O Frapstr, Where Art Thou?

Frapstr is still here.  I’ve been rather swamped lately both with my day job, and with setting up Cowboy Rodeo’s Pinball Dreams/Fantasies blog and forum.  The blog has been a lot of work, mainly picking out the right theme, modifying the HTML, PHP and CSS to suit, creating the header image (mostly taken and modified from existing artwork, but I had to create the buttons and such), adding and modifying the plugins and so on.  The forum took a lot of work too — anyone who has ever set up phpBB3 knows what an incredibly convoluted, complicated and confusing behemoth that thing has become.  It’s the poster child for what can happen when something gets designed by committee.

There’s still work to be done, mostly on the order of touching up and prettifying and stuff, but the major work is done, thankfully.  Juuso and I are just going over the bits and pieces that need to be addressed and fixed up and prettified and modified to better suit the direction he wants them to go in.  As for Frapstr, don’t worry. I’ve got reviews lined up, and will be commencing with those today.  Nothing huge at the moment as, like I said, I’ve still got work to do elsewhere, but I will keep up with things once again.  Just have some patience and faith and Frapstr will continue on its merry way like it has always done.

Back to the grind.

Tags: cowboy rodeo, frapstr, pinball dreams, pinball fantasies

Reorganisation and a New App Review Submission Form

You might notice more changes around the site as I plug away a little bit more at improving Frapstr.  I’ve ended up shuffling around some of the sidebar items so that they’re a little more even. The top apps now live on the left sidebar, so the right is reserved for easy category searching and the random screenshot widget. I’ve also removed the last of the ads from the site (apart from my ad for Galactic Chill, obviously — hey, gotta stump for my own material), something I’ve been meaning to do for a while but it always slipped my mind.  I removed the Technorati link too, because frankly it was just taking up space and not earning its keep, and I cleaned up the resources section a bit, too.  I’m thinking of moving some of the most important links into a new nav bar at the top between the header and content, where they’ll be a little easier to spot.

One of the bigger things I’ve been working on (not that it’s particularly huge) is the new app review submission page so developers and their PR reps have a much better and clearer method for submitting apps for review than hunting for my E-Mail address which, let’s face it, is pretty ghetto.  The new page features a nice clean form with all of the important fields and selection boxes for easy input, plus space to send me a nice note describing their game and passing along any other pertinent information. Yes, there’s a captcha box there too; don’t want bots using it to spam me after all. I still have to play with the CSS a bit to get it looking a bit nicer — wider, mostly, but other than that it’s an improvement over the old method.

Back at the homestead, I’m still 3G S-less.  Rogers is still sold out.  I’ve been hearing a rumbling or two that they just got a shipment in and are shipping them out to back-ordered customers, but as I haven’t received a shipment confirmation E-Mail yet, I’m assuming mine is either still earmarked, or still backordered.  All I can say is, I want my damn 3G S!  It’s been two weeks now since I placed my order, and I’d like it very much if Rogers didn’t gun for three.  I don’t suppose I can blame Rogers, really; Apple is the one with the supply problem.  In the mean time though the wife decided to upgrade her 3G to OS 3.0, because there were a couple of apps she really wanted that required it.  “Super,” I thought, “thirty minutes and we should be golden.”  Yeah, you know damn well fate wasn’t having any of that.  I spent three freakin’ hours on that damn thing. Try as  I might, it would not upgrade. No matter what I tried — normal restore, DFU shift-restore, uninstall and reinstall iTunes, going into DFU with and without iTunes loaded, doing it after a fresh reboot, uninstalling and reinstalling iTunes and AMDH — no amount of hocus pocus, tests of will or threads of physical violence was able to get the damn thing to restore. I finally brought the whole mess over to the Mac, and at long last the damn thing was able to restore.

“Just works” my twice-spanked ass.  Not when Windows is involved.

The review stream may be a little tepid this weekend.  I have company over Saturday, where we’ll be shuttling around hell’s half acre most of the day, and I have to get at least one bonus track done for the next update to Galactic Chill.  I think I’d also like to redo the existing tracks for more seamless looping, and to properly EQ them this time.  They sound like crap right now – I know most who’ve tried it don’t think so, but they sound flat and dull to me.  Just listen to it side-by-side with Relax Trax and you’ll see what I mean.  I really need to fill it out with some proper EQing to bolster the highs and round out the bass a bit.

