Blogs

Over the last several months I've been working with the FizzPow team on a new iPhone/iPod game, Pandamania. The project was an absolute blast! Please, check out the promo trailer at:

You can also check out the game website at: FizzPow Website

I was fortunate enough to do some flying for a couple of experimental aircraft videos a friend made a while back. I was pleased to see a link popup on youtube with one of the videos we made some years ago. Over 40k views on it so far. It is a great reminder why we fly, and why experimental building/flying is near and dear to many pilots' hearts. I'm flying the green striped Longez. Take a look, I hope you enjoy!

Video info: The video was made by Paul Drexler. Burrall Sanders in the Varieze, and Bill Vondane in the RV. The camera plane was a BD4, pilot was Richard Martin. Thanks to them all for very fond memories! I hope we make more videos sometime.

It has been quite a while since I have released any applications targeted to the general public. My last few positions were largely focused on business to business, enterprise applications. I do recall the release of games 'way back in the day' for Excalibur BBS systems and the high we would get reading player and sysop reviews. Once again I find myself humble and appreciative as the positive feeback is starting to come in for our first iphone application (TFRs). It is a vertical, niche application for pilots. I'm pleased it does seem to be a useful application for fellow pilots.

I decided to take my son for a cross country flight a couple weekends ago and I always check the FAA TFR site for the latest prior to flight. I had already left my house so I used my iPhone to check the site. I quickly realized their site is not iphone friendly and decided to take a bit of development time away from our first game project to create a TFR application which formats TFR data to be easily checked from an iphone. We've submitted the TFR application to Apple for review and hope it will be available for purchase in the next week or few. I look forward to feedback on the utility.

While working on an iPhone game for FizzPow (http://www.fizzpow.com) we decided to use Unity for the project. There were a number of reasons but the main one was Unity's cross platform support. We wanted to be able to release the project for multiple platforms. I was able to get a pretty good idea of Unity features and ability. Before that I had used xCode+Cocos2d for a mini project and was also impressed with it. Note, these views are from working on 2D game projects. If I were to be looking at 3D projects, Cocos2D is not an option. Here are some thoughts on the pros/cons to each: