We have moved!

Rather than using Blogger.com for our Blogs, we have decided to setup an external website that will be a central resource for everything we do.

The advantage to this approach is that this increases the amount of traffic, for technical blogs, but more importantly to advertise our products when released.

Please visit us at http://SpikyOrange.co.uk, we hope to increase our content for software developers, including videos on YouTube and gems of information through Twitter.

Thanks for visiting!

Rob.

Appcelerator Titanium - Installation issues on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)

The Titanium product promises desktop and mobile development, using HTML, CSS and Javascript, to Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iPhone and soon Blackberry.


This is an impressive goal, but can it really work?

My first step was to install the product, which unfortunately wasn't as straight forward as I would have liked.  This blog entry is hopefully my first of many, on Titanium, purely to document the steps I took to get it running on Ubuntu.  This blog does not detail the full setup procedure, instead, I show what I had to do to get it working after I had completed their installation instructions (follow link, then select downloads).

When trying to run Titanium I received the error "symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_malloc_n".  To fix that, I had to type...

cd /home/rob/.titanium/runtime

rm libgobject-2.0*
rm libglib-2.0*
rm libgio-2.0*
rm libgthread-2.0*

It would seem that it didn't like trying to use the Java open JDK, so I typed

sudo aptitude remove openjdk-6-jre icedtea6-plugin

To change from Open JDK to Sun JDK...

sudo aptitude install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts

After all of this, Titanium then reported that it couldn't create a new project, so I changed the use of Android 8 to Android 4 (within the 'android' tool that enables you to specify the API's to install) and then...

gedit ~/.profile

Note that the 'android-4' mentioned in the path was 'android-8' but failed to work...

PATH=”/home/rob/android-sdk-linux_x86/tools:$PATH”
PATH=”/home/rob/android-sdk-linux_x86/platforms/android-4/tools:$PATH"
export PATH

I did have a timeout error launching the Android emulator, when this happened I launched the simulator again and then it worked.

I still receive an error '[ERROR] /home/rob/android-sdk-linux_x86/tools/apkbuilder' which I have yet to resolve, however, it doesn't seem to stop the tool from running!

 


My attempt of installing on the Mac also failed - I currently can't launch the iPhone simulator, but that's for another blog entry (once I've fixed it!).

Learning Game Programming - XNA #1

My first attempt of using Microsoft XNA - I plan to create a game eventually, but the first stage is to experiment with the Framework. I coded it using C#, one sprite (increasing to 100 gradually), it uses scaling, rotation and movement.

I'm reading Learning XNA 3.0 from O'Reilly at the moment, I have two other XNA books too. This is simply for a hobby, nothing professional at this stage is required. I would like to finally get the 'game' I write on to the XBOX 360 as a multiplayer game (Split Screen) and eventually over XBOX live.

100 x sprites (512 x 512 resolution) being dynamically resized and rotated maintains 60 FPS! Once FRAPS starts recording for capturing on to Youtube it goes down to 30 FPS.