Generate bulk proof of postage labels from Royal Mails Click and Drop service

I use Royal Mail's Click and Drop service a LOT for my small business and one thing that has always really bugged me is that you cannot create a bulk proof of postage label. The service does allow proof of postage, but you get 1 for every order, so if I have 30+ orders (not uncommon at busy times) I have to print out 30+ pages for the post office to stamp 30+ times!!!

So my solution was to create a small java console application that has a file watcher monitoring my downloads directory, so when the Click & Drop website generates the... read more

I hope others will find this article useful. It’s really not a rant, I’m passed that now, and I’m no longer expecting to hear from Google, as now, after months of trying to contact them, I have sadly concluded they don’t care.

This article is just a warning to fellow developers to be very careful with third-party SDKs and with Google constantly changing... read more

I'm a small seller on Amazon Handmade and got caught out a number of times with my items going out of stock and not realising. If my items where fulfilled by Amazon then there is a handy alert to warn you when stock gets low. But as I made my items to order I have to fulfil them myself, but there is no way to alert me via the seller account.

To fix this I have created a small VBScript that I run manually. You will just need to save the code below into a text file with a vb extension to execute. Sorry, Windows only. You will also need to update the CheckAmazonStock... read more

You may have noticed that I disabled comments from my website a number of months ago due to the ridiculous amount of spam comments I was getting. This was even after intergrating reCapture a few years ago. It looks like the bots are now getting too clever for the 'Googles I'm not a robot' web tools!

So today, after some very overdue website maintenace and improvements, I have added comments back to all blog posts. Please check them out. I have also move away from my own backend php and mysql solution. Instead i'm just using Dis... read more

I number of people have asked me how and what I use to create games, so decided it was time to write about it.

My first game Dave Dangerous was written in Java, at the time this was a language I had not used. But being a c# developer the languages are very similar. Both object oriented and use very similar syntax.

I have now created a few games in libGDX, and have found it a great framework and nice way to learn Java. However, it's not all been plain sailing. I found the depedancy management can be a little tempremental at times. Although that's more down to Gradle than libGDX. I also found it farily teadious re-coding the various sdk's for each platform to intragrate adverts, game services, in-app purchases etc. There has also been a lot of changes with the winding down of roboVM. This is what is used to build for iOS. To overcome this I have been using an earlier open source fork of roboVM that has worked fine. However, it does no... read more

I haven't posted for a while, as I've been busy porting my games across to iOS. I should have some news on this very soon. In anticipation to the iOS release I have made an update to the nellyfish.com site.

It was just a one page site linking to Google Play. This has now been updated to have a details page for each game with screen shots, reviews and links to the various app stores (when available). It's using HTML5. There is also a nice zooming effect that was done using CSS keyframe animation, as follows... read more

Dave Dangerous was my first full Android game, and with that it had a few areas that had room for improvement. The biggest one would be that it did not use hardware rendering, so could struggle on low end devices. Not anymore! I have ported the game across to the libGDX. This is a cross platform framework that I used for Spikes Galore. This will also mean that porting across to other platforms should be a little smoother.

There is also a number of other enhancements. This includes some updated images, better management of adverts and hints on the first few stages. If you have not already downloaded it, head over to Google Pl... read more

I have been asked how I created the Narrative screens in Dave Dangerous. So, if you're interested, please read on.

If you have been following my blog, you would know that a few months back I created my first Android game, and my first Java project. This would not have been possible without the great tutorials over on KiloBolt.com. I would strongly recommend you have a look.

Before the first level, I wanted to create a storyline. This was ... read more

Meet Thingy. I'm not sure what he is, just some abstract thingy. He is the character in my new game called Spikes Galore.

The game is available on Google Play at the moment.

It's been developed using the libGDX, which is a cross platform framework, so this should make porting the game across to iOS fairly simple. It will hopefully be in the Apple store soon. Watch this space!

... read more