Billy Beet v1.0.5 is available on Apple AppStore.

Billy Beet is a unique animated high velocity shooting game for iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.

In this release: additional fixes and stability improvements.

Check out billybeet.com

Billy Beet v1.0.4 is available on Apple AppStore.

Billy Beet is a unique animated high velocity shooting game for iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.

In this release: many bug fixes, stability improvements, a new intermediate level are added to the game.

Check out billybeet.com

Amazon just launched Amazon Mobile Ads - a new monetization option for app developers on Android devices.

You can read my quote towards the end of the post:

"We decided to try Amazon's ads because our overall revenue and eCPM was low on tablets when we were using another network. We initially integrated the Amazon Mobile Ads API in one of our apps distributed through Amazon since the majority of our users there are on Kindle Fire devices. Our effort has paid off! We saw eCPM jump 300% and our revenue doubled even though fill rate was lower at the beginning. Now we have the Mobile Ads API integrated in all our free apps distributed through Amazon."

Billy Beet is a unique dynamic shooting game for iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.

Billy Beet is featuring vegetables characters and you play for the flying beet character named Billy and your mission is to pass all the levels and shoot and defeat all enemies and ... via billybeet.com

It's a big strategic mistake Microsoft committed when they launched Windows Phone 8 while it is incompatible with Windows Phone 7.

WP7 had been in the market just less than a year.

Users who are stuck with Windows Phone 7 devices are not able to upgrade and having this experience at the time they switch to a new device there is a good chance they don't purchase another WP. There are still many WP7 devices in stock and on the market and dealers have to get rid of them before they start to sell superior WP8 devices. Finally WP developers can't be happy since they have to purchase another device and maintain both versions.

Microsoft should have launched it in December 2012 instead of September 2012 but make it fully backward compatible.

The main reason why iOS is still ahead of Android towards the end of 2012 is the quality of execution in design and technology. Android however is focused on functionality.

A couple of most bright examples I can fetch out of the top of my head are Voice over and iMessage.

Voice over makes the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch almost fully accessible for visually impaired and totally blind people and competitors don't have any reliable technology that can compete. Voice over in iOS 5 makes it possible for visually impaired users to use apps, play games, use twitter and any other built in software and gives almost 100% functionality support experience.

iMessage makes it possible to send text messages for free from Apple to Apple device, which makes SMS technology redundant.

It turns out I rarely post lately being busy...

I figured out I'd better post some crazy stuff for motivation to be at the top of the feed for a while...

The clip below is called "Sunspot" by Of the Wand & the Moon from 2011.

The footage is very powerful. For more information about what is going on in the video search for snake handling or George Went Hensley. Enjoy :)

Fosimo 1.1.3 is available for download. Fosimo is a desktop tool for Facebook which helps you control your Facebook account without browsing through Facebook.

It has been more than a year and a half since the previous major releases of Fosimo while we focused on other projects. Since then Facebook has done a lot of changes and deprecations to their API so we found it counter-productive to catch up with that. However Fosimo proved to have a significant number of die-hard fans who continue to use the app.

We decided to catch up with the API changes namely converting to Oauth and Graph API, redesigned the authentication flow, fixed a number of bugs and simplified everything to make it much faster, lighter and easier to make changes in the future. Fosimo is still full-feature working and is able to notify the user about their friends status updates, upload photos to Facebook, update Facebook statuses, browse friends without browsing through Facebook, backup inbox and more.

Enjoy

EDIT: just forgot to mention this - Fosimo is 4 years old project already.

RIP Facebook Developers Forum.

It has been almost 4 years and over 6000 posts by myself alone. Actually the first 1.5 years was pretty fun and even amazing then Facebook had committed all possible mistakes to alienate the community so good folks moved elsewhere to other platforms.

It was fun while it lasted.

EDIT: official replacement forum for facebook devs is stackoverflow. Which sucks since stackoverflow is QnA type of forum without any discussions, argument or brainstorming type of threads. Experienced devs who helped folks on the old forum during last 4 years have to star with zero reputation.

Mobile game or application with sound effects is usually more fun for users than without. So how to implement sound effects on iOS? There are a few ways. If you search on the net - the most frequent recommendation is to use AVAudioPlayer library and component. My opinion - don't do it if you just want to implement short sound effects that last several seconds. AVAudioPlayer is very expensive performance-wise and has lag issues. It is also not very reliable in terms of leaks since you have to release it on the audioPlayerDidFinish callback of AVAudioPlayerDelegate delegate.

AVAudioPlayer is best for playing longer loop-able music tunes as a background. In order to play short sound effects it is performance-wise cheaper to use AudioServicesPlaySystemSound method from AudioToolbox.h. In order to do that you need to declare SystemSoundID like so:

SystemSoundID audioEffect;

and don't forget to dispose it in i.e. dealloc like so:

AudioServicesDisposeSystemSoundID(audioEffect);

Below is a short example function that gets a resource file name and file extension as parameters and plays sound effect:

-(void) playSound : (NSString *) fName : (NSString *) ext
{
    NSString *path  = [[NSBundle *mainBundle] pathForResource : fName ofType :ext];
    if ([[NSFileManager defaultManager] fileExistsAtPath : path])
    {
        NSURL *pathURL = [NSURL fileURLWithPath : path];
        AudioServicesCreateSystemSoundID((CFURLRef) pathURL, &audioEffect);
        AudioServicesPlaySystemSound(audioEffect);
    }
    else
    {
        NSLog(@"error, file not found: %@", path);
    }
}

Enjoy :)