Anyway, ’bout time I get back to things.  More changes will undoubtedly be on the way — and I’m still toying with a complete makeover at some point.  But for now, one thing at a time.

Tags: 3g s, ambiscience, app reviews, galactic chill, iphone 3gs, iphone developers

Releases, Delays, Twitter and Windows

It’s been a busy couple of days, kicked off by the unexpected release of AmbiScience: Galactic Chill.  Given Apple’s backlog of approvals from the OS3 release, I wasn’t expecting to see it until sometime next week at the very earliest — and then it goes and shows up on the App Store last night.  Obviously that kicked me into overdrive mode, creating a banner (which I should have done earlier), arranging a promo code giveaway on touchArcade (which went well), initiating a Twitter-powered giveaway which went down from noon ’til 9pm this evening, and contacting a bunch of app review sites offering promo codes to review the app.  The banner I think looks nice enough, the promo code giveaway on tA went well and has already generated one 5-star review (more reviews may be pending in the moderation queue), and the Twitter giveaway went … well, it just went.  I can’t say how well because I only saw one tweet from a reader who grabbed one. I can only assume the other 9 were snagged.  Despite entreaties to tweet when a code is snagged, pretty well no one did.  (The one person who did tweet didn’t @respond, but rather just tweeted from his own account that was enjoying it — here too I can only assume he got it from a code because he followed me before tweeting that.)

Twitter, being a new thing for me, has been a bit enlightening.  I’ve discovered a few things about it:

1) It’s cool to keep up with other iPhone folks, and it seems to be a handy tool for exposure — presuming you can get followers.

2) Attempted spam is rampant.  Apparently there are Twitter accounts that are constantly searching for keywords and then auto-following anyone who uses them.  The moment I posted a promo code for AmbiScience: Pure Meditation, some meditation guru who has nothing to do with the iPhone started following me.  I’m talking mere seconds between the code being posted and the follow.  And then there are all the beauty product pushers.  What the hell do I have do do with beauty secrets?  Why do I even care?  And what keyword did I use that they found me with?  It’s not like they can spam me if I’m not following them.  Are there really Twitter users who opt-in to this shit?

3) Then there’s some idiot (probably lots of idiots, but I only got the one so far) who’s pushing some site(s) that gets you hundreds of followers instantly for FREE!  Da hell?  Why would someone want hundreds of strangers who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about their banal goings-on (assuming these followers are even real people) following them?  Is it just about the numbers to look important or show up on “most popullar Twitter people” lists?  How sad an individual do you have to be to sign up for that sort of thing?  Christ, I hate idiots that game systems in ways that piss people off.

4) I can’t tell if the people I’m blocking are actually blocked.  It tells me that they’re blocked when I block them, but then they remain in my followers list, still with a button to block button.

So, yeah.  Twitter is showing is dank underbelly pretty fast.  It’s pretty easy to avoid the spammers and morons, at least: Don’t follow them without taking a look at what they’re tweeting about.

Anyway, so I’ve pretty much taken care of the stuff that needed to be done for Galactic Chill’s release.  Now I just wait and hope it gets some positive reviews — on iTunes and off.  But where there’s an unexpected arrival — truly in Murphy’s footsteps — there’s an unexpected delay.  I ordered two iPhone 3GSes from Rogers on release day, but I did it in the evening.  Last Wednesday my wife told me that she’d heard they sold out by sometime in the afternoon.  Since I ordered in the evening, I decided to call customer service at Rogers and find out if maybe I was unlucky enough to have placed my order after the sellout — or if the sellout indeed happened at all.  The Rogers dude assured me that yes, everything’s cool, your order was placed and processed, but if I don’t get anything by Friday, call back.

