So the major event of the day was the submission of the HDL Touch 2.0 program to apple. Of course this required me to jump through all their silly hoops again, as the "code signing" this and the "provisioning profile" that expire all the time so I had to go through all that mess again. But I managed to tweak it a bit so that energy is only updated if END or RES change, and it's automatically subtracted when you use it for STR or COO in hitting someone. That way you can keep track of energy on the app rather then erasing stuff all the time. Good to finally get that done. Finally. 

 

That took me to about 2:00, so I decided to call the other insurance company and get a quote. My car insurance is just a bit higher, but the house is much lower, so it works out to be only $30 more expensive a year. Huh. And he said if I took his "how to avoid accidents" class the car one would go down by another 10%. Sweet! And it's much greater coverage too, which I guess I need, driving around most the time anyway. (except for the slump now now, anyway) So I'm going over there at 11:00 tomorrow. After my one appointment of setting up a router. Not bad, not bad at all.

 

I'm pretty sure the "avoid accidents" class can be summed up in two points:

 

1) Keep your wits about you while driving

2) Don't do anything stupid

 

See, that was easy.

 

Then I went back to moving shelves around (because I still had stuff sitting on my floor without a home) and in the spirt of making this a big programming week, looked at making my Maze Muncher a bit smarter. Right now he kind of wanders around aimlessly, and I wanted to make him a bit smarter in that he would turn towards paths he has been on less. I started a new project and copied the code over though, sometimes it doesn't like updating the project from one version of xcode to another, and like most of my stuff it's pretty old. In the process of poking around for graphics stuff I found someone's code that had worked out something I had been trying to figure out how to do, that is, use Core Animation to do sprite animation. It's not really made for it, so it's not obvious (to me) how it could be done, but I dropped his code into a little test program of mine and it worked great. Hummm. There's something bizarre going on with my screensaver though, when I press the test button it's okay, but when it comes on naturally I get this big message about how it "can't be used with this version of OS X" and to contact the "developer for a new version." Um, hello, I am the developer and this IS the new version!

I might totally redo it. It is a bit laggy, even running on my system (because NSImage was not made to do animation) so I might just redo it with CA and heck, maybe even Grand Central Dispatch if I'm feeling really adventurous.  

 

I know, you have no idea what those are. GCD is for making thing multi threaded, in other words, making one program run across multiple processors. And CA is Apple's "easy" to use animation toolkit. You don't need these to do those things, of course, but apple wraps them up in easy to use libraries so you can spend more time getting your own program done and not worry about concurrency issues or deadlock or whatever.

 

Feels good to be programming again!

 

But you know what else feels good? Playing borderlands with my minions, which is what I am about to do now.

 

Bye!