Eight Bit Blog

What is “yarn vomit”? Yarn vomit is a holiday sweater that will make your stomach turn. Year after year, few really pay attention to this lost art form.  Sure, there is an ironic sweater party every so often and your parents and Grandma legitimately rock them.  But with that, all you get is a taste.

“Hey Jeff, nice sweater!” -You

“It looked better on your Mom last night…” -Jeff

We’re tired of just “a taste.”  We want our fill; that’s where you come in.  We aim to create the largest database of holiday sweaters ever created.  We need your commitment to upload as many unique sweater photos as you and your friends have.  Then tell your friends to tell their friends, and then have their friends (that you really don’t know) to tell their friends, etc.

Go to yarnvomit.com right now and upload your holiday sweater photos to be included in the largest collection of holiday sweaters online by 2010’s end.  You won’t just be a hero, you will be a part of textile history.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
NEW WEB SITE DEVELOPED TO MAKE YOUR HOLIDAYS EASIER
Gift giving for children without the guesswork

CHICAGO, Illinois (November 23, 2009) – Holiday gift giving always makes life a little hectic, especially when it comes to the trying task of choosing children’s presents. But with Rubity.com, a free online gift registry site, it’s easy to make kids happy and keep their families sane.

Developed by Eight Bit Studios, Rubity.com helps parents easily manage what their children want and what they have—making that information accessible to relatives and friends. Parents simply sign up online and create profiles for their kids, which include lists of items they already own. Everything “little Jimmy” wants can be added to a wish list, which is categorized by type (books, toys, games, etc.) and price. If Grandma likes to give books, for example, she can confine her search to those items. Purchase links can be provided to direct gift-givers via Amazon, Borders or other local outlets. If Grandma would rather surprise her grandchild, she can buy a toy that is not on the registry, upload an image on his wish list and “reserve” it, ensuring that no other family member purchases the same great gift. As gifts are “received”, they are added to the “has” list, which comes in handy when it’s time to write thank you cards.

Ultimately, Rubity.com takes the stress and the guesswork out of gift giving. Parents enjoy a degree of control over what well-intentioned gift-givers buy for their children and avoid post-holiday exchange lines by eliminating duplicate gifts. Perhaps most importantly, Rubity.com gives families a better understanding of “little Jimmy’s” personality and current likes. Particularly when extended family members live far away, it’s tough to keep up with children’s rapidly changing interests. With Rubity.com, everyone benefits: Parents no longer have to field numerous inquiries about appropriate holiday purchases; family and friends don’t have to agonize over the perfect gift; and kids receive exactly what they want.

Rubity.com is committed to protecting the privacy of its users. No information (i.e. name or birthdate) about children is required to create an account. While anyone can join Rubity.com, parents approve who can view their child’s profile—and can invite friends and family to join Rubity.com to do so.

ABOUT EIGHT BIT STUDIOS
Eight Bit Studios is a Chicago-based start-up company dedicated to creating fun and cutting-edge social web and mobile applications. More information about the company and its projects can be found on its Web site: www.eightbitstudios.com.

Contact:
Lindsay Atkinson, Marketing Director
Eight Bit Studios
Lindsay@eightbitstudios.com
517.420.0619

Eight Bit Studios is excited to announce our most recent project, the iPhone Job Board.  The concept of the website derived from a seemingly lack of organized iPhone-related jobs.  Therefore, the idea of a centralized website where the best-of-the-best could streamline their search for iPhone development was a natural for Eight Bit.

At jobs.eightbitstudios.com employers can post a job for up to thirty days and are comforted to know that their jobs are being viewed by the top developers of the nation.

The Job Board will provide iPhone developers an opportunity to search nation-wide.   Each job search can be filtered to allow you to find exactly what you are looking for, whether that’s a contracted game development gig or a full time design position.  So why waste time on large cumbersome employment websites when the perfect tailored job is right at your fingertips at Eight Bit iPhone Job Board.

Can’t believe it?  Too good to be true?  Well, here at Eight Bit, we are already living the dream of doing what makes our hearts flutter…and we are so in love with our jobs that we want you to experience the same joy that we feel every day.

