Flash Builder “Burrito” & Flex SDK “Hero”

by ·Comments Off

Adobe Air
We would like to share ours firsts impressions in mobile Apps development with Flash Builder “Burrito”, the last product of Adobe Labs guys.

Flash Builder is a Eclipse-based commercial tool that helps us to develop graphical applications in a simple way using Flex and ActionScript. Flash Builder offers us the clasical graphical widgets available in other frameworks such as textboxes, buttons, panels, accordions, etc. The main advantage of Flash Builder is its multiplatform nature. Your apps can run not olny in any web browser with Flash Player but in any Adobe Air enabled OS (Win, Mac, Linux).

With the arrival of Adobe Air to mobile devices one problem arise. The graphical components designed for desktop environments din’t fit well on mobile devices and they were slow. In this moment Flash Builder “Burrito” comes into play In this release, still under development, Adobe has created a new bunch of graphical widgets specifically designed for mobile devices in terms of usability and performance, and, of course, Flash Builder is capable of generating apps for Android, BlackBerry PlayBook and, in a near future, iOS.

We are playing with it a couple of months and we would like to expose our opinion:

Pros:

  • Fully multi-platform development: A developer can create apps for Android, BlackBerry QNX, Apple iOS, Windows, Linux y MAC with the same code.
  • Simple, powerful and well-known programming languages: ActionScript and XML.
  • Amazing multimedia framework: It is possible with about 100 lines of code to write an app that streams video from the camera to a media server.
  • Visual Development: We can create our app interface dragging & dropping components.
  • Mobile Look & Feel.

Cons:

  • It’s under development. The SDK and Flash Builder isn’t finished yet. After an enviroment update you can find some disgusting surprises.
  • Performance. To use a runtime environment like Adobe Air always causes a performance penalty.
  • Isolated Apps. Air cannot still invoke other apps or Android activities. In fact, Air only can communicate with those that can understand a URL: phone calls, SMS, Maps and WebBrowser. Your app cannot access to these services: Contacts, Phone Info, Network Info, SIM Data, etc.
  • Multiplatform? yes but… many features are only available on Android devices due to the infamous iOS development rules that forbid third party development tools. In this scenario Adobe stopped the framework development in iOS in 2010. Finally Apple removed these restriction and Adobe retake Airs in iOS, so we hope big avantages in this OS soon.

As main conclussion we can say is that Flash Builder will be an outstanding and very powerful tool for create multiplatform multimedia apps but nowadays it has a long way to walk.


Fast Food Hero v1.0.1

by ·Comments Off

Fast Food Hero Logo

A new version of Fast Food Hero is now available on the AppStore

This new version fixes many errors related with the accelerometer reported by ours users. Also ARM v6 devices are now supported.

Last but not least you can see the stage number at the beginning of each stage.

What are you waiting for check out these new features?

Fast Food Hero – Review

by ·Comments Off

Fast Food Hero Logo

We have already talked about Fast Food Hero, the first Iphone and Android development produced by Time Machine Apps. Some of its main characters have been introduced in this blog and others will be shown soon. But now it is time of making a complete review of the game, where main features y how to play are shown.

Main Features

Pantalla de juego

Fast Food Hero is a tribute of the classic pacman game; however it has some new original features:

  • Chips and burgers are the items that give you big scores and powers…
  • … although in this game you get kcal. Remember our hero needs to increase his weight.
  • 4 different enemies, all of them healthy vegetables and fruits.
  • 30 different stages!
  • 3 amazing worlds: fast food, chocolate and cheese worlds.
  • Stunning HD graphics (Retina Display for iPhone 4).
  • Two control modes: traditional and accelerometer.
  • Catchy songs that you cannot get out of your head.
  • A game made with care, we hope you like it.

Pantalla de Título
How to play?

The idea is very simple; eat all the food in the stage to add kcal to your score. There are two types of food that you can eat: delicious chips and tasty. But attention!! Try to walk as few as possible or you will lose some of your kcals.

Fast Food Hero comiendo
But be careful! Dangerous fruits and vegetables chase you! If they catch you, you will lose a life, so take care of them!

Huye de las frutas

However, you do not need to avoid enemies every time… burgers give you powers that help you to finish them during a limited time. Moreover, this gives you a succulent amount of extra kcal.

