iPads, Codea and Eleanor

Continuing the trend over the last two years, I woke up early to watch Tim Cook announce the latest revision of the iPad (sans numeral). One change this time to my little ritual of eating potato chips in my jammies while following the live blogs was the additional duty of checking in on our little baby girl grizzling (obviously because she wanted to be kept up to date on the news). With daddy and daughter excited about the most recent awesome Apple device I pre-ordered one straight away that morning and had it delivered to the office on launch day.

I absolutely love the new screen. It's fantastic for reading and viewing photos, although in truth I've now found it hard to take or even find photos that are sharp enough to show off the new Retina display. The increase in weight and thickness are certainly noticeable but it didn't take long to get use to that. The other great addition in this new model is a much improved camera, which I've been using to add snapshots of documents and whiteboard drawings at work to Evernote. The resulting photos are more than usable and I don't bother with a photocopier or scanner anymore when capturing discussions and diagrams.

Another purchase that I made to compliment the our little Apple infused household was the new AppleTV. I've been waiting for an update to the little black box (which now supports 1080P) and I'm glad that we finally have one as AirPlay is such a great feature. Browsing your content on an iPad or iPhone and slingshotting that to the big screen is so much better than clicking incessantly through menus on our TV remote. Particularly happy with being able to use our Plex server on the TV now, even if there seem to be some teething issues with lock screens activating when you pause a show for too long. Hopefully the rumours about Apple opening up the AppleTV platform to apps will mean that it won't be long before we can get a native Plex client on the AppleTV itself.

Something else we tried with AirPlay yesterday was mirroring the iPad screen during our weekly call with mum and Uncle Wing on Skype. I thought we'd try it for a bit of a laugh but I thought it worked out really well as Eleanor could see her AhMah and AhKong from wherever she was playing in the room. I turned on the back camera of the iPad and followed Eleanor around, which gave the grandparents a great view of Nelly playing while Alison could still interact with the TV. The disconnect also meant that I could show what Nelly was like laughing and touching the faces of her grandparents through the TV, without the previous downside of accidentally hanging up on the iPad.

My other latest geek indulgence has been scratching my game development itch with Codea on the iPad. I never thought that programming on a touchscreen device would be feasible (at least this soon) but I've had an blast over the last week knocking up a game prototype together. The app allows you to develop games (other applications as well but the API is clearly geared towards game development) in a dynamic scripting language called Lua. The experience is so fluid and the API exposes some pretty complicated functions of a tablet device (multitouch, accelerometer, sound, graphic manipulation, keyboard support) in a really simple manner. The barrier of entry for experimentation is so low and the results so immediate that it really becomes a pleasure to code, which is certainly a departure from some of the heavy weight enterprise development that I do for work.

What's also impressive is the speed which the API is expanding. The last few updates have added support for a physics engine (using Box2D) and 3D graphics. There's promise for networking support for multiplayer games to come in the future and eventually the ability to export these sandbox games into XCode so that developers can publish their efforts to the App Store. At the moment the only way to share code is to copy the source and paste it somewhere on the active forum for other developers to import into their own Codea app.

In less than a week I put together a simple prototype of a puzzle/memory game that I wanted to try. The idea is to memorize the randomized sequence which the game scrambles the tiles and return it to the original layout, which becomes progressively difficult as the sequence gets longer. A cross between Simon and a picture tile puzzle basically. Codea even allows you to capture video of your program running, so here's a short clip of the working game on YouTube.



Little Nelly has been doing some real growing up over the last few months. She's now cruising naturally and has begun to attempt free standing on her own. So far I think her record is about 5 or so seconds, so I'd expect that walking will not be far away. Life at day care has improved and she seems to be having fun with the other kids based on reports from the centre, which has made Alison's transition back into the work force two days a week a little easier to cope with. Eleanor's verbal skills continue to expand (in inflection if not phonetic variety) and I managed to convince her to crawl across the room to "bring Daddy the blue square" yesterday which was immensely rewarding. She's also a lot happier playing by herself for longer periods, although when she tires of that we often hear a frantic battle cry as she charges on all fours through the house to find you. It's hard to believe that our baby girl is morphing into an increasingly independent little person. *sniff*

If there was one milestone that really hit home how much time has passed it would have been Lily's first birthday last weekend. We had a great time at the Roma Street Parkland with Jeff, Julie and the birthday girl (who as always, looked gorgeous in pink). It's crazy to think that we met a little more than a year ago at antenatal class.

Which obviously means that there's another beautiful girl that will be celebrating her first birthday soon. AhMah will be flying out in two weeks and we have most of the party plans nutted out. I suppose it goes without saying that we're all more than a little excited.