Sure enough, Friday came and the phones didn’t, so I called back.  They transferred me to the tracking department, which entailed a lovely 30 minute wait on top of the 5 I spent jumping through the security hoops and explaining what it is I was calling about.  (Thank Og for Bluetooth)  It bears mentioning that Rogers has intermittent “Thank you for holding” messages interrupting their hold music.  The one. freaking. song.  It isn’t even a specific song, just some generic Muzak thing.  I think they do that to drive you stark raving hatstand so you’ll hang up.  Anyway, tracking department answers, I go through the spiel again, and am told that it’s freakin’ BACKORDERED.  Gee, thank you, Wednesday evening customer service jerk, for telling me.  So insetad of the 3-5 business days it’s supposed to take, I’m on schedule for the 5-10 business days it will supposedly take them to receive their next shipment and send mine out.  *sigh*

On a good note though at least that means I should receive it this coming week sometime.  I’m told they’ll E-Mail me when it’s shipped out.  In the mean time though the work I have to do this weekend isn’t over.  My Windows 7 beta expires in… *checks watch* two days.  I have the RC though so I’m going to be upgrading to that either later tonight or tomorrow.  Pain in the ass that is, but that’s what I signed up for when I went with the beta.  I’m liking Windows 7, I admit.  I’m hoping the RC will clear up some issues I’m having with it though.

Anyway, enough chit chat.  I need coffee, STAT.

Tags: ambiscience, galactic chill, iphone 3gs, pure meditation, toucharcade, twitter, windows 7

App Submission, Site Improvements, and the 3GS

Busy, busy week.  You may have noticed that I’ve been posting more often recently, getting 2 posts a day more often than one, and three today.  I’m trying to burn through my backlog so I don’t have so much to do and also shorten the lead time between when a developer submits an app for review and it gets written and posted.

But the real news involves that little screenshot right there.  Ya see that?  That’s the credits screen for AmbiScience: Galactic Chill, the new relaxation/entrainment app from Tesla featuring my music.  It was submitted to the App Store yesterday, so it’s maybe a week or so lead before it goes live.  Woohoo!  Ron had to rework many of my tracks because of the way he loops the tunes, so as a result they aren’t going to loop the way I thought they were going to loop, and the way I wrote them to loop.  Ron’s coder, Nick, is hopefully going to find a way to more elegantly loop mid-stream without any pops or clicks, at which point my original tunes will be reinstated all proper-like, the way I wrote them to sound, which would be awesome.  In the mean time though the results aren’t that bad.  I’ve got to do up a sneak peek and trailer video for it this weekend.

I’ve also did a little work on the site itself.  Right now, I just finished fixing the tag browsing finally.  Before it came up all ugly with stripped HTML formatting and crap.  Looked like utter shite.  I’ve fixed that now so it shows the headers properly and a decent amount of excerpt text with one screenshot, so browsing tags will look good and proper now.  I’m going to work on fixing language translation now, too.  The changes also fixed the way localization appears, too, so browsing Frapstr in other languages using the machine translation links below the RSS badge looks like it’s supposed to, not all mangled, so … awesome points there, too.

On another note, my wife and I dropped by the Rogers Wireless store at the mall this evening just to inquire about our options to upgrade to the 3GS.  We had only just renewed our contract last August with the 3G, so we weren’t expecting very much if anything; we were actually expecting to pay full pop, which would be $1,600 for both phones.  We were told instead that we could do it after one year of our three year contract had elapsed, and that they’d knock off $250 from each phone.  So, that was better; we were down to $1100 for two phones.  We were told, however, that we’d either have to go to a corporate store (Rogers Video) or call customer service about that, as they couldn’t do it at the Rogers Wireless store level.  (Those stores are contracted out, they aren’t actually run by Rogers.)  That’s cool though because if I did it via customer service they’d just bill my account rather than require the money up front.

So, we went home and dutifully called Customer Service to talk it over with them, whereupon I was assaulted by a pair of progressively more awesome surprises:

1. I was eligible for an upgrade right now.  Sa-weet.
2. I was eligible for an upgrade at full subsidized pricing.  For both phones.  That’s new customer or full-term renewal (tier 3) pricing, $299 for the 32GB model, and I haven’t even burned through a full year of my current term.  EPIC. F&#%ING. WIN.

Yeah, I pretty much told them to put a bow on a pair of 32s and send ‘em out pronto.  And here I thought I was going to have to scrimp and save and wait ’til August at the very least.  Now it looks like these shiny new beasts will be at my doorstep as early as the end of next week, possibly early the following.  Now, if I sell the two iPhone 3Gs we currently have, plus my 32GB 2G Touch, we’ll probably even be able to come out ahead of the game.

Anyway, I think I’ve earned a little chill time this evening, so I’ma do just that.

Tags: ambiscience, frapstr, galactic chill, iphone 3gs, rogers wireless

Stick a Fork In It!