So check it out – give feedback even – because, after all, this site is for you.

by Don Bora

It all started with Dustin in a coffee shop selling me on the idea and niche market of, well, fart lighting. I’d already released Q-Dialer and I was hard at work on Zen Board so this, admittedly, fell outside the scope of what I would normally call ‘my radar’. As he animatedly pulled me into his vision, spinning anecdotes of the collegiate blue flames, of which I knew absolutely nothing, I was drawn to what looked to me like an easy win from a programming point of view.

This project presented me with unique concerns. First, I would be hesitant to talk to, say, my mom about it–yeah, let’s just throw the rest of my family in there for good measure, an instinct that would prove to bear out. Next, my 11 year old daughter would surely get a kick out of it.  Undoubtedly she would tell her friends and my nearly 20 year software engineering career would conceivably be reduced to one sentence at school: “My dad lights farts for a living.” I would have to hold off sharing the news with her. Finally, this is something my mother-in-law would never see.

We managed to divide the project into: Animation, Sound, Design and Promotion as well as securing the requisite visual and audio assets. I was in charge of animation. It amazes me that after writing software for as long as I have been, I can still eyeball something as a trivial task and grossly underestimate it’s heft. The first cut at animating was obvious, play a movie. The built in MPMoviePlayerController, available through Apple’s API, is woefully underwhelming leaving the developer with surprisingly little flexibility other than playing a video, once and not very cleanly. There may be a spinning progress wheel due to file system responsiveness; you might see fades as part of the MPMoviePlayerController built in experience; there is not a way to alter the speed of playback and the whole experience feels a bit bloated.

The next logical step was to animate the video frame by frame using UIImageView’s built in animation controls. This proved to be an astonishing memory hog so much so that loading a 120 frame video in this manner would simply crash the phone. It seems that the UIImageView animationImages property loads everything into memory, both the images to animate and the Core Animation infrastructure, per frame, to pull off the job. To make a long, and potentially boring, story short, after several more major iterations, I settled on writing my own version of an animated view. Thought a bit more complicated, introducing more timed elements that our little app had to juggle, in the end it gave us much tighter control of performance, memory consumption and user experience.

There are many funny stories that I will remember from this experience: Dustin testing the most honest use case on the floor of my dining room; explaining to my daughter, in front of the team, what I had been writing this whole time (I had named the project something else in XCode); my family’s general response to a sonorous demonstration; me coming out to my parents about what I would unleash on the iPhone public; and the fact that, without exception, every single person who has experienced the app has been seized by an uncontrollable giggle sometimes accompanied by a uncomprehending head-shake. And, while I learned a surprising amount of iPhone nuanced graphics wizardry, I also learned to never, ever, underestimate the power of the funny bone.

Purchase Fart Lighter now.

Don Bora

I keep a running list of project ideas on my white board.  The projects range from extrememley geeky to fun and creative.  Of the 7 iPhone ideas fleetingly scribbled within constant eye-shot, Zen Board was 5 on the list.  Why did I choose Zen Board as my next project?  I had seen a few example projects that suggested it might be easier than I suspected; The feature set was simple enough that I thought it could be completed on a short timeline; It sounded fun, what other reason did I need?

Ease: Welcome to OpenGL.  I have never coded in OpenGL before and, as I always suspected, it’s quite challenging. It’s essentially a very complex 3D state machine implemented in C++.  I had been wanting to dive into OpenGL for a while, being a complexity junky, but until Zen Board, I never had a compelling reason or project.  I’m the kind of person who needs a goal, a specified expectation, something to keep me going.  I find if I just start “kind of messing around” with things, without direction or a clear purpose, I eventually peter out and loose interest.  So, it was exciting for me to have this new project and a clear path of execution, let’s go!

I feel I’ve only scratched the surface of OpenGL and I discovered the algorithmic intricacies of Alpha channel.  I iterated over the evaporation technique about a half a dozen times and field tested them all.  Starting in January and finishing in June, I knew I struck gold, midway through the project, when my most attuned critic told me upon the final iteration of the effect, “Dude, you nailed it.”  At the time of that approving nod, the Zen Board featured only a gray screen on which to draw.  That was it.  Enter John.

