Wednesday, June 8, 2016

New app: Canvas Tutor

Canvas Tutor is an app to help you develop your drawing skills with daily exercise. Everyday you will receive a quest focused on anatomy, backgrounds, inking, coloring and character design.

Complete the quests, gain skill points and share your progress!

If you draw often and want a way to get better or keep yourself in practice, canvas tutor is the right app!




 


See the drawings the user have shared!

https://www.facebook.com/ilariamotokoart/photos/?tab=album&album_id=723028064506625

Download for android:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pimentoso.android.canvastutor

Download for desktop (requires Java):

http://motoko-su.com/canvas/CanvasTutor.jar

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Convert videos for twitter using ffmpeg on Mac

Okay, so you're pretty much done developing your new app or game, and you want to record a short demo or gameplay video. Or you just want to post your dev progress on Twitter with the #indiedev hashtag. But Twitter is really picky and throw errors if the video doesn't follow their parameters.

You can easily get around this by capturing your screen with QuickTime and converting the resulting video with ffmpeg via command line.

First fire up your android emulator, or desktop version of your Libgdx game.
Then start QuickTime Player. In the top menu go to File > New Screen Recording.
When you press the red record button, drag a rectangle to select a portion of the screen to record, and record your video. To stop recording, use the circle icon on the top right.
Save your video as video.mov on your desktop.

Now you need the conversion tool: ffmpeg. We'll install it using the terminal via Homebrew. If you are not familiar with it, homebrew is the famous 3rd party package manager for OSX, read about it here - http://brew.sh/

Open the terminal and use this command to install ffmpeg

 brew install ffmpeg --with-libvpx  

After installing, navigate to your desktop folder

 cd ~/Desktop  

and convert your video. The following command is for creating a h264 video for Twitter.

 ffmpeg -i video.mov -r 30 -c:v libx264 -b:v 1M -vf scale=640:-1 video.mp4  

Do you want to post your game progress to 4chan's /agdg/? The following command will create a webm with VP8 codec suitable for posting on 4chan.

 ffmpeg -i video.mov -c:v libvpx -crf 10 -b:v 1M -vf scale=640:-1 video.webm  

The video will be created in the same folder of your source video (your desktop). If you want to mess with ffmpeg parameters like scaling, bitrate, etc, refer to the ffmpeg wiki.

Monday, January 25, 2016

New game released: Peekaboo

A new game from Pimentoso has been released!

Peekaboo is a fast and challenging memory game, featuring cute and spooky monster girls cards!
Memorize the pattern of a 3x3 grid for just 3 seconds, and try to remember the cards that get randomly covered.
There are 24 levels with increasing difficulty, and you can unlock more than 30 cards.

The game is free for any android device!



Download for android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pimentoso.android.peekaboo

Download for desktop:
http://pimentoso.itch.io/peekaboo

   

Monday, August 11, 2014

Pocket Softbox

New app on Google Play!

Pocket softbox is an evolution of Color Light Touch, with features oriented to photographers and cinematographers.

Pocket Softbox turns your phone/tablet screen into a colored light source, to use it for photography or videos in low-light conditions when you can't bring your heavy equipment with you.

Just slide your finger on the screen to change the color, choosing from a Kelvin scale (1000K-10000K) or a full RGB scale. You can adjust the brightness and save your color for later use. A round light mode is also available for eye lighting purposes.


Thanks to cinematographer Christian Denslow for his supervision and ideas.



Thursday, January 16, 2014

Libgdx Scene2d Dialog resize and style

Having the need to quickly generate dialogs in my game, I looked into the Dialog class in the scene2d.ui package. It allows you to create dialogs with a title, text, and all the buttons you need.
The Dialog object contains a "contentTable" field for its inner text, and a "buttonTable" field where the buttons are placed. Both are Tables. The Dialog class extends Window, which itself is a Table. So you can fine-tune sizes and paddings of the various elements.

Different story for the entire dialog sizing; if you simply use the setSize(w, h) method it won't affect anything. This is because Dialog.show() method calls WidgetGroup.pack(), which overrides any size is explicitly set, and dynamically resizes the group depending on its content. To fix this, you can simply override getPrefWidth() and getPrefHeight() to return the values you need.