Because it’s done!  Well, my part in it for 1.0 is.  I submitted the 8th and final track for the first version of one of Tesla’s forthcoming AmbiScience apps last Sunday.  Now he’s going to think of a name for the app, think of names for the tracks (I already gave them names, but he prefers to name them himself to fit with whatever name he’s giving the app and based on however each track “speaks” to him), put them in whatever order feels right to him, get his coder to whip up the mods necessary to include my songs, add the isochronics, and ship it off to the App Store.  Ron figures it’ll be submitted sometime early-mid next week.  I’m going to see if he can send me an Ad Hoc copy, or at least a screenshot or two so I can post a preview of some of the tracks so you can get a good sense of the soundscapes and songs I’ve written.  I’m rather excited.

There will probably be two more bonus tracks to write for inclusion in an update, but they probably won’t be required until sometime in July.  Ron’s going on vacation for the last week of June, so I won’t be under the self-imposed time constraints I had for the first 8 tracks.  For the last two I can take a bit of leisure in composing them — although first I’m going to take a bit of a breather.  It was a bit of a surprisingly challenge to come up with those first 8 tracks.  I wanted to provide a fair bit of variety to cover enough ground to make the app useful in a variety of circumstances, from chillin’ out to helping one focus, so the tracks range from pure ambient soundscapes to lush synth-orchestral pieces to lounge to chillout electronica.  Part of the challenge was making each track distinct without inadvertently establishing a situation where they become interchangeable, or sound the same.  I’m sure in some way I have a particular sound inherent in the way I write music — although this particular genre being new to me, that may not be apparent.  However, I didn’t want to get stuck in a rut writing essentially the same song over and over again.

Another part of the challenge was sounds.  I burned through a lot of the sounds I have in my patch and sample library, many of which were further altered to my particular wants and needs for a given track.  There’s almost no overlap in any of the tracks — I think I reused one sound, but it was significantly altered enough that you’d probably never even recognize it.  By the 8th track though I was starting to cast further afield for new sounds to suit it.  Track 8 (which may not be the track number it ends up as in the final product) ended up being 80% samples and loops with a couple of synth patches mingled in.  I think though that in the end I managed to do pretty well, and that the final product will appeal to quite a few people.

Funny thing though.  One of the things I most admired about the AmbiScience apps is that they were so incredibly atmospheric that I could imagine them being tremendously helpful in aiding sleep.  My tracks however, while still being tremendously atmospheric at times, I think might have too dark a tone to be recommended as a sleep aid.  Being that the overriding theme was space exploration, I had a tendency to try and convey what the idea of exploring space instilled in me, which was a mixture of awe, fascination and beauty, but with undertones of foreboding and intimidation at the enormity and raw, unbridled power the universe can demonstrate.  That all comes from my armchair interests in both astronomy and cosmology, and having learned a lot about both how incredible the universe is, and sometimes how mind-numbingly frightening it can be.  I mean, can you imagine floating just inside the event horizon of a supermassive black hole, knowing that you are being drawn inexorably toward it to your certain, infinitely dense demise with no possible hope of escape?  That kind of freaks me out, and I think some of that may have crept into some of my songs, which is why I wouldn’t recommend them as a sleep aid; I’m afraid that they’ll induce nightmares.

But I guess we’ll see.  I’m kind of anxious to hear people’s reactions to it.  While I’ve been writing music for years, it’s never been to any particular audience, and it’s never had anything even remotely resembling a wide distribution.  It’s always just been for my own personal enjoyment and that of whomever wanted to download them from whatever services I uploaded them to.  I suppose this is my first exposure to a potential audience of millions of people — though I think this would only appeal to a small subset of those.  Still, it’ll be interesting to hear what people have to say.

In other news, Frapstr continues to chug along.  It’s been a bit spotty of late, but I’ve been trying to make up for it to maintain at least one post per day.  My review queue never seems to get any shorter, which of course is never a bad thing. I’ve bought quite a few games on my own in the last couple of weeks, some of which I’d also like to review, but since apps obtained from promo codes take precedence (because the developer is expecting a review — that’s why they gave me the code in the first place) the reviews for stuff I bought myself keep getting pushed back.  With any luck I’ll get to them eventually.

At any rate, I could probably write more, but I should probably save it for another post, because right now I need sleep like the undead need brains, so my musical project isn’t the only thing you can stick a fork in.  Just watch where you put it.

