sort on variable type instead of the variable name like I can do in Hungarian notation? The notation names come from how the speakers of those languages modify their verbs and nouns. To say: “My ball” in Hungarian is: ”labdám” where “labda” is the root word and the ‘m’ singifies a first person possessive. Hence the ending of the word shows the crucial information. It’s the opposite in Polish notation where the beginning of the word is modified. In the interest of full disclosure, I love the Polish, but I am Hungarian, but I promise that’s not why I prefer one over the other.

Final Thoughts

In the end, be consistent, be clear and spell out your variable and function names.

Naming Conventions – Why Your Code Sucks is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Photos of the Week – Black and White

Mike — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 13:36:08 +0000

With the advances in digital photography and the cost of high quality cameras so low, everyone has become a photographer. However, few realize what it’s like to shoot with film and fewer still, to shoot with actual black and white film.

The development process was the best part because you didn’t get to see your photos until you hung up your role of film on the drying line. Often times, you’d forget you even took some of your shots and be pleasantly surprised. There was no looking at your LCD screen after every shot, there was no deleting bad pics so that you could shoot more on your already full memory card. Different films yielded different colors, grain and style, which can now be duplicated in a computer, but it’ll never be the same. This week’s photo challenge was an attempt to force everyone to think about shooting for a purpose rather than for an edit in Photoshop later.

Disrepair

Branches

Yoga

Photos of the Week – Black and White is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Corona Game Template in Lua

Mike — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:18:29 +0000

This is a template I threw together for the Corona SDK from Ansca Mobile. Since Lua is not a language most people are familiar with, I figured I’d throw together some sample code for Corona and share what I learned so far with the rest of the Corona SDK community by including the template here.

The template includes example code for:

Display groups
Orientation and accelerometer
Touch with buttons
File reading
Example level file for scripting game play

The template separates functionality into modules for an object oriented approach. I’m still learning the techniques for Lua, so if you notice a better way to do it, please don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments below. Some things in the template are not the best way to accomplish some things, but should give people a good idea on best practices of software design. This will also with work Corona’s Game Edition.

If you find the template useful, take a look at some of our current applications to support us. It’d mean a lot.

Download the Template Code

Also, check out the links on the side. Thanks!

Corona Game Template in Lua is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Photos of the Week – After Hours

Mike — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 14:01:58 +0000

Sam and I started a photo project. It’s pretty simple: a theme and a set of photos (3-5) taken that week. This week’s theme was “After Hours.”

I always take photos, but rarely do I have time to post them. Since I have peer pressure now, it pushes me to go out, take some more photos with some thought behind it and finally post them.

Here’s Sam’s After Hours post.

A Tree Grows Through It

Night Frame

Light Streaks on Fairfax

Fairfax at Night

A Sleeping Petunia

Photos of the Week – After Hours is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs