This Saturday, I participated in the 24th World Wide SketchCrawl. What is SketchCrawl? It’s a simple idea, a whole bunch of people gather together somewhere and just start drawing. It’s mostly based in San Francisco but there are gatherings all around the world.

This weekend, the local gathering started out in China Town and we wandered around to parks near there. I’m not that great at drawing (especially compared to the people that were there!) but it was good to get out and practice. It’s tricky to find something interesting that stays still long enough for me to draw it, but I managed to draw a couple in the park, a tree with shadows that made it look like a face, and the back of a friend’s head.

I just started taking a class. A class in stage combat. Specifically, the art of stage combat while using a quarterstaff. I know what you’re thinking. “What could possibly make Mach want to learn how to use a quarterstaff?” Blame it on early childhood influences.

Also, I recently found out that you can jump to the middle of a YouTube clip by appending a time code to the URL. For example, suppose you wanted to start playing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPt0sjn0jSw at the 1 minute and 48 seconds mark. Just append “#t=1m48s” to get http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPt0sjn0jSw#t=1m48s and now the link starts there.

Still kinda recovering a cold so instead of a full blog entry, I’ll just pass on a tip from a fellow developer: If you’re doing any sort of real-time gaming on the iPhone, you probably want to use the CADisplayLink to drive your graphics loop instead of an NSTimer because NSTimer isn’t guaranteed to get called in the specified time frame.

On Friday, I linked to a video I uploaded that was made by one of my co-workers from still images grabbed from a webcam of the construction project. Since then, the video was featured on Laughing Squid and SFist and has garnered over 100,000 views in just a few days. In that time, I’ve learned a few things:

• Anything that attracts the attention of tens of thousands of people per day is also bound to attract some idiots. Boy, some of those YouTube commenters rank really high up on the scale of stupid. (Not you guys, though, you guys are all awesome.)
• There is a Benny Hillifier on the web which will add Yakkety Sax (better known as the “Benny Hill music”) to any YouTube video, which is perfect for, say, a timelapse video of bridge construction. Oh, interwebs, is there anything you can’t do?
• Having a single popular video on YouTube has no appreciable affect on the traffic to your other videos or your website.
• If you are aching from a cold and trying to recover in bed, cats do not care and will come and sit on your chest anyways. However, it is comforting when they purr.

The bridge connecting East Bay and San Francisco recently underwent some construction to attach the new on-ramp. There was a webcam pointed at it during the construction and one of my co-workers wrote a linux script to grab the image every minute and then he turned it into a movie file. I converted that movie into a smaller format and put it up on YouTube. Surprisingly, it’s gotten over 5000 hits in a single day!

One of the nice things about the Open Feint system is that it has achievements. So in the next version of Boom Dice when you unlock a new die type, you’ll get a little message and then you unlock the corresponding achievement achievement. Optionally, it can also post to your facebook or twitter account to tell everyone what a Boom Dice stud you are. I’m still working on the text, but this is the general idea.

So far, I’ve just got the three achievements but if you guys have any others that you want to see in there, let me know!

Also, this post was published on the 9th minute of the 9th hour of the 9th day of the 9th month of the year 2009.

Happy Labor Day! In America, this is the day when we celebrate labor by spending the day not laboring. I’ve got the day off so I’m going to do a little work on Boom Dice. I spent a little time over the weekend integrating the new Open Feint features. What is Open Feint? It’s an open social network by the makers of Aurora Feint that you can include in your iPhone apps. Think of it sort of like XBox Live for app. The latest version has a great new interface and offers achievements, leaderboards, chat, and more. Check it out!

Earlier this week, French website Le Vide Poches (“The Empty Pockets”?) wrote an article about my Holograms app:

L’idée est fort astucieuse, elle permet d’avoir une vraie/fausse 3D sur son iPhone. Vraie/fausse ? Je m’explique.

Unfortunately, my high school French never evolved beyond the level of “Le poisson est sur la table.” So I couldn’t read it myself. But Google Translate provided a pretty good translation:

The idea is very clever, it provides a true / false 3D on his iPhone. True / false? Let me explain.

And it looks like they liked it! =)

So it’s been a couple days since I started my little Mach Dice Google AdWords campaign. If I’m looking at the data correctly, it looks like nobody’s actually clicked on any of my ads. But traffic has gone up slightly to my website. It’s almost as if people see the ad, decide not to click on it, but are intruiged by the name and look it up.

Actually, if that’s what they’re doing, that’s a good thing because I just found out that each click of the ad could cost up to $1.91! At that rate, it’s hard to see how advertising could possibly pay off for a 99 cent app. Boy am I glad that I got free advertising through an AdWords promotion…

Check it out, I made an ad! Don’t worry, I’m not putting ads on this website. My readership is too small (hi, Tracy!) to make that worthwhile but this is a picture of what my Google AdWords ad looks like on other people’s sites.

I haven’t done much advertising of my apps in the past because I wasn’t sure if it’d be worth it. After Apple’s fees, various banking fees, taxes, etc. … I get about 50 cents for each of my 99 cent apps. That’s great because I don’t really have any costs, it’s all profit.

So just how expensive would advertising be? Well, rates vary but it’s roughly a penny per time someone clicks on an ad. But just getting someone to click on an ad doesn’t make me any money. They actually have to buy my app in order to generate some revenue. Then the question becomes, how many people that click on the ad actually end up buying the app? If it’s like 10% of the people (spend 10 cents to make 50 cents), then that’s pretty good. If it’s 1% (spend $1 to make 50 cents), that’s not so good.

My guess is that it’s a lot closer to 1% than 10% so I haven’t bothered to advertise before. But just recently, Google did a promotion offering $100 worth of free advertising if I signed up. So I figured, hey, I’ll give it a shot and find out if it’s worth it.

Oh, and if you’re one of those people that came to my site from clicking on the ad, welcome! I’d love to hear your thoughts on the ad. Did you buy Mach Dice? Also, take a look at Holograms, an app that lets you turn pictures into virtual holograms!