I created this game as an school assignment together with my flatmate Daniel Fuglestad, and its a pure 2D game based on various textures which I’ve been drawing in Photoshop. Below are some screenshots and download links:

Instructions on how to play the game.

Game Interface for Oslo Street Crosser XNA.

The car textures in the game - A volvo 240.

Download the game for Windows.

This will probably be the shortest post you’ll ever read. Download XQuartz and make ‘em work again.

Thats really all there is too it. Make sure to fetch the latest version to make sure its compatible with Mountain Lion. If you have some difficulties, feel free to drop me a comment and I’ll get back to you.

Wine sure brings back a lot of good memories!

One of the features I don’t really get is Gatekeeper. According to Wikipedia it is an “anti-malware feature” which in my opinion really doesn’t cut it. It basically lets you select either to only accept apps from the AppStore and signed developers, only the AppStore, or from “Everywhere”.  Well, to be honest its a step in the right direction (they finally approve their software isn’t indestructible)  - but I don’t think it’ll help anyone besides the absolute beginners which isn’t aware of all the apps beyond the Apple AppStore. But hey, somebody might find it useful I guess.

Furthermore the Mac keeps borrowing stuff from iOS, and one of my favorites is iMessage – or “Messages” thats built right in. Most of the people i text a lot has an iPhone which makes it easy to send messages from my computer to all their iDevices. It looks and works just like on the iPhone.

Messages built right into Mountain Lion.

Another great iOS adopted into Mountain Lion is “Notifications” which basically is a clone of iOS Notification Center. The only problem with it is that it only seems to work with software downloaded from the AppStore. I sort of knew that it would come to this tight integration with the AppStore which both has it pros and cons. I still use and prefer Growl though.

Notifications sure reminds you. Of iOS.

There is a whole lot of other stuff going on as well, but I’d recommend you to try it yourself. If you’re an Mac Developer you can download it from Apple. I’ll be back with more.

I still remember when Microsoft was the big buzz, and I really wanted a Windows Phone. To make a long story short, I ended up with Symbian. Four times (and I hated it – slow and terrible looking) And by the time a threw those away, Microsoft still hadn’t really made any changes in Windows Phone. So I ended up with some other lousy phones, until I finally bought an iPhone to replace a Nokia 6700. And since then I’ve been urging to develop software for it. I plan to do it eventually, I just don’t feel like getting my hands to dirty in XCode. Iam sure it’s easy and all, but it sure is a mess. And when I finally had a good look at it, they decided to change the whole GUI again. Needless to say, I really haven’t made me comfortable in it – yet.

But then Microsoft gave us this challenge – create three Windows Phone apps and get a free Windows Phone. And I was all like, free stuff? Hell yeah.

Microsoft claimed from the very start that their tool was super easy, and little or none coding experience was required to get started. I didn’t really believed that, but it was true.
Even though the challenge only was for students – you should take a look at it if you’re looking at getting into mobile developing. It’s a great starting point – and you’ll have an app ready in a matter of hours.

I’ll be back with a review of the Windows Phone 7 as soon as/if  I receive a phone.

Check out my applications here!

If you’re not familiar with GTFS I’d suggest you read a bit about it over at Google. To make a long story short – its information about public transfer (busses, metros++) freely available for you to use (well, quite a lot of them has some disclaimers, and you’d might have to register to gain access).

Anyway, the reason I got involved and all was because of the GTFS feed from Kolumbus (public transfer in Stavanger – my hometown). So I screwed around a bit, trying to add the data to a MySQL database with the least amount of energy. Fortunately, somebody had already written a python based importer, which in my case was a painful journey. The thing is, it works superb, but its a big job on the Macintosh – which is the platform I use most of the time. Installing python was pretty straight forward, but the python-mysql wasn’t to easy. I probably would have gotten the hang of it if I sticked around, but it was simply to time-consuming. So I ended up installing Ubuntu while screaming “For god sake, there has to be another way!”. Which there wasn’t at that particular time.

So I wrote this php-gtfs-mysql (try to read it out load in one breath) and hosted it over at GitHub. My main goal was to create an easy-to-use interface, without the need for diving to deep into the application. Everything is done by this minimalistic WordPress inspired setup interface directly in to your MySQL database.

Please notice that this requires a lot of memory, so it might be a good idea to do it locally.
Please leave me a feedback of what you think!

Furthermore Iam through with writing Norwegian. Not because of the language itself, but by the little amount of people i actually reach with my guides, advices, and thoughts. If you’re norwegian, you might be familiar with my old page “Helt Personlig” (which should be something like “just me” or “personal thoughts” without translating directly, though Google Translate said it should be “totally personal”. Nevertheless, enough mumbo.

Oh, and by the way. Perhaps some of my english is a bit rusty and all, so if there is something that makes completely no sense your either missing the point or I’ve been too long away from my dictionary. Which is what one would except for a guy like me.

Anyway, happy reading. And please feel free to leave feedbacks in the comment section, or by sending me a personal message. Even a letter’ll do. I love those things, glossy and full of ink! And personal flavors.