He had a good life, he was almost seventeen years old, and Karin and I both got to hold him and say goodbye as he left. It was about the best ending I could have imagined for him but he's still my little guy and I miss him terribly.

I had to change my desktop wallpaper because this picture still chokes me up to look at. For now. But it's one of my favorite pictures of the little doofus and someday I'll be able to treasure it without the tears. For now I'll just leave it here as a bit of tribute where I can share it but not see it constantly.

Goodbye Heisenberg. We love you and we will always miss you.

Full resolution

If you do buy (or bought previously! Even if you rated 1.0 you can rate each version separately. Annoying but true.) a copy please take a moment to at least rate the app. I know, I know, I hate app developers begging for ratings as much (and probably more) than most people but it really does make a huge difference to sales. It amounts to the only marketing that can be done inside the App Store proper and Apple uses that data to drive how visible it is in search results and category lists. Version 1.0 never got enough ratings to display an aggregate and now that 1.1 is in the wild the review count is reset back to zero. I won't put a begging dialog in the app but I'm not above asking for ratings on the blog …

(If you're new around these parts you can read my story about developing Road Trip.)

For the curious/technically inclined I switched to Hover. I was reasonably happy with EasyDNS but there were a few things that bugged me, in order from most to least aggravating:

1. No privacy options. I don't think I've ever been contacted via my WHOIS info but there's no real reason to have that hanging around out there. EasyDNS has help pages that seem to say this isn't possible but that's just patently false. Yes, a contact must be listed. But it doesn't need to be me and there are plenty of registrars in the sea that will do this. It's free at Hover and in fact is defaulted to on.

2. Couldn't set the @ A record for hiddenjester.com. I pretty much want everything for hiddenjester to dump into Squarespace except for mail, which goes to Fastmail.fm. Without the @ A record if you did a dig on hiddenjester.com you got back nothing. Hover will let me send that to Squarespace. This is one of those "does anybody really care" things, and the A record for hiddenjester.com covers 99% of the cases but still … it was weird that the option was not available.

3. EasyDNS got a little spammy about renewals. I received seven total emails from them about renewing, going all the way back to late July. That wasn't really a huge deal but it was slightly annoying. And it's poorly timed right? They start annoying me right when I can jump ship and go somewhere else?

4. The EasyDNS dashboard/configuration/whatever-you-want-to-call-it page is confusing to me. Some things are off my account, some things are managed in the domain, then when you get into the domain there are several little subpages, etc. It worked but in comparison when I log into Hover I get a screen listing my domains, click one, and there's a "Domain Details" name for setting the name servers and the WHOIS stuff, then there's a DNS tab that has all of the DNS records listed for easy tweaking. (There are other tabs, but ones I can safely ignore. The Easy DNS separation between "account" and "domain" was less clean to me.)

The thing is at the end of the day I don't need complicated DNS stuff, and I don't need fancy options. I don't want a lot of handholding, I just want to drop in, set the things that need to be set and then not worry about it until I need to renew. At that point I'd like one email about it, maybe a month or so out. If I don't mess with it, ideally it would just roll over and charge me another year. I liked EasyDNS overall, and they certainly were head and shoulders above a Network Solutions or a (shudder) GoDaddy, but it seemed like there were both more knobs than I wanted, and a few knobs I did really want that were missing. Luckily switching registrars is much easier than it was in the Dark Ages …

(Before going any further I should mention that I'm writing this up in part in response to Sean Nittner's play report so you can also go there for more info.)

Let me try for a one paragraph summary of Durance. It's a science fiction setting: some desolate planet at the ass-end of nowhere has been converted into the far future's Australia. There are convicts aplenty and an authority structure, as long as they can keep control of the situation. The game focuses on 10 characters who fall in two parallel ladders of five people. On the Authority side you have the colony governor, the govenor's XO, a free colonist, a marine, and a emancipist freed from the ranks of the convicts. On the criminal underworld you have the "Dimber Damber" (Crime boss, ruler of the underworld), the Dimber Damber's 2nd in command, a "Bolter" (escaped convict), a convict, and an Outcast or "Wrecker". While many of these characters represent an entire class of people the game explicitly encourages using just these ten characters. Each character is given a oath - something that he or she will never do, even to achieve their most heartfelt goals. Then players take turns being the guide and asking a framing question that establishes a scene.

