Bitwise Magazine

Learn to program adventure games - part 3

Making the map

Monday 14 May 2012

The pinnacle of the programmer’s art is ( as you must no doubt agree! ) the text adventure....

If you've never written an adventure game, the latest in my series of videos may help you to get started. Here I look at how to create Rooms and maps and ways of saving and loading game data. Examples are shown in Ruby, C#, Objective-C and ActionScript but the same principles apply to other languages such as Python, Java, C++ and Delphi...

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MoviePlus X6

Budget video editing package

Saturday 12 May 2012

£61.27 (inc VAT)
Serif: http://www.serif.com/MoviePlus

Serif's MoviePlus X6 is a video editing program that aims to provide a range of powerful editing tools in a simple-to-use interface. You only have to look at the Serif web site and product packaging to see at once that the target audience for MoviePlus is the amateur or ‘home' user. Mothers and babies feature rather heavily on all the MoviePlus pages and promotional materials. In fact MoviePlus can be used for far more demanding projects than just splicing together a few clips of baby's first steps. In common with much more expensive packages, it has a multi-track timeline onto which you can place numerous video and audio tracks. The clips on each track can be dragged and dropped, cut to length, copied and pasted, panned and zoomed. You can add text and titles, you can blend (...)

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Visual Studio 11, Fifty Shades of Grey

Colours, capitals and a problem that need not exist

Friday 11 May 2012

I must confess that I am baffled about the problems Microsoft is making for itself by tinkering around with the appearance of the forthcoming version of Visual Studio.

User feedback on the beta was overwhelmingly critical of the grey lack-of-colour-scheme. In fact, there was so much criticism that Microsoft relented and, in the new Release Candidate (RC), has added back the odd dash of colour. The software is still rather subdued in tone but there are at least some hints of blue and green to pick out the glyphs and icons from the pervading grey background. The other element of the user interface that was widely attacked in the beta was the curious decision to put all the names of the docked panels into capitals. So whereas we have been used to seeing a Toolbox and a Solution Explorer, Visual Studio 11 was planning to give us a TOOLBOX and a SOLUTION EXPLORER. Microsoft responded to this criticism in a most peculiar way. Realising that people (...)

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Wirth on OOP – Classes, Objects and Extensible Types

Never mind the instances and messages!

Monday 23 April 2012

One of the things that seems to baffle many people when they start learning about Object Oriented Programming (OOP) is the jargon – and the arcane concepts that the jargon attempts to describe: classes, instances, inheritance, polymorphism, message-passing and so on. It could have been all so much simpler… OOP could, for example, have been described as nothing more than data records (or structs) that can be extended. That, in fact, is precisely how Niklaus Wirth – creator of the Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon – thought of Object Orientation. I happened to be browsing through an old copy of Wirth and Reiser's book ‘Programming In Oberon' the other day and I came across this very sane explanation: “The ultimate innovation [of OOP] was data type (...)

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Learn to program adventure games - part 2

Planning the class hierarchy

Friday 20 April 2012

Here is the latest video in my new series...

Now pick a language, and write that game!

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The Bitwise Newsletter

Tuesday 17 April 2012

We now have a newsletter...

We've been doing so many thing lately that even I find it hard to keep track of everything. I mean, not only are there all the news and reviews on Bitwise, but there are also the developments (Ruby and Flash/ActionScript tools) from my software company, SapphireSteel Software. Not to mention various online courses I teach on Ruby for Beginners or advanced users and C# Programming for Beginners. On top of that, we also have competitions from time to time and special-offer discounts on courses and software. Well, to help you keep up to date with all this stuff, we now have a newsletter. It's a cooperation between Bitwise and SapphireSteel Software and the first edition includes $100 discount on my C# course, so you can enrol for just $49 instead of the regular $149. Lots more news and (...)

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Learn to program adventure games

The highest calling in programming

Monday 16 April 2012

Long ago and far away (well, London in the early ’80s to be precise) I started programming...

I started with GW-Basic, a horrible language that came free with my PC. Fortunately I then discovered Turbo Pascal, a great compiler from Borland, and I never looked back. In my first year of programming I went from writing "Hello world" to coding a huge, sprawling adventure game with many rooms, a parser that let you enter commands such as "Put the carrot into the slot" or "Kick the potto" and many, many inscrutable puzzles. My game was called The Golden Wombat Of Destiny and it was inspired by what was then known as 'interactive fiction' such as Zork. I still love text adventures - much more, to be honest, than I like fast graphics games. I am a reader. I love books. And adventure games are the nearest you can get to becoming a character in a novel. Writing an adventure game is a (...)

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Learn C# Programming With $100 Discount

On Udemy Now!

Tuesday 3 April 2012

If you’ve ever fancied learning to program on Windows, this is your chance...

