Author: Sarah Northway

  • Panagia, Thassos island, Greece


    Kitchen Window
    Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

    We’ve been cloistered in our new home on the island of Thassos, Greece, for a couple weeks now. It’s so different from Athens we might as well be on the other side of the world. We’re living in the little mountain town of Panagia (pronounced Panayhia – it means Virgin/Madonna), which has a population of maybe 400 right now. There are probably more goats and chickens than people.

    The streets are so windy and narrow that cars can’t make it up to our part of the village, making it very peaceful. A series of canals run beside the roads bringing clear water down from a natural spring. Gardens spill into the streets, and all include grape vines that are starting to show signs of bearing fruit. I wonder if everyone will make their own homebrew wine, or if they combine the grapes from every house together. Wine is one of the exports here along with honey, olive oil, and a shiny white marble they pull out of the big quarry peaking over a nearby hill.

    Instead of the iconic Greek red tile roofs, the little white houses in our little Panagia stand out by having slate roofs. Whitewashed stucco covers the traditional stone walls beneath, which looks to me like heaps of rocks and the occasional haphazard wooden board. A surprising number of houses that have been abandoned to the passage of time, including the ruined walls of a neighboring house which we overlook from our ample balcony.

    As usual we spend our days on the balcony, reclining with our laptops on two single beds at either end. There’s a table between us (the only one in the house), where we eat meals consisting of Greek salad, fresh bread with olive oil & vinegar, and whatever Greek recipe I’ve tried to implement that day.

    There’s a bakery and grocery just a few steps down the hill, and trucks come by every morning with loudspeakers announcing fresh vegetables and fish. Further down in the center of town are four restaurant/bars facing eachother, where the men of the town spend their evenings drinking retsina and gossiping. The women sweep homes and putter in their gardens, and have shouted conversations between balconies. The older ladies all wear black blouses and long black skirts. I hear the period of mourning for the death of any family member is 2-5 years, but widows and the especially mournful will wear black for the rest of their lives. It’s so common here it almost seems like a fashion statement. Everyone is friendly, although few of them speak English.

    They all say “hello” to which we answer “yia sas”.

  • Athens: Old ruins and new


    Blinded!
    Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

    We were warned about staying near Omonia station in the “bad” part of town. Colin was nervous about arriving at midnight and walking through there with all our worldly posessions, so he meticulously planned our route from Syntagma square to the hotel. It took us along two wide roads lined with upscale shops… sort of. Every third or fourth storefront was abandoned, smashed up and/or burnt out. Graffiti covered every available surface. The word that came to my mind was “wounded”, like this part of the city had been beaten up, whether by riots or the economy in general.

    Omonia didn’t look much better in the light of day, and the damage stretched all the way to the old town around the Acropolis. It was hard to tell where the modern ruins ended and the ancient ones began. The grafitti was even further spread, mostly short phrases written with fat black markers on the ubiquitous white marble. We’d desciphered the Greek alphabet earlier using an in-flight magazine, but none of the words were familiar.

    We strolled over to Lykavittos hill and took the furnicular to the top (not a thrilling ride, but it was a hot day). From the top we could see Athens stretching out in all directions, uniformly beige 4-8 story buildings packed in tightly by the surrounding hills. No skyscrapers or obvious downtown, but there are several big parks and at least a dozen 2500-year old archeological wonders just plopped around the city.

    On our second day we met with a couple of local independent game developers from Flipped Horizons to get their perspective of the city and Greece’s local games industry (namely, that there isn’t much of one). Their 20-some person studio produces more games every month than we have made in our entire professional careers. It’s like they’re in a permanent state of game jamming, and it seems to have fostered a strong feeling of camaraderie (not unlike soldiers at war).

    We had a late tour of the Parthenon and watched the sun set over a much nicer view of the city bordered by olive groves. We had dinner at an outdoor tapas place (what do they call tapas here?) and ouzo at a very cool little bar called Loop down in Thiseio. One thing we loved about Athens was the amount of outdoor seating. And the Athenians seem like a pretty hip and happy bunch all things considered.

    Our flight was delayed until the next evening, but I suspected the posters pasted all over the city with a picture of a fist clenching a wrench and the words “something something MAH 1” were going to put a damper in any plans we tried to make. Sure enough, Athens celebrated May Day with a general strike, closing all the museums, archeological sites and trains to the airport. So instead we wandered towards Syntagma square to see what we could see.