A certain level of comparison to Fiasco is inevitable. They are both storytelling games, both are GM-less, they have no prep required, and they both are one-shot games. There's no campaign mode, in part because many characters won't make it out alive. But where Fiasco deliberately pushes the setting information to the playsets Durance has more assumptions built in. Where Fiasco only the vaguest and hand-wavy-iest method of conflict resolution Durance has more explicit ways to determine what happens. Where Durance has dice rolling in a scene that can introduce unexpected twists and turns Fiasco uses the dice very minimally, and always within a certain framework of player choice. In Fiasco you have one character and your interaction with the story is almost entirely through the the lens of your character. In Durance you have two characters but more importantly you don't have full control over them (you don't pick your own character's oaths) and your narrative control (as the Guide asking questions) is explicitly disconnected from your characters. The scene you frame with a question ideally doesn't have your characters in it and so that means your character's story comes entirely out of questions the other players ask.

Unfortunately the cats had a few … issues (the less said the better) and I was late getting to the con so I missed the colony setup. There is some sort of collaborative process by which certain things are determined about the planet and colony. (For example, our colony had a mild climate, favorable hydrology, high prosperity, and a motivated workforce. There was an intelligent native species on the surface, but due to extreme temperature issues most of the colony was underground.) There are also three drives in the narrative. Two of them are always Servility and Savagery, and the three is selected at the start of play. Ours was originally Control but during gameplay we changed it to Freedom.

I got there just as they wrapped up the colony stuff and so we dove into character creation. Each person picked one of the ten characters. We went around the second time with a few extra rules: you had to have one criminal and one colonist and you couldn't have both characters at the same power level in the social structure. I ended up playing the colonial X.O. (a Judge Advocate who used his position of authority to manipulate and control the other colonists) and the criminal outcast (the only person on the colony who was there voluntarily: he was a cop who framed himself in order to get sent to the colony in order to pursue his sister's killer. The criminals all hated a dirty cop worse than anything so he was outside all social norms, which was fine with him.)

This two characters per player thing was interesting. I expected to be more into my manipulative power-behind-the-throne authority character and in contrast was just flailing around for why my criminal outcast was so far outside the pale. I just blurted out "he's the only person crazy enough to come here voluntarily and framed himself" and then spun up the rest in justification of that first piece of nonsense. But somehow he came to life in that moment and we did more with the outcast than the judge for the first part of the game. I also think that was in part because Durance doesn't really flesh out any character relationships beyond the social structure. I just sort of attached Anders (the outcast) to the established Gunny Black story. Gunny's crime was killing his wife and I later said that Gunny's wife had been Anders sister. As I said later in the game, "Anders doesn't want to kill Gunny. That's too easy. Anders wants to destroy Gunny and only after he's lost everythng can he die." In contrast Dalvin (the judge) was passively gathering information through many scenes. He got his time in the sun at the end of it all, but he didn't have strong ties to anyone to start out and that made him sit idle a bit more.

I mentioned the oaths before and they are a key part of the game. The oaths all come from a sample table, but the twist is you don't pick your character's oaths. You go around the table and pick an oath for somebody else's character. My judge would never tolerate incompetence, even to gain control and my outcast would never accept charity from anyone. The game encourages leaning hard on these oaths and it works better when everyone remembers that. This is one of the biggest departures from Fiasco and it was a bit difficult to wrap our collective heads around. The guide isn't framing a scene he's asking a question and letting the other players frame a scene that answers that question. The guide is encouraged to ask about oaths and push characters towards breaking their oaths. Breaking oaths removes characters from the game and causes all sorts of other mechanical effects. Our change from Control as a drive to Freedom was caused by the governor breaking his oath. When Anders broke his oath and accepted charity (getting another character to bring down Gunny Black because Anders was unable to do so) Anders was removed from play and also changed Gunny from the X.O. position on the criminal side down to the lowest "Outcast" caste. The main game clock is when enough characters break their oaths or die then the game closes out. When we got that and started asking the really pointed questions is when the game really came alive and started to sing. Somehow Fiasco has this web built that just collapses together into a mess but Durance requires a little more active pushing from the players. Honestly I'm not sure how/why it works in Fiasco it just does.