Short Timeline: At this point, I decide to open this up to design and esthetic consideration.  John seized the challenge with enthusiasm: “You need a little water bowl that animates to your touch!” “You need an info screen!  NO really!  it would be ridiculous without it!”  ”You need to be able to change the evaporation rate and toggle it.” “You need an instructional video to explain what to do!”  And some other ideas that we may get to in future releases.  Throw into the afore mentioned mix the announcement from apple that all submitted applications must run on 3.0 and you have a sense of what filled out the rest of the schedule.

Fun: With all of the creative and technical challenges, Zen Board was crazy fun to work  on and testing was very satisfying.  Taking prototypes to parties and my daughters’ school events was a great proving ground for what worked and what didn’t.  Kids and adults alike enjoy the cycle of the continual experience.  What is most fun, for me as a developer, is when people achieve the unexpected with your work.  My daughter, for instance, exploited the evaporation as a technique to render a creepy skeleton.  As with all of our projects, we will strive to socialize the effects of the Zen Board and the artwork generated by our creative users.

Download Zen Board from the App Store now!

Watch for future developments on Facebook and at Eight Bit Studios

by Don Bora

In a fervor of creativity and adrenaline, we were serendipitously drawn together on a task where fun was one of the top priorities on what would be Eight Bit Studios’ first project.  Immediately following the U.S. vice presidential debate between smilin’ Joe Biden and Tina Fey look-alike Sarah Palin, it naturally occurred to two of the bigger nutcases at Eight Bit to have a website dedicated entirely to Joe Biden’s radiant smile.

After dipping my toe in the digital waters where Objective-C frolics in the tide-pools, I had already released my first iPhone application and was enjoying the success that nobody talks about–extremely modest.  I should mention that I had been an Objective-C developer back in the early ’90s and I found developing software for the iPhone freakishly invigorating and somewhat addictive.  When I caught wind of some of my soon-to-be Eight Bit brethren working on http://joebidensteeth.com the first thought that same into my head was, “You guys need an iPhone app!”

The web site features a glowing portrait of Joe Biden featuring those pearly-whites accompanied by a speech-bubble containing one of several faux satirical quotes.  If you refresh the page, a new random quote appears in said speech-bubble.  The premise of the iPhone application was simple, the very same glowing portrait of Joe Biden featuring those pearly-whites accompanied by a speech-bubble containing one of several faux satirical quotes.  A user can tap on the speech-bubble to refresh the content and receive a new quote.  Fun and simple; the perfect ingredients for a snack-sized project.

I had one of the original two nutcases, let’s call him “John” (because that’s his name), move all of the quotes into a separate file so that I could grab it through a URL on app startup.  That night I went to work.   As the goal was to have this available through the app store by election night, time was tight so I didn’t get fancy and I clamped down the requirements.  I sliced my graphics, assembled the XIBs and whipped together the app in under five hours, including the requisite icons for store submission.  I put it on my iPhone, showed it off a bit and modestly tested it.  Since it was an extrememly simple application, I chose not to adHoc beta test it.  I submitted it to the store the following evening.

Dear Mr. Bora,

Thank you for submitting  BidensTeeth to the App Store. We’ve reviewed  BidensTeeth and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states:

“Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

If you believe that you can make the necessary changes so that  BidensTeeth does not violate the iPhone SDK Agreement we encourage you to do so and resubmit it for review.

Regards,

iPhone Developer Program

By now, we’ve all seen it.  Applications have received this notice for the most innocuous content and functionality.  It’s been blogged about, made headlines and been featured in news segments, but for me, on this day, it was new and shocking.  A bit of googling revealed the natural next step.

I believe you are in error.  Neither the application nor content fits the criteria that you described.  The application contains satirical content based on Joe Biden’s fabulous smile.  It is not obscene; containing no offensive rhetoric.  It is not pornographic; neither words nor images that fit this criterion. It is not offensive; Mr. Biden himself receives good natured commentary with aplomb.  It is certainly not defamatory; it does not attack his reputation.  It’s satirical.

All of those criteria, however, can be used to describe the content of both online dictionaries and wikipedia.

I ask that you please reconsider this rather harsh pronouncement on a lighthearted and deferential companion application.

We all know how these stories usually end if they’re not blogged about; if they don’t make headlines and they’re not featured in news segments.  My entreat went unrecognized by those who have supreme power over the entrance into the captivating repository of realized imagination, that we know as the App Store, featuring over a hundred fart applications.