Ground Rush

… for the Blackberry Playbook™ is now available in the Blackberry App-World.

Ground-Rush is a simple yet addictive game where you fly through a myriad of obstacles, collecting ‘Bonus’ points on the way until you get destroyed.

HOW LONG CAN YOU LAST …..

For full details about ‘Ground Rush’, click here to got to it’s home page.

Warp-a-tron : Photo Effects for the Blackberry Playbook – Updated to V1.3.1.

This update brings a couple of brand new effects and a minor bug fix.

You can see the new Halftone effect and Displacement effect in the images below.

The Halftone effect can give your images a magazine/newspaper ‘print’ look. Coupled with the background images, frames you can add and vignetting you can create some astonishing photo’s straight from the Playbook camera.

You have full control over the size of the ‘Halftone’ blobs and rotation of the pattern. You can change the foreground and background colours or even opt to have the background transparent.

The Displacement effect displaces/refracts the photo using a particular pattern. There are a number of patterns to chose from and they can all be scaled and rotated. You can also adjust the strength of the image displacement/refraction and optionally add a psuedo depth (bump) to the displacement or make it transparent.

Warp-a-tron : Photo Effects in the App World : Warp-a-tron : Photo Effects

Full size images are available at Flicker






Here are a selection of images of two new effects



Ye Olde Laptop



Castle – Halftone



Castle – Halftone (Blobby)



Displacement effect – Using the Voronoi pattern



Displacement effect – Using the Voronoi pattern and showing the bump depth.



Displacement effect – Using the brick work pattern



Displacement effect – Using the square stud pattern rotated.

Warp-a-tron allows you to take snapshots with special effect directly on your Playbook. Preview and adjusts the effects in real-time using the multi-touch screen controls and save your master-piece to JPG or PNG in your photo library.

Choose from a whole range of special effects including zooms, twirls, colouring effects, etc and even optionally add a frame to you picture.

FOR FULL DETAILS CLICK HERE OR ON ONE OF THE IMAGES BELOW

There are no functional changes at this stage, just a rebuild/refactor of the original demos. I’ve got a work-in-progress revision of the Fur experiments to follow soon, hopefully.

Update!!! The three examples now supports full screen. Click somewhere in the flash movie and press a key (except Esc) – Esc to return to windowed.

You may need to clear you browsers cache to pull in the latest SWF file.

Click on the following to download.

• Flash Player 11 Beta version
• The latest Away3D 4.0 – ‘away3d-core-fp11′ repository

This now includes :-

• BlackBerry Playbook – Blackberry App World
• Android devices (requires 2.2 or above) – Android Market
• Android devices (requires 2.2 or above) – Amazon App Store for Android
• Phone 3GS, iPhone 4 (requires iOS 4.0 or later) – iTunes App Store
• iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation)(requires iOS 4.0 or later) – iTunes App Store
• iPad, iPad 2 (requires iOS 4.0 or later) – iTunes App Store

**** GET IT NOW ****

Greg209

Featuring all the same, hundreds of maths problems and the addictive qualities.

The Android version requires Adobe Air 2.7 to be installed and can be installed on devices with the exception of small phones.

Greg209

Features include :-

• Image optimisation
• Install file now reduced by of 40%
• Memory usage optimization
• Bug fixes – yes there were a few

Just to make your addictive game playing experience even more pleasurable.

GET IT NOW!!! GO ON YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO.

Greg

Friday was a bad day. I’d been developing and deploying to my Blackberry Playbook with no trouble at all (with latest firmware 1.0.3.1868). So much so, in fact, that it’s charge was getting pretty low, even though it’d been plugged into a laptop (MacBook Pro) all day – I hadn’t properly charged it for a few days. It was close to 0% – something I’ll try to avoid in future.

Anyway, I got home and plugged the Playbook in using the charger that came with the unit. What happened next was not good. The red LED came on as usual, it went off a few seconds later and was closely followed by the BlackBerry Playbook splash screen.

Unfortunately, this only appeared for a split second and then vanished – usually, this is the start of visual bit of the boot sequence.

Then came the red LED again……. Oh dear!!!! ….. This cycle when on continuously, getting no further than a seconds worth of the splash screen.

What now?

I left the thing going through this booting cycle for an hour or so but then started to get impatient. During which time, I started Googling to find anyone else’s experiences with this. To my dismay, there are several forum threads out there describing similar things.

Including :-

• BlackBerryForums – PlayBook Guide: Red light and then green blinking light
• CrackBerry – Playbook won’t start
• BerryReview – Playbook low and dead battery state
• Blackberry Support Community – General Forums – Playbook won’t Power on

Amongst others which were perhaps less informative.

I tried numerous times at attempting the hard reset option (of which there are several methods referenced). These include :-

• Pressing the Power button + Vol Up + Vol Down
• Pressing the Power button + Vol Up
• Pressing the Power button

All of which has to be done from anything from 10 seconds to 30 seconds.

Unfortunately, that did nothing – other than making my fingers a little sore.

I tried changing which wall outlet I was using – just in case there was a difference between using a multi-plug block as opposed to directly into a wall socket. No difference.

