We were recently asked (along with our mobile marketing partner LaunchMedia) to build an iOS app for the Pink Ribbon Watermelon organization. When retailers participate in the Pink Ribbon Watermelon program, C.H. Robinson donates a portion of Pink Ribbon Watermelon sales to breast cancer research and prevention organizations. To date they have donated over $480,000!

Pink Ribbon Watermelon wanted to create a fun, easy way for people to donate to the organization while displaying great watermelon recipes and carving tips. Much of this information was already on their web site, so we wanted to do something extra that could make the app more intruiging for people spending a dollar on the app (even though the money is going to a good cause). After a few discussions our team suggested adding some type of game that would be fun to play, would highlight the organization’s benefits and use the watermelon theme. Because the organization also did not have the budget to build out something like this, we decided to donate the time to design and develop the game.

Last night, the Javascript usergroup here in Minneapolis, Minnesota JavascriptMN had it’s monthly meetup. This months meeting was set to be a javascript game hackathon, with the winner taking home a new Nexus 7. This is a write up of the game that I made for the hackathon, which was ultimately voted to be the best game of the night.

Concept

Since I am not a graphic guru, I wanted to stay with something very simple graphically. My graphics skills are little better then stick figures. That’s IT!! Remember the doodles you used to draw in your note book during class in high school or middle school. What if they could come to life and run around on your sheet of paper fighting against other doodle drawings. I had determined my game concept and it sounded completely reasonable to accomplish in the 2-3 hours available.

Today in the office we were trying to best each other with our oldest site or piece of technology still publicy available. Here’s what we came up with:

If you have only built applications in iOS, let this be a gentle introduction to creating static libraries for iOS applications. The reasons for doing this are multiple. You may have a set of applications that need to share code with a very well defined interface. You may want to distribute a library to your customers to allow them to build in some of your technology into their application. You may want to use some Objective-C code into your RubyMotion project. In any case, here is a simple example to take you from an app where the code is all together, to one that uses a library for some of the code.

Being in the technology world is is hard to deny the shift toward mobile. Knowing this, I felt the desire to learn a mobile technology. I chose the Android platform due to my past experience working with linux operating systems. My most recent development experience has been focused around Ruby and Javascript. Over the years I have come to realize, that I have an easier time learning new a new technology when I conceptually understand how the pieces fit together. Recently, I have started working my way through the “Android in Action” Book as a way to learn Android development. Most of the code snippets are taken from my version of the sample applications built while going through the book. This post covers some of the basic concepts that I have learned and how they fit together to build an Android application. The concepts I will cover here:

• Intent
• Intent Filters
• Activity
• View
• Application
• Android Manifest file

The goal is to understand some of these basic building blocks and how they interconnect.

When the team here at :coderow decided to launch a blog, the first discussions at a development shop always begin with what technology to begin with. Static generators came up more than once. These type of site builders allow the team to worry about writing something of value instead of worrying about how the CMS works. No code runs on your server, just static HTML and CSS.

Some basic goals of our blog:

• Easily share code with the community
• Be able to write freely
• Keep it simple

We chose Octopress, because it answered all these and more.

RubyMotion was released into the wild on May 3, 2012. Since then it has been a wild ride of contributors that have already setup over 100 repositories on GitHub since its release. Why all the excitement? Well for me, the excitement of being able to program in Ruby on a platform with an awesome complete toolkit for writing apps is too good to resist.