    We were immediately caught up in an enormous parade of chanting ralliers which pulled us along for ten or twenty blocks. The side streets were blocked off with hundreds and hundreds of police in riot gear. We’d noticed a huge police presence over the weekend in just about every corner of the city. We saw them in the squares, in the parks, even outside our hotel just hanging out in big groups. I’m not sure if this was normal, or if they came from out of town for this one event.

    Unfortunately (or fortunately?) we did have to head for the airport but are keeping track of the Mayday protests through Twitter. I hope the 30 degree weather will keep tempers down and Athens won’t aquire any more bruises or broken bones tonight.

  • Rebuild now available for Android phones & tablets

    Yes, you can now get Rebuild for your Droid Nexus Galaxy Razr Epic Maxx, or whatever you call that thing! But first, an update:

    Rebuild in the PlayBook top games
    Rebuild in the PlayBook top games
    Rebuild’s doing way better than expected on the BlackBerry PlayBook. This week it’s featured and in their top paid games – up there with three versions of Angry Birds (or is it 4 now?). It’s gotten mentions on crackberry.com, blackberrycool.com, and playbookdaily.com.

    All of this is so awesome, because the port took zero effort… and I’m rather fond of my new PlayBook.

    Rebuild's PlayBook Sales
    Rebuild's PlayBook Sales
    But even with all this extravaganza, my sales there are just barely matching the current iPad/iPhone sales (where Rebuild is #500 in games, #50 in strategy with a super-minor feature in iTunes – bet you can’t find it). So being a relative nobody on iOS == stardom on the PlayBook? Bummer for RiM, but I’m just so happy to be loved that I’d rather not dwell on that.

    Up next: the terrifying Android marketplace. I’d been avoiding Android because of my instinctive fear of all those different devices. Despite all my laboring over the iOS version, Rebuild is still a little sluggish and crashy on the iPad 1 and iPhone 3GS. There are much less powerful Android phones out there and no easy way to target only the ones with enough RAM and CPU/GPU power to run Rebuild smoothly (although I’ve tried using compatible-screens). So it is with trepidation that I announce Rebuild on Google Play.

    But apparently that’s not enough. I knew the hardware base was fractured, but I didn’t realize the app market itself was also fractured. There must be 100 different sites that sell Android apps, and each one wants me to upload my binary to them along with screenshots and promo art in different arbitrary dimensions. Many of the Android “review” sites either require you to sell through their store, or charge $200 for a review. Am I really seeing this right?

    I’ve submitted to Amazon so I can get it on the Kindle Fire (although for $200 the PlayBook is a massively better hardware deal). But I’m not sure I have the stomach for all these other stores. Have I been naive to only buy apps through Google? Android users – where do you get your games?

  • Rebuild: Porting to the PlayBook via Adobe AIR and FlashDevelop

    Pugs Luv Beats
    I helped demo IGF nominees Faraway and the very musical Pugs Luv Beats.
    Last week was my first GDC as an indie developer, and hoh boy were those goodtimes!

    I helped Colin present in a talk about failure (Incredipede was the happy ending), and co-demoed Steph Thirion’s game Faraway in the Independent Games Festival. During the awards ceremony they gave us all BlackBerry PlayBooks, so I now have little excuse not to port Rebuild to it.

    I sat down to get it running today and spent far too long stepping through RiM’s convoluted developer security setup, which took me even longer than Apple’s similarly obtuse system. There are several tutorials out there but some were out of date or assume you have Flash Builder (I use FlashDevelop). So as of March 2012, here’s what you do to get your SWF running as an app on your PlayBook:

    Step 1: Request a CSJ code signing key from BlackBerry.com (takes a couple hours).

    Step 2: Get the Flex SDK, AIR SDK, and BlackBerry AIR SDK. I had trouble with Flex4.6 + Air3.2 so I used Flex4.5 with Air 3.1.

    Step 3: Start dev mode on your PlayBook in Options > Security > Development Mode.

    Step 4: Edit & execute the following to install the debug token on your PlayBook (ten steps and five different passwords, seriously?):

    @echo off
    
    :: BlackBerry development token 
    :: More information:
    :: https://bdsc.webapps.blackberry.com/air/documentation/ww_air_testing/Create_a_debug_token_CMD_ms_1968147_11.html
    :: http://www.hsharma.com/tutorials/10-easy-steps-to-package-and-sign-air-apps-for-playbook/
    :: http://docs.blackberry.com/en/developers/deliverables/27280/Running_unsigned_apps_debug_tokens_1585072_11.jsp
    :: http://openbbnews.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/installing-a-debug-token/
    :: http://www.mellisdesigns.com/blog/?p=37
    
