Our latest book, Learning Swift, is now available! The book will cover everything you need to learn Swift, for iOS, OS X, watchOS, and tvOS. Grab the early release (all updates to final release included) (via O'Reilly Media). Or pre-order it on Amazon! We'll be covering iOS 9.x, Swift 2.0/2.1, and the iPad Pro as well. This is probably the best book we've written yet!
We've been at YOW! Connected in Melbourne this week. It's been pretty awesome, and we've met lots of cool people doing awesome things with mobile and IoT. We gave two presentations!
The first was the latest update to our How Do I Game Design? session, covering just enough game design theory to make you dangerous. You can watch a video of this session from OSCON 2015:
The second was called Watch This Face, and covered the philosophical design differences between Android Wear and Apple's watchOS. You can grab the slides from Speaker Deck:
And, because apparently we can't get by without giving a plug for our books, don't forget to check out our new books; you can get them for 50% off with code WKIOS9.
“When I realised what the engineers had done, my head LITERALLY exploded…,” said Jon to the other Kerbonauts, waiting for their turn on the Kerbtrifuge, an odd part of training that persisted even though it was universally agreed that G forces had no effect on Kerbal physiology.
Paris would normally have a great rejoinder to his, but he had just entered the training capsule. The rest of the crew were eager not to think about that, and were swapping horror stories to keep their mind off things.
“That’s nothing,” said Tim. “There was one time when they confused apogee and perigee, and rather than a nice circular orbit I found myself heading out past the orbit of Jool. It took me SIX YEARS to get back home.”
Tim had been with the programme for less than a year, but that didn’t stop him embellishing stories like the rest of the crew.
“Al, how about you?” asked Paul, who was next in line for “endurance training,” and was clearly fidgeting with nervousness, “what’s your scariest moment?”
Al looked up from the console which he was soldering. “Mine? It was when they decided that even though more boosters had been added, it still wasn’t enough. I was in a ship made of nothing but boosters.”
From the room next door, the sound of the Kerbtrifuge spinning up could be heard. Everyone held their breath, Paris’s cry could be heard through the thin metal walls…
“WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Join Paris, Jon, Tim, Paul, and Alasdair as they regale you with tales of their adventures in the Kerbal Space Program, the increasingly popular and disturbingly realistic space programme simulator game enjoyed by geeks around the world. Learn how and why you should go to space, and what you can learn from it! Science will be involved.
We've spent the last week at O'Reilly Media's fantastic OSCON conference, in Portland, Oregon. We presented a whole bunch of talks, ranging from Swift programming to Kerbal Space Program. Friends of ours, and other interesting people, also presented great stuff. Our talks were:
And great talks by our friends, and other interesting people, included:
We also did a book signing (or two), which was as strange-but-awesome experience as ever. We're looking forward to OSCON in Amsterdam! Our photos from OSCON 2015 in Portland are on Flickr.
We're deeply saddened that our dear friend, collaborator, and frequent board gamer, Frank Sainsbury, has passed away.
Frank was definitely Secret Lab super-fan Number 1, and board games day will certainly never be the same without him.
Frank's regular presence in our office, when he'd almost certainly broken something he was coding, which usually turned out not to be broken at all, and frequent collaborations at hackathons and generally within the Hobart technology community, will be missed.
Our condolences to Frank's family and friends. We'll miss you, Frank!
We've released a new version of our very popular Bus Pal application for Metro Tasmania timetables. The app has all the timetables and route information for all the buses in Hobart, Launceston, and Burnie.
This update updates the data to the latest from Metro Tasmania, adds lines to the map showing the bus routes, and includes a Watch App for the Apple Watch.
The Apple Watch App shows the time to the next bus and the route number at the bus stops you've favourited within Bus Pal. In the future we'll be adding a glance for even quicker access (we're trying to figure out the best UI for that at the moment).
You can download Bus Pal on the App Store.
Bus Pal is not endorsed by Metro Tasmania, and neither Secret Lab or Metro Tasmania warrant the completeness or accurateness of the data included.
