The Dord of Darien

Musings from the Mayor of the Internet

bbbbbbbbbbbbb

Puzzle Strike Randomiser

There’s this game called Puzzle Strike, right? It’s pretty fun. But if you have the physical copy, there’s a bit of a chore right when you get started because you need to choose your bank chips, and there’s no efficient means of doing so. Well, here comes Darien riding to the rescue! I’ve just released the first public version of my Puzzle Strike Randomiser app for Android. Here are some screens:

All that and a bag of... oh

This is the main screen, which you see as soon as you run the app. It generates ten chips at random from all the possible bank chips, and sorts them by cost (and then by alpha within cost).

Everything's so green!

And this is the set filter menu, useful for those people who may not have every single Puzzle Strike chip ever made. You can select or deselect any sets, and it remembers your settings between sessions so it’ll just automatically be right forever once you set it once.

It may not be the prettiest thing ever, and the code contains a few inelegant kludges that I really do mean to fix as soon as I’m able, but it does what it’s meant to do pretty well. I do have plans to expand on this in the future, but it’s on hold for a bit due to the pending move.

You can download the app right here for free. You’ll have to enable loading arbitrary apks on your device; how to do that varies from device to device, but most of them will prompt you for it as soon as you try to install something that’s not from an approved store, so it’s not really very hard. And it will tell you it wants full internet access; this is nothing to do with my code (which has no communication desires or abilities at all) but is a requirement of the Adobe AIR framework, which I used. I should also make it clear that this is 100% my own creation, and you shouldn’t harass Dave Sirlin about it — he has nothing to do with this (past giving me permission to distribute it, anyway), and is not able to support you if you have any problems with it. You can feel free to post any questions, concerns, problems, or feature requests in the comments on this post, and I’ll attend to them as I am able.

At present, this has been tested on three different phones and two different tablets, and works fine on all of them. If you happen to have a phone with a really small screen — say, smaller than 450 x 600 — it probably won’t work right. If enough people do have such phones and really want support, it’s possible that I can be arsed to make yet another graphic set for still smaller screens, but I don’t wish to bother if nobody has that.


September 23rd, 2012 Posted by | Games | no comments

Ned Colletti just got a big new deal

And is still a moron. Here are two lines from this article that I swear ran back-to-back like this in the original:

Colletti was reportedly praised by the Dodgers new ownership group after pulling off a nine-player blockbuster trade that included bringing first baseman Adrian Gonzalez, starting pitcher Josh Beckett and outfielder Carl Crawford over from the Boston Red Sox.

The Dodgers are 7-12 since the trade but are still in the National League wild card chase.

Great job, Ned!

Colletti has also signed outfielder Matt Kemp to an eight-year, $160-million contract extension and traded for shortstop Hanley Ramirez, outfielder Shane Victorino and pitcher Joe Blanton, and extended outfielder Andre Ethier’s contract.

Hanley was a pretty good pick, and Ethier’s awesome, but Kemp’s only played 89 games this year due to injuries, Victorino’s gone .247 / .314 / .329 for a whacking great 79 OPS+ since the trade, and Blanton’s thrown 40 innings of 61 ERA+ ball and cost the Dodgers half a win. So, really. Great work, Ned!


September 15th, 2012 Posted by | Baseball | no comments