    :: Path to Blackberry SDK
    set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files (x86)\Research in Motion\blackberry-tablet-sdk-2.0.0\bin
    
    :: Path to Java
    set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\bin
    
    echo First get CSJ from https://bdsc.webapps.blackberry.com/air/signingkeys
    echo And start dev mode on PlayBook in Options > Security > Development Mode
    
    :: begin setup
    call blackberry-signer -csksetup -cskpass [YOUR_PASSWORD]
    
    :: register CSJ locally
    call blackberry-signer -register -csjpin [YOUR_PASSWORD] -cskpass [YOUR_PASSWORD] client-PBDT-[XXXXXXXXXX].csj
    
    :: create p12 file
    call blackberry-keytool -genkeypair -keystore author.p12 -storepass [YOUR_PASSWORD] -dname "cn=YOUR_NAME" -alias author
    
    :: register device against CSJ
    call blackberry-debugtokenrequest -register -csjpin [YOUR_DEVICE_ID] -storepass [YOUR_PASSWORD] client-PBDT-[XXXXXXXXXX].csj
    
    :: later calls expect the p12 here for some reason
    call copy author.p12 "C:\Users\USER_NAME\AppData\Local\Research In Motion\author.p12"
    
    :: create the debug token BAR
    call blackberry-debugtokenrequest -storepass [YOUR_PASSWORD] -devicepin [YOUR_DEVICE_ID] debug_token.bar
    
    :: sign bar with RIM (remote)
    call blackberry-signer -verbose -cskpass [YOUR_PASSWORD] -keystore author.p12 -storepass [YOUR_PASSWORD] debug_token.bar PBDT
    
    :: sign bar with developer (local)
    call blackberry-signer -keystore author.p12 -storepass [YOUR_PASSWORD] debug_token.bar author
    
    :: upload debug token to playbook (must be running in debug mode at this address & password)
    call blackberry-deploy -installDebugToken debug_token.bar -device [DEVICE_IP_ADDRESS] -password [YOUR_PASSWORD]
    
    :: echo important metadata
    echo Add the following authorId to bar-descriptor.xml
    call blackberry-airpackager -listManifest debug_token.bar
    
    pause
    

    Step 5: Download this FlashDevelop project adapted from Studio Chris’ BlackBerry template, and edit airplaybook.as3proj and airplaybookConfig.xml to point to your SDK locations.

    Step 6: From FlashDevelop, hit F5 to build your SWF and test it locally using ADL.

    Step 7: Edit & execute the following to package and install the app:

    @echo off
    :: AIR application packaging
    :: More information:
    :: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=CommandLineTools_5.html#1035959
    :: http://www.hsharma.com/tutorials/10-easy-steps-to-package-and-sign-air-apps-for-playbook/
    
    :: Path to Flex + AIR SDK
    set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Flex451AIR31\bin
    
    :: Path to Blackberry
    set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files (x86)\Research in Motion\blackberry-tablet-sdk-2.0.0\bin
    
    :: Path to Java
    set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\bin
    
    :: package swf and assets into a bar then install to device and run the app
    call blackberry-airpackager -package airplaybook.bar -installApp -launchApp application.xml bar-descriptor.xml airplaybook.swf blackberry-tablet-icon.png landscape-splash.png portrait-splash.png -devMode -device [YOUR_DEVICE_IP] -password [YOUR_PASSWORD]
    
    pause
    

    If all goes well, you should see Main.as (a red square on a black background) appear on your BlackBerry. Chances are good that some parts of the debug token installation aren’t necessary but it got the job done.

    Rebuild actually ran the first time, and quite well which was an unexpected surprise. Now I need to adjust the fonts and aspect ratio, then go through what promises to be another certification nightmare to package it for sale in the BlackBerry App World. It’ll probably take two or three days total, so no great loss if it bombs.

    Rebuild should be out for the PlayBook by the end of the month!

  • Rebuild: iPhone, iPod touch & 99 cent sale

    I just released the version 2.0 update to Rebuild iOS, which adds support for iPhone 3GS/4/4S and iPod Touch 3&4. To celebrate, Rebuild is also on sale for 99 cents through the end of this weekend!

    I just got new business cards made up for GDC. This one is my favorite. :)

    I hope this update also addresses some of the stability issues that Rebuild has been having on the iPad 1. Did you realize an iPhone 4 has twice as much memory as the iPad 1? So it was easier than I’d expected to accommodate iPhones, and obviously I should have done this earlier. I can’t get enough of how nice the cartoony map graphics look on that double-density display.