If you haven't discovered Udemy yet, you've been missing out. This is a wonderful site where you can learn all kinds of new skills by following video tutorials. For some time now, I've been teaching two of the most successful programming courses on Udemy: Learn To Program with Ruby (for Beginners) and Expert Ruby (for more advanced programmers). Now I've launched a new course: Learn C# Programming (in ten easy steps). This is a video course that teaches programming from the ground up. Step-by-step it explains how to write C# code to develop Windows applications using either the free Visual C# Express or a commercial edition of Microsoft Visual Studio. Normally the course costs $149. If you are quick, however, you can get it for just $49. That's a saving of 67%. Watch the course (...)

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Blu-Rays – when Technology Goes Backward

Why DVDs are so much less annoying

Tuesday 3 April 2012

The companies who distribute them would have us believe that Blu-ray discs are essentially better than DVDs. They have better picture quality, better sound, more special features….

So why is it that my heart sinks whenever I get a Blu-ray to watch? Simple. The damn' things don't let me resume playback. It drives me up the wall! Often, I like to watch a long film over two nights,. With a DVD I can stop the disk one night and, when I restart it the night after, it automatically plays from the point at which it was stopped. With a Blu-ray, more often than not, when I play the disk on the second night, the damn' thing goes right back to the beginning and I then have to spend a frustrating few minutes winding my way forward to the point where I really want to be. I say “more often than not” since some Blu-rays do resume from the point where I left off. But these seem to be the exception rather than the rule. For a long time I blamed my Blu-ray player. I (...)

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Get to No. 1 on Google (in easy steps)

Book review

Monday 26 March 2012

Get to No. 1 on Google (in easy steps) – 3rd edition $14.99 / £10.99
by Ben Norman
ISBN-10: 1840785330
ISBN-13: 978-1840785333
http://www.ineasysteps.com
http://www.computermanuals.co.uk

If you have a web site one thing you would no doubt love to do is what this book promises: Get to No.1 on Google. But how exactly do you do it and what exactly does it mean to “get to number one” anyway? This book takes you through the process of identifying what you want to achieve from Google searches (for example, which words in a search you would like to lead people to your site) and then finding ways of optimising your site to accomplish that. If you have never given any thought to search-engine optimisation (SEO), the book will be invaluable to you. If, on the other hand, you have studied the subject to some extent you may already be familiar with many of the tips and tricks described: using keywords, choosing a domain name, using header and meta tags, giving (...)

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PagePlus X6

DTP review

Monday 19 March 2012

http://www.serif.com/pageplus/
$99.99 / £68 (£81.69 inc VAT)

Serif is an odd company. Odd in a good way. The thing is, their software is so inexpensive that it's tempting to dismiss the company as no more than a “pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap” outfit: one of those low cost operations whose products promise much more than they deliver. Nothing could be further from the truth. Serif produces great software. The latest release of their DTP package, PagePlus, is an excellent example of a program that is packed with high-end features but without a high-end price tag. Here I have imported a PDF file and PagePlus X6 has created an editable publication PagePlus can be used to create anything from simple one-page ‘flyers' or posters to quite complex magazines and books. It lets you accurately position text blocks and (...)

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Win a copy of Snagit 11 and Snagit for Mac 2 from Techsmith!

Competition Time!

Sunday 18 March 2012

Have you ever tried explaining over the phone or email how to do something on your computer, only to realise it would be much easier to show people how to do it? Or have you ever seen something really cool online but not been able to copy/paste it to share? These are just two problems that can be solved with Snagit from TechSmith.

Snagit lets you capture anything from your screen, including images, web pages, video and text. These images and videos can then be easily edited, saved and shared through the Snagit application. See The Bitwise review. For your chance to win please answer the following question: What cannot be captured using Snagit? A – Video B – Images C – Smell For more information please visit http://www.techsmith.com/snagit. Competition now ended. Winner (picked at random from correct entries) to be notified 1st week in April.

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Snagit 11 (Windows) 2 (Mac) Review

screen grabbing tools

Wednesday 7 March 2012

Snagit 11
£38.95 incl. VAT
Upgrade £19.00 incl. VAT

Snagit for Mac 2
£76.50 incl. VAT
Upgrade £38.50 incl. VAT

Snagit is a slick screen capture tool that lets you grab pictures of your PC screen, a specific window or a marked area (either a rectangle or a ‘freehand-drawn' shape). It has a number of built-in editing tools to let you add captions and annotations and it can save your screen grabs in a variety of different image formats. I reviewed the previous Windows version, Snagit 10, last May. Two new versions have been released recently, Snagit 11 for Windows and Snagit 2 for the Mac. These are broadly similar tools and, though not functionally equivalent, each has gained several useful new capabilities (summarised below). The most striking of these is its ability to capture videos in addition to static images. Snagit lets you grab activity from the screen, including the mouse cursors (...)

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Aikido in North Devon

Yes, I have a life beyond...

Friday 2 March 2012

I’m a bit behind schedule with Bitwise at the moment...

