Pig on a Hill Productions

So somehow it’s February already! How did that happen? I was going to write a post hoping everyone had a good Christmas and New Year but I feel it’s possibly a little bit late now.

So what’s been going on? Well over Christmas I was working on an update for Puck. I wanted to add live scores to it, which of course means push notifications. This ended taking a little longer than I’d have liked as performance never seemed to be quite good enough. Push notifications in general for an app are one thing if you’re just informing the user about updates or features. However, in Puck’s case it has to be instant (or as close to it as possible) as it’s notifying the use about a live event, score reports. Sadly it’s never going to be totally instant due to it going out of my hands as soon as I send the notification request to Apple, but I’ve done my best to make it as fast as it can be my end.

I submitted the new version to Apple for review last week and it’s now available on the App Store for download or update. The next step for Puck is a new refined navigation and hopefully more Hockey league. Let me know in the comments if you have any requests for these.

Now I like to keep a rotation going between my apps. It allows me to have a break from one as I will be millimeters away as I’m working on it so sometimes you miss something that’s glaring me in the face. Ether a problem or an extra feature you could add. This week I have managed to get back to an app Iv’e been planning and re-planning for months, Pixel Pals 2.0 (here on also referred to as PP2). I believe it has come at a perfect point as I’ve just learnt some really good (fundamental actually) practices that have made it so much easier.

As I’ve said before, the original Pixel Pals was built for my dissertation and I made it as I was learning how to code, let alone it be my first iOS app. This was my first proper application, ever! Because of this, it’s a mess and that is why a complete rebuild is needed. As of right now I have the basic logic written and it just needs testing and polishing. The next step is working on the 2D graphics engine, which I’ve done some work on in the past but never got round to competing.

Lastly I am hoping to start a little Vlog over the next couple of weeks. I have thought about doing one for a while but never got round to it. It’s going to be a combination of a video diary for Pixel Pals and tutorial videos for iOS and possibly OS X (as I learn it). I often come across things that I learn and would love to share how to do them with the Internet, so hopefully I’ll try here.

Anyway, I’ll let you know about that when it happens.