coders » productivity improvement

Animas newest iPhone App: Earth Defender

hhamm — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:39:13 +0000

Defend the Earth against hordes of aliens in Earth Defender™, the highly addictive, classic arcade shooter for iPhone and iPod touch available on the App Store now! Check out the Video on YouTube, too!

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Earth Defender is know available in the appstore(10th best Overall App in Germany)

Would be nice to be notified in other countries, too. Its a fast paced action tap shooter packed with great sound and beautiful graphics: “Like Independence Day, but on a really small screen.”

MobileTechReview:
Earth Defender positively radiant 3D graphics that outshine many iOS 3D games. The environment looks stunning with detailed animated backgrounds and elaborate visual effects. Enemy design look like 3D Galaga and levels look very realistic.

PocketGamer:
What makes Earth Defender stand out from similar games is the sheer feel of it. Taking on the enemy fleet looks and feels like you’re engaging in the kind of epic space battles seen in Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica.

trailer : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nigfYp6pxUI

Buy It !

Screenshots:

Tip: how not to step into code in visual studio

fschaper — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 10:18:37 +0000

At my job, I heavily rely on working with the STL and the Boost libraries.
During debugging, which as we all know takes up a certain amount of ones time, I found myself seemingly more often than not looking at STL or Boost code while stepping through.

At some point I really got tired of hitting SHIFT+F11 to jump out of another section of code that I knew, wasn’t really the problem.

I found an interesting article about preventing the visual studio debugger from stepping into certain areas of your code, that I would like to share with you:
http://blogs.msdn.com/andypennell/archive/2004/02/06/69004.aspx

Note that in case you use a x64 based system you will need to place the registry information into the HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\NativeDE entry (you can read more about this at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896459).

So this is what I use on my Windows7 x64 installation running Visual Studio 2005:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
 
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\NativeDE\StepOver]
"no boost"="boost\\:\\:.*=NoStepInto"
"no stl"="std\\:\\:.*=NoStepInto"

calling functions from inside the watch window

fschaper — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 01:53:59 +0000

It sometimes becomes handy to be able to call functions or methods while debugging. Say you have some complex type that you want to visualize on the console or to your debug output.

The VisualStudio expression engine makes this an easy task (no need to brush up your assembler knowledge on this one) just enter the function signature into your watch window. Note that you will need to fully qualify any namespaces.

If your project consists of multiple modules, or when you use the same function signature in different compilation units you will have to tell the debugger where to find the symbol.
For this the context operator {[function],[source],[module] } location is defined.
You should have a look at the reference[1] over at MSDN to familiarize yourself with the syntax.

[1] – The context operator – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wztycb7f%28VS.80%29.aspx

automatic source formatting

fschaper — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:40:02 +0000

like most larger companies, we have a set of coding guidelines that every developer working for us is bound to comply with. I don’t really care how the code is formatted in the end as long as it is consistent. But then again, it also helps to be the one defining the standard for your co-workers to feel at ease with it.

On that note, I’d like to point you to an interesting link where you will find a coding standard generator. After choosing from a lot of options your will end up with an generated document that can serve pretty well as a draft four your own needs.

To make compliance with that standard easier for me and my fellow co-workers, I have created an astyle configuration file and let astyle (A Free, Fast and Small Automatic Formatter) run over my code every time I create a build (visual studio pre-build event). At least for my current project, the amount of time needed for the tool to crawl all my files does not become noticeable on my machine.

For sure astyle is no silver bullet. There where a couple of incidents where code wasn’t correctly formatted (at least not by our definition) and we would have to customize the tool a bit. Changing astyle to fit your needs however is pretty straight forward. What you gain however is that everybody is more or less free to code as he is used to. The result will always conform to the same standard since everybody’s code is formatted after a predefined set of rules.

At least for us this approach proved beneficial.