This post is getting too long (and I've been working on it on and off for almost a month now!) but I'd be severely remiss if I didn't mention the dice. In Fiasco there's a big pool of dice but they mostly just build the setting and then at the end of the game help determine your character's ultimate fate. They are mechanically important but they actually function as tokens more than dice: rolling them only happens at the very start, the very end, and a handful get rolled at the halfway point. In Durance there are three dice representing the the three drives. If a scene's end is unclear the scene's Guide locks down one die on its previous value and the other two are rolled. The high die tells the players which drive dominates the end. So you can roll dice every scene potentially and they can make the scene veer in unexpected ways. But there's more! If you roll the same number or two or three dice something crazy happens. We had a tie twice in our game and both times it strongly moved the fiction forward. When ties happen there's a big table of cryptic statements to apply. Our first time was a at the end of a good, but fairly dry scene and the tables spit out "Death, amidst mind-numbing terror". Suddenly our scene of wheeling and dealing at a religious service turned into a riot and the Dimber Damber was killed. What? All hell broke loose from there. (And on a personal note Dalvin was forced into action and grabbed a character and saved him, beginning his transition from passive spider in his web to eventual governor of the colony.)

The second tie was a tense scene. Dalvin and Irwin (the govenor) misjudged a situation and managed to get two criminals in a grab for a shotgun. That was not supposed to happen (from Dalvin's POV), but we needed the dice to figure out who won. We went to the dice and got something along the lines of "What you know could fit in a hat. What you don't know on the other hand?" (That may not be precise. I'm going from memory and to be honest at the time I was sort of like "What? Whatever fortune cookie table." And I was wrong because when Sean figured out what it meant we got another powerful drive forward.) We all sort of had to stop for a moment and think. But what it became as while we were trying to handpick the new Dimber Damber good old Gunny Black decided to he could just move up a rung on the power ladder and bam! Revolution! It no longer mattered which criminal the Authority liked because Gunny Black had the guns, he had the manpower and suddenly he had the governor! While I was sort of dissatisfied with the cryptic and random nature of the the thing at the time upon reflection it was a great moment. And the truth of the matter is that this moment is our game's equivalent of Fiasco's "Tilt" between Act 1 & Act 2. It was at this moment that the final plot elements started into motion and everything rushed to a finale from here. Remember when I said that somehow Fiasco just naturally collapses into a mess and Durance took some more pushing? That's true but this was the last push and I have to admit it was the game system that provoked it, whether I liked the table or not.

It's well past time for me to wrap up and post this. The short version is that I liked Durance and I look forward to getting my hands on a copy. I'd like to see the colony creation part that I missed (glares at Heisenberg & Schrödinger). I'll probably try to make some of my friends play it as soon as I have a full copy.

It's aimed at a younger audience and it's not something that takes more than an hour or so to flip through but it is well done and there were several articles that taught me things I didn't know before. And like I said, it's free so it only costs that hour of your time. Check it out!

This is probably old news but if you haven't seen it yet you should certainly go watch An Invocation for Beginnings. Heck even if you have watched it's worth watching again. If you're stuck on something don't spin your wheels beating yourself up. Just watch that and I bet you'll come unstuck before the video is done …

I'm working on an app right now that has the option of driving a second screen. There are two methods of connecting such a screen: using a special dock cable to physically connect a monitor; and using Airplay to connect to an Apple TV device and using that screen.

Note that I'm not talking about mirroring the iPad display to the second display, I'm talking about having a completely different UIView on the second display. (This is confusing because iOS calls turning that on "Airplay Mirroring" although it's entirely up to the application whether it actually mirrors the main view or not.)