I created this class for my needs, which automatically styles the text and buttons you add to the dialog.

 public class CustomDialog extends Dialog {  
   
     public CustomDialog (String title) {  
         super(title, Assets.skin);  
         initialize();  
     }  
       
     private void initialize() {  
         padTop(60); // set padding on top of the dialog title  
         getButtonTable().defaults().height(60); // set buttons height  
         setModal(true);  
         setMovable(false);  
         setResizable(false);  
     }  
   
     @Override  
     public CustomDialog text(String text) {  
         super.text(new Label(text, Assets.skin, "medium-green"));  
         return this;  
     }  
       
     /**  
      * Adds a text button to the button table.  
      * @param listener the input listener that will be attached to the button.  
      */  
     public CustomDialog button(String buttonText, InputListener listener) {  
         TextButton button = new TextButton(buttonText, Assets.skin);  
         button.addListener(listener);  
         button(button);  
         return this;  
     }  
   
     @Override  
     public float getPrefWidth() {  
         // force dialog width  
         return 480f;  
     }  
   
     @Override  
     public float getPrefHeight() {  
         // force dialog height  
         return 240f;  
     }  
 }  

You also need to declare a WindowStyle declaration in your skin.json file.
For more informations about skins, take a look at my Skin tutorial.

 com.badlogic.gdx.scenes.scene2d.ui.Window$WindowStyle: {  
     default: { background: button-disabled, titleFont: fx35, titleFontColor: red }  
 }  

Example usage in your game screen:

 new CustomDialog("Exit game") // this is the dialog title  
     .text("Leave the game?") // text appearing in the dialog  
     .button("EXIT", new InputListener() { // button to exit app  
         public boolean touchDown(InputEvent event, float x, float y, int pointer, int button) {  
             Gdx.app.exit();  
             return false;  
         }  
     })  
     .button("Keep playing") // button that simply closes the dialog  
     .show(stage); // actually show the dialog  

Output:


Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Candy Falls! LWP goes free

You can now grab our Candy Falls! Live Wallpaper for Android for free.

Old price: 0.99$
New price: FREE


Remember to shake your phone to get even more sweets falling!

Google Play link:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pimentoso.android.candyfall.lwp

Sunday, December 1, 2013

Retrieving data from a JSON webservice in Android - simple tutorial

In this guide I'll show how to write a basic Android app that retrieves data from a JSON webservice, and simply shows it in a list.

We'll be using the following stuff.

Tutorial

Create a new Android project, with a MainActivity class inside. Create a "libs" folder inside the project, and put the GSON jar in there. When you refresh the project, Eclipse should automatically add the jar to the project's build path.

Let's have our activity extend ListActivity instead of Activity.

 public class MainActivity extends ListActivity {  
      @Override  
      protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {  
           super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);  
      }  

Now let's look at the "citiesJSON" webservice API.

Webservice Type : REST 
Url : api.geonames.org/citiesJSON?
Parameters : 
north,south,east,west : coordinates of bounding box 
callback : name of javascript function (optional parameter) 
lang : language of placenames and wikipedia urls (default = en)
maxRows : maximal number of rows returned (default = 10)

Result : returns a list of cities and placenames in the bounding box, ordered by relevancy (capital/population). Placenames close together are filterered out and only the larger name is included in the resulting list.

We'll call the webservice with the 4 coordinates parameters. The webservice also requires an "username" parameter. You can use the "pimentoso" user for this test, or you can register your own username here: http://www.geonames.org/login

Go to the JSONgen website, and paste the sample URL for the webservice.


When you hit "generate", the website will have you download a zip file containing the generated classes. Unzip the file and copy the classes in your project. The classes will look like this

 package com.example.placesjson;  
 import java.util.List;  
 public class GeonameList {  
      private List<Geonames> geonames;  
      public List<Geonames> getGeonames() {  
           return this.geonames;  
      }  
      public void setGeonames(List<Geonames> geonames) {  
           this.geonames = geonames;  
      }  
 }  

 package com.example.placesjson;  
 public class Geonames {  
      private String countrycode;  
      private String fcl;  
      private String fclName;  
      private String fcode;  
      private String fcodeName;  
      private Number geonameId;  
      private Number lat;  
      private Number lng;  
      private String name;  
      private Number population;  
      private String toponymName;  
      private String wikipedia;  
      [... getters and setters]  

Now we're gonna work on the activity. We're going to create the "callService()" method that does the main job: starting a thread that calls the webservice, and deserialize the data. The comments in the code should be self-explanatory.

