Edge for iPhone

No, I'm not talking about the 2.5G mobile technology. Nor will I mention that we're getting copy and paste at last! Oh dear, sorry about that.

No, I want to talk about another shiny gem of an iPhone game called Edge, that I discovered over the weekend. Sadly, no screenshot I can take does it justice, so I strongly recommend you check it out on YouTube.

Retro graphics, a simple concept and a varied 8-bit inspired soundtrack combine to provide something really quite engaging.

Guide your cube around numerous cubic landscapes, each one more fiendish than the last. When your cube reaches the goal tile, based on how many times you dropped off the world, the number of smaller cubes you managed to collect and the time taken, you'll get a rating, which as far as I can tell is between A and D.

Very simple. Insidiously addictive.

Microsoft Research and ILMerge

Before we start, I'd like to draw your attention to the Microsoft Research website. There's some pretty interesting stuff available to download if you have a dig around.

ILMerge is one such research project. One of the less grandiose ones, no doubt, but it works as advertised. It's a tool which can combine multiple .NET assemblies into a single .NET assembly. You can download it from Microsoft, here.

And the Microsoft Research Website for the project is here.

I've come to the conclusion that ILMerge appeals to my nature because back when games used to be played in DOS, you'd typically have an EXE and maybe a data file or two. And that was it! Ah, such elegant simplicity.

ILMerge is a command line utility, but there is a CodePlex project which puts a GUI on the front if you have an aversion to the command prompt. I can't vouch for the UI, it's written by another third party and I haven't tried it. Besides, who doesn't love command prompts?

There are four basic pieces of information you'll need to provide to ILMerge:

1. The directory to search for input assemblies. Use /lib:<directory>
2. The target assembly type. For an exe, use /target:winexe
3. The output assembly. Use /out:<assemblyname>
4. The Primary and secondary assemblies. These get listed at the end of the command line, with the primary assembly first.

So, to merge an application which consists of hello.exe and world.dll, which reside in the directory C:\HelloWorld, into a new assembly called helloworld.exe the command line would be:

ilmerge /lib:"C:\HelloWorld" /target:winexe /out :helloworld.exe hello.exe world.dll

We then end up with a shiny new helloworld.exe which can be used in place of both input assemblies. You can verify that the assemblies have been merged by opening up the output file in ILDASM, or your intermediate language disassembler of choice, where you should see all the component parts of your input assemblies.

Time Out: Ancient Frog

I happened to stumble upon a rather excellent iPhone app called Ancient Frog at the weekend. I thought it was so excellent, I'm sharing it with you.


The premise? Help a variety of flexible frogs get the fly by guiding their limbs, for which there are limited spots to place them, across various surfaces. Not only is it an original and entertaining product, it's developed by a one man band.

I have a bit of a soft spot for Independent Game developers. Previously, I worked on both Thievery and the first incarnation of Alien Swarm, and I'm currently working on an as yet unannounced XBox 360 community game. It can be a hard slog, especially if you're trying to fit in a life and a day job.

Want to support Indie Game devs? This is definitely one to buy if you've got an iPhone or an iTouch.

Google Charts API

Hands up who knew about the Google Charts API? I didn't until recently. And this is coming from someone who knows a thing or two about charts.

What is it then? It's a web based charting API with which you can create a custom chart by simply forming a valid url.

For example, the following url:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:50,40,10&chs=290x100&chl=Hamsters|Mice|Tigers

Gives us this:




Other than to say it's not limited to just pie charts, I won't go into further detail since you can read all about it in the documentation for yourself. If you haven't seen it before, it's well worth a look.

Recommendation: DotNetZipLib

I've been working on a personal software project lately that needs the ability to manipulate zip files, and I can heartily recommend DotNetZipLib for doing so.

DotNetZip is a small, easy-to-use class library for manipulating .zip files. It can enable .NET applications written in VB.NET, C#, or any .NET language, to easily create, read, and update zip files.

Does exactly what it says on the tin. Brilliant!

Productivity Tools - SlickRun

Due to the nature of my job, I have the curse of using a laptop to develop on when I'm at work. It's not a bad spec, plenty of RAM, XP, Core 2 Duo processor. But it falls down when it comes to the hard drive, which is a pretty nasty 5,400 rpm excuse of a thing. The speed at which my considerable Start Menu loads can at times, be pretty dire. It's a classic case of portability at the expense of productivity.

Previously, I had favoured the use of a double height taskbar and the quick launch toolbar for frequently used programs, but even this was becoming unwieldy.

Fortunately, I then discovered a rather nice freeware application with a small footprint, called SlickRun.

Once installed, SlickRun sits in the corner, or wherever you place it, waiting for the hotkey combination to activate it. You can configure in terms of opacity, colour, and whether you would like it to display the date. Here's how SlickRun currently looks on my system:



Once configured, it allows me, in a few keypressess, to launch my apps without having to go near the start menu or quick launch toolbar. For example, to launch Visual studio 2008, I simply press 'WINDOWS + W' (which sets focus to slickrun) and then I type '08' followed by 'ENTER'. Another nice feature is the ability to launch an application under a different account (RunAs).

I can't vouch for v4.0 of the app which is currently in development, but 3.9.8.3 works like a charm.

Launchy does a similar thing, but works by indexing the Start Menu and desktop. SlickRun however, is my current preference. Cunningly, it also keeps a running total of how many commands it has executed since installed. I think this following screen capture proves just how useful I find SlickRun to be!



What productivity apps would you recommend?