Have you bought my iPhone / iPod app, Mach Dice? It’s been, like, forever since I’ve done an update to it, right? Well, I’ve started taking one night a week to try to work on iPhone stuff and this week, I implemented fudge dice — one of the most popular feature requests I get.

What are fudge dice? They’re dice that have an equal number of plus sides, minus sides, and blank sides. Typically, you roll 4 of them and then add up the plusses and subtract the minuses to get a value from -4 to 4 in a rough normal distribution. But you can also add them to other dice, like a d10 in my screenshot.

The way you’ll create them in Mach Dice is to tell it to use a “d3”. Why d3? Because there are three possible values: plus, minus, and blank. There will also be a setting to let you use d3 as values from 1 to 3.

It’ll be a while before I submit an update because there are a couple other things I’d like to implement as well. But hopefully, it’ll be out in the next few weeks.

I attempt to do a great many things in life, not all of them successfully. But sometimes failure is funny:

http://www.youtube.com/v/U_dc91ZrZaY

In the first half year of his life, my baby has tripled in size while I have remained fundamentally the same. Now, I may not know a lot about babies, but I know math. And at this rate, baby “Mach 2” will overtake me in less than a year.

That’s okay, kids are all about surpassing their parents. I just didn’t think it’d be happening this soon. Although, I suppose I should have expected it. He was already way cuter than I was as a baby and I was pretty cute baby:

Dear Mach,

There’s this guy that I’ve been friends with for a couple years but now I’m starting to have feelings for him. What should I do?

TNK

Dear TNK,

You know, as a guy with extremely limited dating experience, I’m not sure that I’m the best person to ask this question of. But since you asked — if it were a guy in that situation, I’d want to hear something like, “Hey, I just wanted you to know I’m totally into you.” And bam! Problem solved.

What, too simple and straightforward? Well, I can suggest something more elaborate, but I have to warn you that my knowledge of dating is mostly fictional and primarily comes from John Hughes movies of the 80s. Try this: throw a birthday party but conveniently “forget” to invite everyone but the boy in question. And then (read this on my blog to see this in script format):

And bam! Problem solved. No, no need to thank me. It’s reward enough to know that I’ve made it possible for you two crazy kids to finally get together.

One of the harder things about being an independent hobbyist developer is that there are just so many distractions: emails to respond to, internets to browse, twitters to tweet, etc. But one thing that I’ve found that really helps me focus is to get together with friends and do a coding night.

It’s nothing fancy, I just invite a couple friends who are also working on iPhone projects over and then we just sit and code. The fact that there are other people in the room gives me just enough pressure to keep on working on my project instead of checking out the latest weird video coming out of Japan.

Oh sure, there are several articles that point out how small the Android paid market is compared to the iPhone. And from anecdotal experience, that seems to bear out. Almost everyone I know with an iPhone has bought an app at some point but of the few friends that I know have Androids, none of them have ever paid for an app.

That said, it seems like a very powerful platform and if I had an Android, I’d probably try developing for it except for the fact that between a full-time job and a certain other thing occupying all my free time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DFHrVcmNvc

Occasionally, I write about fun games that I’ve been playing and encourage you guys to try them out. In that vein, I’ve been playing a bit of Dwarf Fortress lately, but I don’t know if I’d exactly call it a fun game.

Instead, I’ll say it’s a very, very involved game. Basically, you control a bunch of dwarves and try to make a productive fortress. Sounds simple, right? But the game is deep and super complex. How complex? There’s an entire wiki site devoted to it. And some guy made a 40-part video tutorial series. It has the steepest learning curve I’ve ever seen in a game.

And yet … there’s just something charming about it. The game is so incredibly detailed that you really start to feel something for the little dwarves. Some friends and I are using Dropbox to play a shared game of Dwarf Fortress and we’ve been having a great time with it.

On Monday, The Unofficial Apple Weblog reviewed my iPad game, Castle Tiles! The added publicity meant I sold 23 times as many copies of Castle Tiles on Monday as I did on Sunday bringing my sales to … 23. =)

Okay, so Castle Tiles isn’t exactly a huge seller. But it’s an iPad-only app, and there are 50 times as many iPhones / iPods as there are iPads. So from a market share perspective, that’s like 1000 sales! Of course, financially, it’s still just 23 sales.

But that brings up an interesting question. If you’re a developer, should you develop iPad-specific apps? Financially, it might not be as worth it. On the other hand, it sure is fun making apps for a giant screen like that.

I had high hopes for The Last Airbender, the live-action adaptation of a phenomenal cartoon series, Avatar: The Last Airbender. After all, it’s based on a great franchise with a compelling story, had cool effects, an experienced director, and a big budget. But apparently, it’s really, really bad. So what happened? I have a theory…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PogS6FqL9_8

One of my friends, Everett Downing, is being interviewed today by Bobby Chiu of Imaginism Studios. As part of his interview, they’re running a drawing contest on the theme “Street Magic”. So I decided to do a sketch of a little dragon busker (street musician) cause hey, a dragon’s gotta earn a living, too, right? =)