This second display is primarily a UITableView and it can potentially have quite a few rows to display. Also the intent is to have a screen that can be read at a distance so I use quite a large font (the current "large" size font is 36 point.) Since there's no touch UI there's no way for the user to directly scroll the secondary display but the app scrolls the second display to match a similar table on the iPad display. As the user manipulates the main display the secondary screen scrolls in unison. Well, at least it should and that right there is the bug. In my experience any UITableView method call that takes an animated: parameter does not animate on the Airplay secondary screen if animated: is set to YES. This works fine on the physical secondary screen, but not the Airplay. For example scrollToRowAtIndexPath:atScrollPosition:animated: will silently fail if you try to animate it.

There's also a workaround I have, and you can see it in the code on GitHub. Short form is this: animating the contentOffset value of the table in a GCD block via [UIView animateWithDuration:delay:options:animations:completion] works. So instead of simply scrolling to a row, I calculate a contentOffset for that row and scroll the underlying UIScrollView.

I was not able to find any references to this bug anywhere via Google so I'm not sure it's been reported before. If you want to animate a UITableView on an Airplay secondary screen you probably want to take a look at the GitHub repository.

Here's the idea: four guys from Polygon each bring a game they want to be Game of the Week and they pitch the games to each other. After picking a winner for the week they compare it to the current "Bestie" to see if it dethrones the previous winner.

So far so good, and they do genuinely bring games that I've bought and enjoyed, but the the part that really elevates it is that the whole thing is done tongue–in–cheek. For example one of the early winners was the new SSX game and the reason they gave it the prize was that it supported racing against a previously saved ghost and therefore if your Dad had raced a game and then died you could play SSX with your dead Dad, thus keeping him alive. SSX was dethroned by Journey because Journey lets you play cooperatively online with somebody you don't know and has no voice chat so it was possible that somebody from Israel could play with somebody from Palestine and thus bring peace to the Middle East. (Journey was recently dethroned because it had two months on top and failed to deliver the promised world peace.)

So yeah, I like it. It's a good blend of game reviews and jokes. Check it out!

Reasons? Well the reasons are legion. I'm more caffeine sensitive now. I suspect that's a mix of drinking less coffee and getting older but it's tough to separate the two there. If you know me as that "drinking a pot from a thermos" guy you also know me as a the guy who pops Tums all days. Guess what? Less black coffee means less stomach acid. Science! Also as I wrote on the defunct photo-blog I got weirdly OCD about "if I brew a pot of coffee I drink the whole thing". Switching to the Senseo meant I brewed coffee one cup at at time so drinking the "whole thing" was no longer a deal, but it also meant I was drinking mediocre coffee. Switching to the French press meant I could make good coffee and still only make one cup at a time.

OK, swell. Now I just need coffee beans. For a while I was trekking up to Orchard Valley Coffee to buy beans but that's a whole drive and crosses the 17 traffic and can be icky at the wrong time of day. Then for quite a long time I went to the local coffee shop (Lime Tree Espresso) that sources beans from Barefoot Coffee. This was a Good System™. Problem is that the local store is pretty much a one–man shop and sometimes he is just closed unexpectedly. About three weeks ago I went one day and found out he had started closing Tuesdays at noon. I went Wednesday at 2 PM and he was just "out until 2:30". At which point I had to go buy Cthulhu–knows–how–old Peet's beans from the Safeway. Enough. It's 2012, can't I just buy good coffee beans from Amazon and have somebody ship them to my hermetically sealed house of Board Games 'n Code Development™?

Well I didn't actually check on Amazon but the answer is yes! You can get 12 ounces of quality fresh-roasted beans shipped to you every two weeks from Tonx. But don't use that link use my pyramid scheme link a bit later. It will save you $10!

I just got my second shipment from Tonx this week and opened it up today. I have to say, I'm really pleased. 12 ounces/2 weeks is at least really close to my coffee bean consumption and I like the coffee just fine. It's within a buck or so of what I was paying at the local shop and I don't have to drive out and there and hope he's open.

So there you are. If you like quality coffee I'd recommend checking out Tonx. If you want to give it a try use this link. You get $10 off your first month and I think if three people use that link I get a free T-shirt. Or something like that. Anyway it's good coffee. Check it out.

