New website nellyfish.com

Now that I have a few games in the Google play store, I thought it was about time that I created a website. Why the name nellyfish? Well, I was struggling to think of a simple, easy to remember name. At the time, my daughter kept drawing what looked like a jellyfish, so it stuck. Unfortunatly, jellyfish.com was unavailable, so it became nellyfish.com.

The website is a simple one page affair. I used html5 and jquery to give a simple transition effect when the mouse moves over the images. It could take a few seconds to load the image... read more

My first full featured game is now in the Google play store. Join Dave in his quest to save his beautiful girlfriend, Daphne, from the clutches of Evil Steve! Fight through 40 levels of nostalgic platform mayhem. It's free and it's available on Android. Click the image below to be directed to the Google play store.

Well, for something that was origina... read more

Just a short entry today. A few days ago, I was having internet problems, and by accident I managed to press the space bar on the 'you are offline' page in chrome. To my amazement that cute little retro dinosaur came to life and became a great little addictive game!

After a bit of investigation I discovered this easter egg was added to Chrome earlier this year. As the source code is all open source, over in the Chromium repositories. I got the javascript and created a simple Android application using a webview. You will need to be running... read more

Well after 35 years of never touching anything Apple, I have finally got a Mac. Getting seriously into mobile development, it has made me realise that for iOS apps I'm really going to need a Mac. I started going down the route of VMWare on my Windows box, but finally decided to bite the bullet and get a Mac.

So... here it is, a bottom of the range i5 Mac Mini. So far I have installed Xcode. Still lots to learn as the whole thing is so alien to me!

#coding #ios #mobile

Wow, it's been a while since I wrote a post. Most of my evenings have been busy with a website a friend told me about called Profit Accumulator. It's a great a site, with lots of videos that explain how to do matched betting. This is not gambling. It's a system where you place bets on all outcomes, so you can't lose. You then do the same with the free bet and pocket the money! It's all legal and completely tax free! I have been doing it for over a month, following the member offers, and made over £1,000. If you're in the UK, I would recommend you sign-up for the free membership and make an easy &poun... read more

Now that I have the touch screen fitted in the Kitchen, I needed a convenient way to wake the tablet. I was hoping that just swiping the screen would wake it up, but unfortunately not.

After a little bit of internet searching, I came across a blog entry on dotmana.com. The site goes through the steps to create a motion detector to wake the screen, using a Arduino and PIR sensor. This was almost perfect, except it ... read more

No I'm not talking about the tinned porky ham that Monty Python likes to sing about. It's the electronic type. I added the option to add comments to my site a few months ago. Being aware that this could be abused I coded some email notification.

Late last night I received over 300 emails notifying me that comments had been added to one of my blog entries. Anything from Obama healthcare to Casio slot machines. All linked to various other sites with 404 errors. I don't believe they were malicious, just simply to increase other sites r... read more

I have been meaning to learn Java for a while a now, but as usual it’s all about finding the time. Over the last few weeks I have been fortunate enough to come across the brilliant Java tutorials over on Kilobolt.com. Not only do they cover Java basics, but they continue to step you through creating your own framework for game development. Then port them across to Android via the Android Studio IDE.

At the end of the tutorial you have a one level robot platform game, shown above. The development has gone fairly smoothly. ... read more

It seemed crazy to me that the original code would generate a feed every time you accessed the page, generating lots of unnecessary database class. I have updated my code so that when I add a post it will replace a static blog.xml file.

So if you have subscribed to my RSS feed, please refresh your reader by re-pointing to digitalgeek.me/blog.php or digitalgeek.me/blog.xml.

I have also improved the site indexing files. This is using pretty much the same code to create a sitemap.xml. I hope this will help getting my pages listed on Google... read more

Continuing from my previous post regarding the dynamic backgrounds and colours. Starting from version 39 of Chrome on Android (Lollipop) you can also set the toolbar colour. It's easy too. You just need to add a meta tag for theme-color in the head. So now if you're on Android hopefully your toolbar should be not the boring grey. Head over to the htmlrocks.com website for more details.

http://updates.html5rocks.com/2014/11/Support-for-theme-color-in-Chrome-39-for-Android

#coding