#mobile development environment

[gideros-old]

Gideros Studio seminar in Istanbul Technical University

Last week we've been invited to Istanbul Technical University by Physics Engineering Department, to show how to use Gideros Studio to create a simple, attractive game in a few hours. More than 90 people have signed for the event, and while it was raining cats and dogs outside, 54 brillant students showed up at 17:30 in the auditorium.

    The seminar started with benefits of Gideros Studio. Students were extremely interested in the fast prototyping features, including the instant testing of the application over Wi-Fi. This feature was very beneficial yet convincing for newstarters.

    Just before the seminar we introduced our latest release, Gideros Studio 2011.9 beta 3, and let students download it. In the second part, we showed how to benefit from easy-to-use physics engine that comes bundled with Gideros Studio, and create a simple catapult game resembling Angry Birds :-) Students were really curious to see the first steps of a game built on top of Gideros Studio.

    After a long 3.5 hours, it was already 21:00 PM and everybody were very excited with the capabilities of Gideros Studio. We received lots of questions about IDE, the multiplatform development strategies on iPhone & Android, and how Gideros Studio SDK will evolve in the future.

  We'd like to thank to the university students in ITU Physics Engineering Club, for their generous hospitality and successful organization.

[gideros-old]

New beta release - the latest and sweetest

Two weeks have passed since we released Gideros Studio 2011.9 beta2 and now we are ready to roll another beta, before the final. We thought we'd release only 2 betas, but it turned out that our beloved devs in Gideros Forum found bugs to get rid of, so here's another polished beta3. These are the fixed issues and improvements for this release:

  Improvement (IDE): new keybindings on Mac OS X

Completed autocomplete for API for 465 functions, classes and variables

Improvement (IDE): compile Lua codes to Lua bytecode while exporting

Improvement (iOS): multitheaded game loop - now touch events are much more responsive

New feature: b2.Body:setActive, b2.Body:isActive

New feature: maxImpulse field for box2d PostSolve event

2 bugfixes from Mike

Bugfix (android): touch ids >= 3 is wrong

Improvement: upgraded to box2d v2.2.1

New feature: added wheel joint

New feature: added debug draw

Bugfix: "invalid key to next" at GTween

Bugfix: whole testing and bugfixing of activity lifecycle on android

Improvement (IDE): added localhost checkbox to player settings

Bugfix (iOS): application lifecycle works well on player but not on exported project

  Curious? Interested? Go get your free copy now from our download page! :-)

  Stay tuned for the final release.

[gideros-old]

Another beta release with full of features, fixes

We are really glad to announce that the second beta release of Gideros Studio 2011.9 is ready for consumption. This release brings many enhancements, bug fixes, and a taste of what 2011.9 will bring.

  Let's see what has changed between two betas:

  [list type="check"]

Android! This is our first release including Android support. After working for 2 months, Android is there, functional and ready to kick. Now you can export your native apps directly to Android as a Java package and compile using Eclipse. More information can be found in Installing Gideros Studio and Deployment page. Oh, here's a screenshot also:

[/list]

    [list type="check"]

We are introducing MovieClip, a fantastic library to create static, timelined animations. Now you can display sprites and objects on the screen in a much convenient way, with less code and hassle. For more information about MovieClip, see our Documentation page, and use the Reference Manual for API that comes with Gideros Studio. 

Two new API Documents, Gyroscope and Geolocation have been introduced in Gideros Reference Manual. 

We now have the GTween library for tweening, animation, and transitions. There are examples under Examples/Graphics/GTween, so have a look at them before using this wonderful library.

Two new articles (Automatic Image Resolution and Automatic Image Scaling) are written to elaborate these two features in IDE. Both are "chapters", which will eventually go into the final Gideros Studio Manual soon. Also, two related examples have been introduced: Examples/Hardware/Automatic Image Resolution and Examples/Hardware/Automatic Texture Pack Resolution. Just fire up your IDE and examine code!

Now we have the "Export assets only" button in export dialog, so if you want to make some changes to the exported code, IDE does not overwrite to it next time you export.

Gideros Player now includes 10 more resolutions covering a wide variety of Android smartphones and tablets (See Hardware > Resolution menu under Gideros Player.

[/list]

    And now some fixes:

  [list type="check"]

Automatic screen scaling bug report, which causes a bug in landscape bug mentioned in our forum has been fixed.

The capabilities of automatic image resolution have been fixed and extended - now it works smoothly with texture packs and fonts. Please test this and give feedbacks.

IDE now saves tabs, so when you close and reopen a project, Gideros Studio remembers open tabs and even the cursor position! :)

[/list]

  Apart from all those, many new functions arrived, namely:

  [list type="check"]

os.timer()

Stage:setBackgroundColor

Stage:getBackgroundColor

Sprite:set

Sprite:get

[/list]

  This was the last in the beta list, so we are working hard to give you a best-of-breed, stable 2011.9 version. Until that time, devs will be working on the following, which are mostly bug fix requests and enhancements noted in our forum:

  [list type="check"]

IDE keybings for Mac OS X will be fixed (e.g control/option/command + left/right/up/down/delete)

Autorotation for iPad (bug report link)

Faster tilemaps

Keyword autocomplete for all API functions

[/list]

  Exciting times ahead of us! We had lots of fun for this release, and we hope that you'll find Gideros Studio much more usable, stable and suitable for your next app!

  Go grap your copy!

[gideros-old]

You'll be remembered

Everybody is deeply saddened with his death. The co-founder and mastermind of Apple Computers, Steve Jobs was a true innovator, future predictor and a businessman. We'll miss him a lot. It was too early.

  Thank you, Steve

[gideros-old]

Numbers, lots of numbers

I really like when it's about numbers and statistics. When you use quantifiable numbers in a sentence, it magically becomes a convincing fact. While we are a young company (we'll turn 1 in a few months hint hint) our codebase has been in development in stealth mode for a long time.

Now that we decided to release our application to the public, it's a timely chance to expose some numbers about our company and some facts about Gideros Studio, our precious mobile development environment :)

Number of initial employees of Gideros Mobile: 2

Number of downloads in 3 days: 107 - Not much but thrilling! :)

Number of lines in Gideros Studio: 37643 - excluding autogenerated code.

Number of characters in the same code: 952707 - enough to cover a 600-page book.

Number of classes: Slightly more than 200

First game developed with Gideros Studio: Tim the Timber

First children playbook developed with Gideros Studio: A Snow Tale

Time it'll take for us to give Android support: 1.5 months

The year we'll provide support for at least two more platforms: 2012

We'll release more numbers soon as we release upcoming versions, in order to compare the past and predict the future.

Stay tuned!