Android 3.0 Animations: Beginner’s Guide Review
This was a good read if you are interested in adding animation to your android applications. It shows several different methods, from frame animation to tweening objects around on screen.
The book is titled for “Android 3.0”, but almost all of the examples will work for any version of Android. You just need to change the build target of the project properties to whatever SDK version you are using, and change the android manifest file from build 10 to 3.
It does touch on what the new animation methods are for Android 3.0, and you have a warning in the chapter for the exercise file that uses a newer version.
The examples may not all look pretty (especially the first one), but it teaches the main concepts, and you can fill in your own graphics, using the concepts, to add some nice ‘flair’ to your applications.
One of the more interesting examples shows you how to create your own, animated, and interactive ‘live wallpaper’, which you could use to create pretty much any type of live wallpaper.
The book does not go into OpenGL programming, but does introduce the concept of a “game loop”, which would be useful for someone to see who has never created a game before. A lot of the concepts might seem simple to someone who has experience using tweens, or frame by frame animation.
I would recommend this book to someone who has programmed on Android application before, but would like to add more “polish” to their application, using animation to liven it up.
You can pickup the book here: http://www.packtpub.com/android-3–0-animations-beginners-guide/book
Flash Development for Android Cookbook Review
This is an awesome book to bring your Flash games and programs to Android!
This book provides you with everything you need to start developing programs and games on android using Adobe AIR, assuming you already have some knowledge in ActionScript.
It shows short “recipes” on how to interface with everything that you would want to on the phone, from gestures, drawing, acceleration and geolocation, camera, microphone, images, video, audio, local storage and SQLLite, to even putting the final app on the market.
Every recipe is well written, and specific to the interface you will be looking for, so you can easily find how to use the accelerometer, or load up the browser within your app. Most examples show how to do everything in Flash Builder (Flex), Flash ‘professional’, FDT, and even command line, so you have many options (although the code will work well in any of them).
The only negative I found with the book is that in Chapter 1, you learn how to compile, and run a program on Android, but Chapter 10 is when it actually goes into debugging, and setting up different configurations for testing your app. I wasn’t sure how to have the app test run in Windows instead of running on my Android directly until that chapter (although it is a cookbook– you pick which chapter is relevant what you’re trying to do).
If you have built applications or games using Flash/Flex before, and would like to have a version running on Android, this book will give you all the information you need, and is a great reference as well!
Get it now to get your Flash apps running on Android!
http://www.packtpub.com/flash-development-for-android-cookbook/book
Review of Cryengine 3 Cookbook
I picked up this book because I wanted to get some hands on experience using the CryEngine with a reference book, but had not used the CryEngine before.
I feel this book is more aimed towards beginners, and allows someone new to the CryEngine to be able to easily jump in, and have a reference for doing a ton of stuff that might not be very straight forward, as well as a lot of detail on using the interface.
Overall, just reading through the first chapters, I was able to get comfortable with the interface, and able to create and setup my own basic level. Further on, the book goes into a more general “cookbook” style, with recipes for doing a variety of different things you might need in your level.
The book is well written, easy to read and a beginner can pick it up without a problem. There are lots of recipes for most things you would want to do, such as: creating terrain, changing level layout, placing items, changing lighting, putting down enemies, creating assets to import into the CryEngine, creating vehicles, some game logic, creating cut scenes, and much more.
The one problem I did have with using the book with the CryEngine are that the assets have changed since the book was published, so some of the items, or textures it tells you to look for at the beginning aren’t there. You can use alternatives instead, but it would be nice if the downloadable files included them, or you could know which version of the CryEngine Sandbox was used in the book.
Overall a great book for learning how to use the CryEngine Sandbox, with lots of helpful recipes that will have you creating cool levels.
It was also very interesting frm a game developers standpoint to see the CryEngine Sandbox tool, how it was made, and what kind of things were taken into account for creating levels. It gives me better insight into how I should layout my own tools, for simpler game development projects 
You can see the book here:
http://www.packtpub.com/cryengine-3-cookbook/book
Packt Publishing 30% of open source ebooks
I’ve been getting a lot of my technical books from Packt Publishing, as they seem to have a ton of tech books, and e-book copies of everything, so I don’t have to wait to read them.
If you’ve been interested in any of their open source based software books, they are going to be on sale for 30% off on e-books (and 20% on printed copies) starting July 4th.
Some that I will be looking at in the next few weeks will be ‘PHP jQuery Cookbook’, ‘PHP 5 Social Networking’, ‘Inkscape 0.48 Essentials for Web Designers’ (vector based graphics program, and ‘Blender 2.5 Lighting and Rendering’, although they have quite a few more books offered for the discount as well.
Apparently they have also donated over $300k to open sourced projects this year as well, which is pretty cool that they are helping to support the open source community.
I’ve got lots of good reading to do!
You can see the books discounted here: http://www.packtpub.com/article/packts-best-selling-open-source-books-offer/
CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook Review
I have been developing web sites and web applications for several years now, but have been wanting to try out a PHP development framework to take care of not having to program lower level functionality, which would also let me develop applications in much less time.
CakePHP is a php, rapid development framework, and the tutorials on the site walk you through creating a basic blog application in relatively little time.
The CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook, like all “Cookbooks”, gives you many code snippets to create commonly needed systems, which are used to create complex applications.
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Review
I’ve been waiting for The Witcher 2 since it was announced.
I loved the first game (mainly because of the involved story, and fantasy universe), so I was able to pick it up today from Fry’s electronics.
One nice surprise was that even though it retails for $50, and the sticker was $50, Fry’s had the game for $34!
(more…)
Review of Flash Game Development by Example (Author: Emanuele Feronato)
When I found out the author of the largest Flash game development blog had written a book, I was very eager to pick it up and try it out.
(his announcement on his blog HERE)
Emanuele’s blog has been around for many years, and he has great information from starting out in actionscript and beginning game programming, all the way up to developing complete games, using 3d and physics engines.
Asus EP121 Tablet Review (Cintiq Alternative)
What is the Asus EP121?
The Asus EEE EP121 tablet/slate is a great multi-purpose device.
For artists, it has a 12″ wacom screen that has 256 levels of pressure sensitivity.
For people looking for a tablet or new laptop, it is a lightweight, relatively high resolution full windows device, with bluetooth hardware keyboard, that accepts up to 10 finger multitouch. Use it as a tablet, use it as a laptop, the power to do both!
For hardware buffs, it has a 1280x800 touch(capacitive) and pen sensitive (electromagnetic) input screen, with potentially a 64GB SSD (solid state hard drive), 4GB DDR3 ram, 802.11n/g/b wireless, 4.5hr battery, stereo sound, 2x usb 2.0, 1 mini HDMI port, and a 2MP camera.
An in depth review of my experience using it as an art tablet and a laptop+ conventional tablet follows.
