Sparrow-Framework is pretty awesome for quickly chucking together iOS games. But wouldn’t it be nicer if there was a handy Xcode 4 template to start from?

So I’ve been thinking about this, and pending further evidence I’m going to assume that the story about vodka soaked tampons (see KPHO) is rubbish. Every so often it seems to make the rounds (see Snopes). Here’s why I’m an unbeliever.

Shuffling is just like buses. You sit about being deterministic for years, and then all of a sudden, you need some random shuffling on two platforms at once.

For some reason, there doesn’t seem to be any sane example of shuffling arrays in ActionScript blogland. I discovered this when I was trying to send a lazy link to someone of an implementation rather than write the code myself. Oh, by sane I mean vaguely efficient, not overusing crazy Math.floor or Array.slice functions.

Upgrading an OS is always fun, especially when you go for a clean install and forget about the 40 million really useful applications you need to make your life comfortable. Then you run into all the subtle changes that break the way you did things before…

Let’s face it, we all use Flash and AS3 because we like pretty eye candy. Otherwise we’d just use a real language.

Another one of my silly mistakes. I’ve been having problems getting fonts I was using in game (created with the rather excellent Glyph Designer) to display as anything other than a black blobby mess.

UPDATED: The pull request was merged, so this should be all fixed.

If you’ve tried to create an app using the latest Sparrow Framework and XCode 4, then tried to Archive it (say for distributing via the excellent TestFlightApp service), you may have run into an error similar to the following:

AppScaffold Cannot be Validated “AppScaffold” does not contain a single–bundle application or contains multiple products. Please select another archive, or adjust your scheme to create a single–bundle application.

I’m currently playing around with the rather fine iOS game engine, Sparrow Framework.

I had been aware of it for a while, but hadn’t really got my hands dirty using it. However I’ve recently resolved to work on a few side projects with Dave Thomson who waxed lyrical about it’s ease of use, so I decided to learn a bit more about it.

Being a Mac user, I’m unable to work with anything that doesn’t have eye candy, even my terminal. So, I knocked together a quick bash function to prettify my terminal a little. It probably works in any bash or bash like environment with git installed: