On January 2, I”ll be going to work for Mutual Mobile, an Austin-based company that specializes in application development for iOS, Android and Blackberry devices. “But Sean!” I hear you, Rhetorically Convenient Reader, cry. “You just started working for Magnolia back in March! Why are you moving on again so soon?” That’s a good question. [...]
Yesterday the kids were off from school for teacher conferences. We started off with 10 young people under the roof, thanks to sleepovers, with the remainder of the day continuing in the same busy, wild vein. And then, on the way to pick up a collection of teenagers from the river, I heard on NPR [...]
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Posted 06 October 2011
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Art
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This October, anyone can take an Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class, taught by professors at Stanford, for free. This is great. But it gets better. In order to expand the scope of the class from the 200 people they’ve been teaching in person, the instructors will be using AI software to grade homework, aggregate discussion [...]
For those of you who have an interest in programming in general, Magnolia in particular, or just can’t get enough of my scintillating writing, I’ve started a new blog over here: Propeller Hat. It’s mostly Magnolia stuff thus far, and will probably be infernally geeky for the foreseeable future, so only visit if you have [...]
Back in 2001, CBS introduced EyeVision for their Superbowl telecast. EyeVision allowed the broadcasters to combine images from several dozen cameras, positioned and 7° intervals around the stadium, into a seamless playback that could be rotated on the fly, creating an effect much like the famous “Bullet Time” sequence in The Matrix. The technology, while [...]
Last Thursday, I gave my one month notice at the University. The reason for that was not any particular discontent. While the University has its share of bureaucracy and silly decisions, the management above us has generally shielded us from much of it. And being able to walk to my office, have the freedom to [...]
I’m a fan of agile practices in programming, and encourage my team to work along agile principles as much as possible. One thing that has always been tricky about that for us, however, is that we don’t really match the usual profile of a software team. Most agile teams (at least in the literature) are [...]
All of you folks who are as interested in location-based gaming as I am have been checking in on Gowalla, Foursquare, SCVNGR, Facebook, Rally Up, or Yelp for a while now. But the lame thing about those services is that you actually have to go somewhere and do something to earn points! Enter Mojo, the [...]
Seth Priebatsch, the CEO of SCVNGR, a company developing an interesting eponymous location-based gaming platform, gave a talk at TED recently. He covered some interesting ground, including a few game design patterns with in-game and real-world examples. If you’re as interested in this stuff as I am, it’s worth 12 minutes of your time: Is [...]
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Posted 20 August 2010
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Games
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Back in March, I posted my Thoughts on Titanium, which we were using at the time to develop Texas State’s iPhone application. Since that time, we’ve become increasingly frustrated with the system, and have finally decided to leave it behind and rewrite the application in a combination of native Objective C code and HTML/CSS/Javascript. This [...]
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Posted 10 August 2010
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iPhone
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