Partly that's because I run a software company, partly it's because I write books and teach programming courses. But it's also because I've been busy setting up a new Aikido club in North Devon, UK. Yes, I teach aikido too in, er, my "spare time". Anyway, if you live anywhere near where I teach, I'd love to see you. If not, well, normal Bitwise service will be resumed as soon as possible...

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Word style sheets for books and eBooks

Latest adventures in self-publishing

Sunday 26 February 2012

As some of you may know, I have a blog elsewhere devoted to the art, craft and craftiness of self-publishing.

Over the years I've published all sorts of things. I've written articles and columns for dozens of different print magazines. I've published a paperback book on Ruby programming with a US publisher. At one time I had my own magazine publishing company. More recently I've published a book of my old interviews (with 80s pop stars) and some novels (about 80s pop stars and horrible murders) for Kindle. And now I'm going through the process of publishing them as paperbacks. My latest article is about simplifying the formatting process with style sheets: http://dark-neon.blogspot.com/2012/02/using-style-sheets.html. Incidentally, I am a big fan of self-publishing. I am completely convinced that this is the start of a revolution in publishing. I would be very surprised if there were (...)

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Self-publish a paperback

First steps

Monday 20 February 2012

While it’s the in-thing to publish eBooks these days, paperback books aren’t going away any time soon.

Elsewhere, I have a blog devoted to the dark arts of self-publishing. Up to now, I've concentrated on the ins and outs of publishing to Kindle. Today, however, I wrote the first in what will be a series of articles about publishing the same work as a paperback. If you are interested in making the leap from e-Book to p-Book, see: http://dark-neon.blogspot.com/2012/02/formatting-kindle-book-for-lulu-or.html.

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Exposure 4 Photoshop plugin

from Alien Skin Software

Monday 13 February 2012

Alien Skin Software today announced the immediate availability of Exposure 4, the new version of its photography effects plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and Photoshop Lightroom.

Exposure provides accurate film simulation and a wide range of creative effects. Popular classic films are accurately simulated, like Kodachrome, Polaroid, and Panatomic-X. Exposure reproduces the ethereal glow of black & white infrared film, and now color infrared. Pricing and Availability: Exposure 4 is available from www.alienskin.com for $249 USD. Owners of any version of Exposure may upgrade for $99 USD. Free upgrades were automatically sent to everyone who purchased Exposure 3 directly from Alien Skin Software in November 2011 or later.

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Chrome Flash Crash

Why Chrome’s shine is tarnished

Sunday 12 February 2012

For a while I loved Google’s Chrome browser. It has the virtue of being fast to load and generally fast to use. And it seems not to gobble up as much memory as Firefox (as least, the last version I used – having switched to Chrome a few months back, I haven’t since updated Firefox).

But lately Chrome has been getting almost unlivable with. Because it crashes. Frequently. Maybe this is because I have recently switched to a new PC that uses a 64-bit version of Windows 7? All I know for sure is that two Chrome plugins repeatedly cease to function. They are: 1) the Skype Toolbars plugin that lets me click a phone number in a web page in order to dial it and 2) Adobe Flash. The Flash plugin is the biggest problem because Flash content is all over the place. I've never experienced Flash crashes before in Internet Explorer or Firefox but in Chrome the crashes occur regularly – often several times a day. This is what a crash looks like… A bit of Googling quickly revealed that this is a widespread problem and it is one of the major sources of irritation to (...)

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Win The Book Of Ruby - Free!

Enter now

Thursday 9 February 2012

It’s the book I wrote but I’m not giving it away (I’m far too mean ).

However, here's someone who is... http://www.impressivewebs.com/book-giveaway-ruby/. Enter now, for a chance to win!

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Objective-C Book Reviews

For books on Mac/iOS programming

Wednesday 18 January 2012

The principal application programming language both of the Mac and Apple’s various iOS devices is Objective-C. It is not the easiest of languages to learn. A beginner may find its mix of C and Smalltalk-like syntax baffling. Even an experienced programmer is likely to have problems, not only learning the language but also getting to grips with the Xcode development environment. Here I look at four books that might help you get over a few of the barriers…

These are the books… Objective-C Fundamentals $44.99 by Christopher Fairbairn, Collin Ruffenach, Johannes Fahrenkrug Manning Publications ISBN-10: 1935182536 ISBN-13: 978-1935182535 Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide $39.99 by Aaron Hillegass Addison-Wesley ISBN-10: 0321706285 ISBN-13: 978-0321706287 Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (4th Edition) $49.99 by Aaron Hillegass, Adam Preble Addison-Wesley ISBN-10: 0321774086 ISBN-13: 978-0321774088 Advanced Mac OS X Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide $59.99 by Mark Dalrymple Addison-Wesley ISBN-10: 0321706250 ISBN-13: 978-0321706256 At first sight, three of these books appear to be aimed at more or less the same type of reader: Objective-C Fundamentals, Objective-C Programming and Cocoa Programming (...)

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