So, I check my sales stats daily to keep track of how my apps are doing. (Mach Dice tends to get about a dozen or two sales a day and Holograms gets less than half that. Boom Dice might get a couple sales in a week.) In addition to sales numbers, I occasionally see that people update to the latest version of Mach Dice. But last week, according to the stats, it looks like someone updated their version of Holograms, which is odd because I’ve only ever published one version of that app. Spooooky…

I recently decided to get some more exercise in my life. And when I say “more” I really mean “greater than zero”. So I joined an indoor climbing gym. It’s a great workout for the entire body but especially for the fingers and hands. That may not sound especially useful but if I keep at it, I may someday be able to crush coconuts with my bare hands! (Right now, I think I’m up to boiled egg crushing level … well, maybe if it were shelled.)

My arms are pretty sore for an hour or so afterwards, which is fine unless I go climbing in the evening like last night. The problem is that I ride my motorcycle home and the clutch and front brake are controlled by hand levers. We’re only talking a couple pounds of pressure but sometimes even that’s a bit of a challenge after a good session of climbing. Thank goodness for the rear brake and neutral gear…

Well, the ladies that are under 2 years old, anyways… My friend just sent me this photo of her baby playing with Mach Dice. So adorable!

I’ve been using the ad-hoc provisioning to beta test my apps but I’ve recently learned something disturbing. There is a limit of 100 UDIDs that you can register. So I figured, that means I can have up to 100 beta testers per app, right? Well, it seems that once you’ve registered a UDID, you use up that slot. In other words, you had better be really certain who you want to beta test your apps because once you’ve selected 100, you can’t add any more.

If anyone knows any more about this issue, please chime in because I couldn’t really find any links about it.

Okay, it’s not quite yet the Fourth of July. But I don’t usually post on Saturdays so it’s a bit early. Anyways, I’ve always loved this holiday as a kid because it’s so magical. I mean, sure, I loved Christmas because of the presents and I loved Thanksgiving because of the cranberry sauce (and I’m talking about the stuff that comes out of a can without any bits of real cranberry because really, who wants actual fruit in their sauce as a kid?).

But what other holiday is celebrated by blowing stuff up? (Okay, there’s Guy Fawke’s Night but I didn’t find out about that until much later.) This was the one holiday where I was allowed — nay, encouraged — to set things on fire. And as amazing as fire was by itself, it was taken to a whole new level with fireworks. Not only was fire bright and dynamic, it was also multi-colored and capable of propelling and spinning and sparkling!

Fourth of July probably had something to do with my desire to work in the effects industry and, truth be told, my slight prediliction for pyromania. In any case, I have fond memories of those hot summer days and the nights that came with them because the world seemed almost magical then. So many things seemed possible on those nights and it was all the sweeter for only happening once a year.

Happy Fourth of July!

Things are getting pretty busy at work, but I’m still doing a bit of work on Boom Dice. I’m working on a system to unlock new dice and a computer opponent. Here’s what the silver dice will look like eventually!

Over the weekend, I saw a fantastic low-budget science fiction movie called “Moon” starring Sam Rockwell, featuring the voice of Kevin Spacey, and directed by Duncan Jones. I don’t want to say too much about the film because I don’t want to give anything away (in fact, avoid the trailer and reviews if you can) but if your sci-fi preferences run more towards 2001, Moon is definitely worth seeing. That said, I understand that movie tastes are very subjective so I’ve devised a handy test that helps you decide.

Complete this sentence: “I saw Star Wars Episode I and felt that it needed …”

a) “… more boobs, exploding giant robots, and wacky ethnic characters like Jar-Jar.”

b) “… a plot.”

Occasionally, I’ll get a request to port Mach Dice to other platforms (Palm Pre, LG Touch, HTC Diamond, Google Android, Virtual Tabletop, etc.). But with a full time job, I barely have enough time to just work on the iPhone. So it isn’t likely any time soon. Still, I am curious. Do any of you have one of the other smart phones? Or does anyone have a sense of how many people own each of the devices? My impression is that iPhone has the biggest app customer base out there, but I’ve only ever seen anecdotal evidence.

Over the weekend, I upgraded my iPhone and the corresponding SDK to OS 3.0. So far, things seem to be working pretty smoothly but I did run into one problem when recompiling Boom Dice. Some of the sounds stopped working. In the sound allocation command, I got back a result of “kAudioServicesSystemSoundUnspecifiedError”. But then I moved the sound files to a subdirectory, ran afconvert on them and then they worked. Here’s the command I used:

    afconvert -f caff -d LEI16 $x ../$x

And here’s the old broken sound file and the new working sound file.