I don't know that I've ever really written down the story behind Road Trip so now is as good a time as any. Set the wayback machine to August 2008! Apple had just updated what was still known as iPhone OS into version 2.0 with the App Store allowing third party development. I had picked up an iPhone in March but had found at the time that iPhone development was limited. Apple considered it a beta and getting the keys that let you put an application on the hardware was at their discretion and I wasn't invited to the party. So around July or so I had acquired the necessary certificates and was trying to figure out what my "Hello World" learner app would be.

By this point the Big Honkin' Road Trip (BHRT) was well established. A group of friends from my Kesmai days would gather somewhere and we'd travel around hanging out and visiting various local HOOTERS. Usually we tried to find a state where there on the order of three – six restaurants and visit them all, thus completing the HOOTERS of (state) tour. Our process for handling this was a little complex. Sometimes there would be a car rental, sometimes we'd have somebody's vehicle(s). There would be hotel rooms, there would be gas costs, there would be bar/food tabs. As different people paid for different items we'd constantly be passing back and forth cash as we tried to pay for things evenly. Mind you, sometimes we'd have six people on the trip with one or two others showing up for one stop or another. Plus there was drinking. We'd have somebody staying sober to drive, but that wasn't always the person tracking the cash. There were always these crummy morning reconciliation sessions where we'd dig up receipts and try to reconstruct who owed whom what. The previous BHRT I had used an OmniOutliner document to track every receipt and all of the outstanding debts. It worked but it was still a pain.

For some reason while Karin and I were at PAX in August it hit me: I could put an app on my iPhone to do all of this. At this point I had one week to write the app. This was the first version of Road Trip. I worked on it at PAX a bit, and wrote the vast bulk of it on my flight from California to Dulles to start BHRT2K8. It wasn't quite ready that night and I have some humorous memories of frantically debugging the math in Tony's car on Saturday morning because we needed the app to work before I started drinking. We all agreed that after I had been drinking I wasn't allowed to tweak our key financial instrument – this was really a refinement of an old MAMBA Kings rule where we could code after drinking at Fridays After Five (a little civic party that would happen in the summer that was a couple of blocks from our offices) but we never committed code until a sober review. (Indeed, you can see my key observation about that debugging session in a post on this blog.)

The UI for that version of Road Trip was hideous. It had this tabbed interface with no graphics, the first version couldn't handle splitting things non-evenly, there was some terribly confusing debt/payment nomenclature that was overly complex, and it was ugly as sin. But it worked. You could tell it "Oh Tony paid for a hotel room that Tim and Tony are splitting" and it would tell you how much each person owed each other. The core idea was offsetting debts: if I owed Tony $90 for a hotel room and I picked up a lunch tab so Tony owed me $45 then I'd still owe Tony $45. Now if there's a third person in that mix the numbers got more complicated but the app didn't care. It would tell you who owed the most money and they picked up the next tab. That would likely change the "Deadbeat" and we'd rinse and repeat. On the last stop of the trip we'd settle up and that would be the only time cash would have to change hands. We usually didn't have anyone owe more than $50 or so.

We used that version of Road Trip for several BHRT's and it slowly got more features, but was still ugly as hell and complicated. I was busy doing other paying work so Road Trip never got a through work over and I was never convinced there was much market for the application. Our trip to PAX East last year wasn't technically a BHRT but we did use Road Trip for settling debts.

OK, so last year my paying work stopped and I didn't have a great lead for something new. I decided to do iOS work and at that point why not dust off Road Trip and ship it? Maybe it won't be a big hit, but it's mostly done right?

Well, no. iPad had happened between 2.0 and 4.x and it really ought to be a Universal app. And the UI was just awful. And it really should have a map view, and maybe something about photos? Really the only thing that salvageable was the core math crunching. So the ugly Road Trip became Road Trip Classic and I started a new project, using iOS 5.0 (then in beta) and embarked on learning storyboards, the new iPad UI elements, and generally modernizing it.

And here we are way too many months later! I like the new UI and it even has some pretty textures evoking the key conceits of the app: money and roads. Maybe somebody will find this app useful, and at the very least we'll have an easy–to–use version for the next BHRT …

If you (or somebody you know) would find the app useful please check it out!