just for fun, i had written this (really simple) game for Android not long ago. i decided that i should release it rather than keep it on my hard drive doing nothing. it is really simple, but still, it is fun enough to try

if you have an android phone, download it a shot and let me know what you think – and if you have better graphical skills than i do, please feel free to send me some images

so it’s been nearly 6 years since i posted here about pyboids…  and since i love the idea of the boids algorithm so much (and was trying to play with core animation), i decided to try to write boids using core animation.  it’s imperfect, but it works (and, technically speaking, it is 3d, although i don’t really have the functionality to rotate and such to prove it… well, not yet anyway).

the cool thing is that (theoretically speaking), this same code can easily run (without many changes) on an iOS device.  core animation itself is really powerful – it helps make snazzy apps possible by making animations really simple (in many cases, core animation takes care of the animation for you, automagically and behind the scenes).

for those who don’t know, boids is an algorithm developed by craig reynolds to simulate the flight of birds.  a good explanation (and pseudocode) of the algorithm can be found here.

it’s simple, but challenging – if you like puzzle games, try it out and see if you can beat all the 32 levels! you can find it on the android market.

dstar android home

here’s a screenshot of the level selector and another of the game play.  graphics by @somaiagabr.  levels come partially from the ti83 version and partially from gstar.  as far as i know, the game was originally made on the ti by joe w, although i think there’s also an hp48 version somewhere as well.

source code could be better, but you can find the non-minified game logic here and the levels here. if i were to try to optimize this, i would start at the levels, since each level could be represented as 27 bytes (+2 bytes metadata) instead of 108 bytes.

click here to play!

download it from the android market or check out the code on github!

more features and improvements are in the pipeline.  feel free to check out the code on github and let us know if you have any suggestions, thoughts, or contributions!

screenshots:

• ipad:  1 (shown above) and 2.
• iphone: 1 and 2.

you can find the source code here (update: added a link to a tar download and removed the code from github since i am not really maintaining this – june 26th, 2011).

just for fun, i hacked together a simple prototype of quran search on android. in reality, it’s more close to the autocomplete transliteration demo that i did some time back. for now, it’s only transliteration search, but later on, it can be expanded to search other languages. ultimately, it should probably be integrated into quran android.

you can find the source here.  (update: added a link to a tar download and removed the code from github since i am not really maintaining this – june 26th, 2011).

ramadan kareem! just in time for ramadan, we’ve released the first version of Quran Android. download it and let us know what you think! the source code is on github.

the above code snippet is from the first few lines of one of the etisalat 3g usb modem’s postinstall script on osx – seriously, why chmod -R a+rw "/usr/local/"? no one uses /usr/local except etisalat?

the modem is a huawei e1550 hsdpa usb stick.

update (june 16, 2011) – @AhmedElGamil sent this post to @EtisalatMisr over twitter, and they said they would forward it to the responsible team insha’Allah.  you can see the conversation on twitter here.