 private void callService() {  
      // Show a loading dialog.  
      dialog = ProgressDialog.show(this, "Loading", "Calling GeoNames web service...", true, false);  
      // Create the thread that calls the webservice.  
      Thread loader = new Thread() {  
           public void run() {  
                // init stuff.  
                Looper.prepare();  
                cities = new GeonameList();  
                boolean error = false;  
                // build the webservice URL from parameters.  
                String wsUrl = "http://api.geonames.org/citiesJSON?lang=en&username=pimentoso";  
                wsUrl += "&north="+COORD_N;  
                wsUrl += "&south="+COORD_S;  
                wsUrl += "&east="+COORD_E;  
                wsUrl += "&west="+COORD_W;  
                String wsResponse = "";  
                try {  
                     // call the service via HTTP.  
                     wsResponse = readStringFromUrl(wsUrl);  
                     // deserialize the JSON response to the cities objects.  
                     cities = new Gson().fromJson(wsResponse, GeonameList.class);  
                }  
                catch (IOException e) {  
                     // IO exception  
                     Log.e(TAG, e.getMessage(), e);  
                     error = true;  
                }  
                catch (IllegalStateException ise) {  
                     // Illegal state: maybe the service returned an empty string.  
                     Log.e(TAG, ise.getMessage(), ise);  
                     error = true;  
                }  
                catch (JsonSyntaxException jse) {  
                     // JSON syntax is wrong. This could be quite bad.  
                     Log.e(TAG, jse.getMessage(), jse);  
                     error = true;  
                }  
                if (error) {  
                     // error: notify the error to the handler.  
                     handler.sendEmptyMessage(CODE_ERROR);  
                }  
                else {  
                     // everything ok: tell the handler to show cities list.  
                     handler.sendEmptyMessage(CODE_OK);  
                }  
           }  
      };  
      // start the thread.  
      loader.start();  
 }  

The code contains the "readStringFromUrl()" utility method which is not covered in this guide. Please download the project zip at the end of this post to grab the code.

When the thread has completed, the "cities" object shoud contain data returned from the webservice.


This is the simple handler that's called at the end of the method.

 // This handler will be notified when the service has responded.  
 final Handler handler = new Handler() {  
      public void handleMessage(Message msg) {  
           dialog.dismiss();  
           if (msg.what == CODE_ERROR) {  
                Toast.makeText(MainActivity.this, "Service error.", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();  
           }  
           else if (cities != null && cities.getGeonames() != null) {  
                Log.i(TAG, "Cities found: " + cities.getGeonames().size());  
                buildList();  
           }  
      }  
 };  

The last thing that remains is to actually populate the list, so let's write the "buildList()" method.

 private void buildList() {  
      // init stuff.  
      List<Map<String, String>> data = new ArrayList<Map<String, String>>();  
      Map<String, String> currentChildMap = null;  
      String line1;  
      String line2;  
      // cycle on the cities and create list entries.  
      for (Geonames city : cities.getGeonames()) {  
           currentChildMap = new HashMap<String, String>();  
           data.add(currentChildMap);  
           line1 = city.getToponymName() + " (" + city.getCountrycode() + ")";  
           line2 = "Population: " + city.getPopulation();  
           currentChildMap.put("LABEL", line1);  
           currentChildMap.put("TEXT", line2);  
      }  
      // create the list adapter from the created map.  
      adapter = new SimpleAdapter(this, data, android.R.layout.simple_list_item_2,   
                new String[] { "LABEL", "TEXT" },  
                new int[] { android.R.id.text1, android.R.id.text2 });  
      setListAdapter(adapter);  
 }  

Let's wrap it all up, by calling "callService()" when the activity is started.

 @Override  
 protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {  
      super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);  
      callService();  
 }  

The final result should be something like this.



Error handling

You will notice that when the webservice returns an error, a JsonSyntaxException is not actually thrown. This is because GSON only throws the exception if your class has a field whose type didn't match what is in the JSON. So, in case of an error like this-

{"status":{"message":"user does not exist.","value":10}}

The exception is not actually thrown. So if you want to retrieve the error message, you could expand your GeonameList class to contain a Status object, so GSON can fill it when it is returned. 
You can read more about it here-

Other libraries

If GSON is a bit too heavy for you (with its almost 200KB) you can look into JSONbeans, a lighter library by EsotericSoftware.
https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/jsonbeans

Download

You can get the project on Github.
https://github.com/Pimentoso/AndroidPlacesJson

Alternatively, you can download the Eclipse project ZIP here.
http://www.pimentoso.com/uploads/PlacesFromJson.zip