Tags: ambiscience, music, tesla software

Being Productive Like a Mofo

I finally got some quiet time this weekend to get some stuff done.  I finished the 5th track for Tesla, and already knew what I wanted to do (more or less) for the 6th, so I started working on it on Saturday night and finished it up today.  Just two more before Ron can do the artwork and his coder can cobble together the app to submit to the App Store.  There will probably be two more tracks to do for an update later on, bringing the total to a full “album” at 10 tracks.  I’m kind of excited now that I’m kind of in the home stretch.  Although the update to Theme Park Madness with my 4 tracks will probably be out before this AmbiScience app is released, I’m rather more excited about this.  The TPM tracks were extremely short (~30 seconds to a minute and change) and partly made to spec, while the AmbiScience tracks are all my own creations.  Thematic, yes, but my theme, too.  Apparently other artists have approached Ron at Tesla about doing music for some other AmbiScience tracks.  It’ll be interesting to see if their material is decent.

Okay, so I didn’t get any reviews done this weekend.  What else is new?  I really wanted to get work done on the songs since I really didn’t get a chance to over the last week and change.  I picked at track 5 here and there, but I was either too tired or too busy to give it the attention it needed until this weekend, where I got plenty of rest, which resulted in me getting my mojo back.  Now if only I can carry this into the week ahead.

Anyway, I’ve got to head off to continue to make dinner and snap some screenshots for more reviews.

Tags: ambiscience, movile, music, tesla software, theme park madness

Crazy Days

Well that was a short weekend, and it was followed by a crazy Monday.  The weekend saw no reviews done. Instead I was working on the tracks for Tesla.  Well, one track in particular, as it was a bit more complicated than the two others I’d done.  I finished it on Sunday night though so now I can move on to the 4th track.  I think I’m going to stick to keeping it relatively simple so as not to drag this out too long.  I’m pretty pleased with the work I’ve done so far though.  I’m really getting to explore musical territory I’ve never ventured into before — both thematically and compositionally.  It’s fun, and it’s broadening my horizons, which is never bad.  I’m still really just feeling my way through it though, but I think the end result will be good.

Not every waking hour was spent composing though.  I did get some quality time in with Fallout 3, too.  I finished it once because I inadvertently started following the main plot almost exclusively, so it ended rather suddenly with a dozen side quests unsolved, dozens more undiscovered, and a ton of unexplored territory.  Now I’m going through it while following through on side quests and exploring everything I missed.  It’s weird, because in Oblivion there were so many side quests that I felt like progress on the main quest was slow — but that was good.  Although I got bored of closing Oblivion gates all over the place I enjoyed the loads of side quests.  It seems like there are fewer of those in Fallout 3 — though again there’s lots I haven’t explored yet, so I’m probably missing loads of them.

I didn’t get much sleep last night though, and I’ve been dog tired all day, hence the lack of reviews today as well — though I’m still going to get one done this evening so I’m not too long between reviews.  It’ll be an early night tonight, both because I need it, and because the work day was relatively nuts.  It’s always tougher to head into a seasonally busy time of year suddenly when the last while had been comparatively quiet.  Good for business, bad for stealing time away from work to blog.  So it goes.  But I’m positively beat.  I’ve got other things to do this evening but if I can get one review in, great.  If I get some quality sleep tonight then I should be able to polish off one or two tomorrow — work permitting.  I’ve got a decent backlog I’m working through, so there’s plenty to keep me busy on that front.

Touch Podium seems to be dead.  The last post was end of March.  A month without a post.  I feel bad; I mean, Jody and I started that up from scratch and built it into a pretty decent news site.  But ever since Frapstr took off I’ve been busy with that, not to mention my various iPhone projects, beta testing a few apps, learning iPhone development, and so on.  I hate to see TP languish like that, but I’m spread agonizingly thin as it is; I can barely scrape together the time to juggle what I’m already doing.  *sigh*  If only we had the money to hire a few pros to take some reigns.  Maybe when I finally learn iPhone programming well enough to churn out some good stuff we’ll have some spare cash to spend on writers.  I guess we’ll have to see how it goes.  I know Jody’s working mad hours which explains his absence from the site.  Life first and all that.

For now though it’s back to doing what I need to do this evening.  Just wanted to post an update.

Tags: ambiscience, fallout 3, music, oblivion, tesla software, work