The only thing that did seem odd was that when I disconnected the power during the rebooting cycle, the red LED would go off as usual but then there would be a sequence of five green/yellow LED flashes – as described in one of the links above – indicating a dead battery. I pretty much knew the battery was flat so that kind of made sense.

The question was, was the charger unable to provide the tablet with enough power to get it passed a specific point the boot sequence to start charging properly? Was the charger not giving enough power? Was the battery really and terminally dead?

I sent a support mail to BlackBerry as I was under a 90 day complimentary support. Fortunately, I got a relatively quick response back indicating I should put the device on charge for several hours to build it up. At the time I had to pop out and about, so I put it on charge. The only question that I had was – was it really charging. Unfortunately, they were also going to be out-of-office until Monday.

If I left it continuously rebooting, was that charging? I doubted that one. If I tried the hard reset option, it would stop the rebooting cycle but not show any signs that it was charging. I opted for the latter.

The next day – Saturday …..

I was busy pretty much all day but did get a moment or two first thing to see if it had charged. But no, it hadn’t. I left it rebooting this time, for a while again – although something felt it would be doing more harm than good leaving it in that state. Yet again nothing.

I even decided to follow some information from one of the links suggesting to use the Desktop Manager software on a PC, as at the time it doesn’t do anything on a Mac. So I dusted off my old PC and fired it up. Once it was installed and up and running, a pop-up appeared indicating that the Playbook’s battery was dead or was doing something else (like an update). The two options were to Retry or Update. As I didn’t really have anything on the Playbook other than a good handful of apps including Sum It All Up (shameless plug) and some part developed new ones, I wasn’t going to loose much. So Update it was. After ages of downloading a package ending in the word ‘debrick’ ??? and installing it, the process had seemingly gone through successfully and completed, but unfortunately, had done nothing to improve the rebooting.

I knew from the e-mail from that BlackBerry support wouldn’t reply til Monday but I replied with my findings so far – hoping there was a magic fix. It was a bit disconcerting to receive a mail back entitled ‘Please submit BlackBerry inquiry via approved channel‘. Maybe it was because it was the weekend, maybe not – I didn’t have time to find an alternative channel.

Sunday….

I was getting impatient now and still frustrated that the thing wasn’t working.

It’d had been left overnight again, so the tablet fairies could work there magic and sort it out for me. I powered it up. Got the red LED, a slight pause, the BlackBerry Playbook splash screen and the off for another reboot. DAMN!!!!

A little over frustration kicked in, along with a grasp at an idea. As I understand it, the Playbook doesn’t charge if it’s switched off but charges quite happily if in standby. Yet if the battery is dead, how can it be in standby to charge? It’s a bit of chicken catching 22 eggs.

My rational for what I tried was that if it’s off, it won’t charge. If it’s booting, it’s using all it’s power to try and charge and boot the device. What if I tried to put it in standby whilst it’s booting so it’d only have to do one thing.

So I plugged it in. Got the red LED and I started repeatedly pressing the power button. The red light went off for a second or two and the splash page appeared ……. and stayed ……. and stayed……

IT WORKED!!!!! I don’t really know why, but my PlayBook was starting up.

My PlayBook had been completely factory reset – which I presume was due to the update, various hard resets or my general mental frustration. Either way it’s back and I can go and play my really great game Sum It All Up and I think you should all check it out for yourselves.

It would be interesting to know what the real problem is and it would be even better if it were fixed in the next firmware update. If the battery gets low again and the same situation arises, I’ll try this method out again and try to record the process.

If anyone else suffers the continual rebooting and is at loss of what to do, perhaps give it a try and let me know if it works for you. I certainly can’t guarantee it. I’m going to reply to BlackBerry with my updated findings to see what they have to say for themselves – it may even turn out that my device is defective in some way, I hope not as I don’t really want to go through the whole process of returning the device and waiting on a replacement. We shall see.

UPDATE

Although I’ve not tried it, I’m a little to nervous to drain my battery, but as of Blackberry Playbook Firmware 1.0.5.2342 the device can now charge when powered off, so the likelihood of getting into a continual reboot scenario is significantly diminished. Other changes may also help in this matter.

Lets hope the problem has gone away

Greg

Thanks to Research In Motion’s promotion, offering a free Blackberry Playbook™ to Adobe AIR developers who successfully have an App submitted and accepted in the Blackberry App World, I’ve now got a free Playbook – woohoo.

My App is a maths game where you are given an answer to a sum, a set of numbers and using any of add, subtract, multiply or divide, find that answer within the given time limit.

For a full set of features and screen shots, click on one of the following images.

Greg209

Note: You will need the Flash Player 11 RC1 to view these examples.

You may need to clear you browsers cache to pull in the latest SWF file.

The RegularPolygon Class

// Constructor definition
//
RegularPolygon(material:MaterialBase = null, radius:Number = 50, sides:uint = 16, subdivisions:uint = 1, yUp:Boolean = true) 

// Typical usage - create a regular polygon (a disc) with a radius of 100
// and 16 sides.
//
var regPoly:RegularPolygon = new RegularPolygon(material, 100, 16);
//

The RegularPolygon class is another variation of the Cylinder class and is essentially a flattened cone.

There will be more Away3D 4.0 (Broomstick) primitives to come soon.

Greg