Coge super poderes y acaba con las frutasAnd this is all you need to know, these simple rules make you get higher scores and become a real Fast Food Hero!!

Fast Food Hero arrives to the AppStore

by ·Comments Off

Pantalla de Título

After months of hard work and development we are pleased to announce you that Fast Food Hero is now available on the AppStore.

The game is fully compatible with iPhone 3, 3GS y 4, Ipod Touch and Ipad with 4.2.x firmware. It features high definition graphics that looks amazing on the Retina Display.

Enjoy our fatty friend’s adventures on his long yourney, along 30 levels, for the rest and cholesterol than he needs

SilverTomate

by ·Comments Off

It will look for our friend to mineralize him and clean him out, reduce and transform him into a vulnerable metrosexual using its good arts.

Tomate Lápiz

If you see it on the street, in the theatre or dancing in the most cutting edge club please let us know

Choosing a iOS development framework

by ·Comments Off

When we decided to carry on this new adventure in the mobile games development, one of the important questions was choosing for what devices we will be going to develop. One of the family devices that hold a wide percentage of mobile market is the Apple mobile devices. So we focus firstly in this niche market.

In order to develop our first game, we look for a simple framework, easy to use and by zero cost, if it was possible. Several develop environments was checked. The first one was Cocoa and Quartz, the Apple’s development tool. This tool was discarded due to the difficult management of animations and their workflow. Moreover, some studies explain some performance and scalability problems.

After discarding this option, we began to research about more powerfull and feasible tools. A lot of tools and frameworks exist for iOS development specifically for bidimensional games development. For our purpose we chose these three tools: Unity Framework, Adobe Air and Cocos2d.

Firstly we install the evaluation version of Unity Framework. We liked its power and its multi-platform nature, but it was too complicated for our projects and we could not assume its learning curve.

Adobe Air was the next option. We liked everything of Adobe Air because we already knew the Action Script language, moreover is a multi-platform environment, and finally the development process with it is fast and intuitive. However, we had doubts about its performance. We develop a prototype of our first game and some interesting conclusions appear: a not very good performance on Android and a horrible performance on iOS. It is possible that this performance will be improved in the future, but this makes us to discard this tool too. We will publish a post tacking in depth these performance features.

Finally, the last tool we proved was Cocos2d. This is a framework based on Objective-C, what was an initial handicap for us since we had not programmed in this language. However, this framework worked out easier than we thought. It is very easy to use, to install and to develop. Moreover the documentation in its web is wide enough to learn it without problems. Furthermore, it has another important advantage, it is open source.

Some of the features that this framework offers are: graphics loading, tactile control, accelerometer, iphone3G/S, iphone4 and iPad compliance, etc. What is the result of this work?? You can see it soon in the AppStore.

Fast Food Hero – Sneak Peek 1

by ·Comments Off

Fast Food Hero

is our first application on the AppStore, a tribute of the classic pacman game!!!

Eat chips and burgers instead of pills!! Run and avoid the vegetables and healthy food catch you!! And over all finish them when the power of the big burger comes to you!! Available soon!

30 amazing levels of growing difficulty in three worlds: fast food, chocolate and cheese worlds!!! Each of them with terrorific, agressive and healthy enemies: tomatoes, bannanas, celeries, and others fruits and vegetables!!!

Google App Inventor available now!

by ·Comments Off


Although App Inventor has been been available since some month ago, it is now when this tool is available for everybody. No technical knowledge is necessary, no Java classes, no XML layout… Thanks to App Inventor we can forget all them and develop our applications by means of graphical interfaces that allow us defining user interfaces and establish their behaviour.
In spite of not substituting the traditional development, App Inventor offers casual developers the possibility of creating application. For this reason, we will offer a deeper review and some examples in future posts. Stay alert!! Regards!

What does this blog offer to you?

by ·Comments Off

Time Machine Apps' Blog

Hello everybody!!

Today, we are going to show you the different things that you will be able to find in this blog.

On the one hand, this blog offers to you a meeting point with us, in order to know more information about the products and applications that we are developing such as: storyboards, trailers, launching dates, curiosities, reviews of our applications, etc.

On the other hand, another aim of this blog is to help other developer teams by means of sharing experiences, publishing code examples, performance tests and a lot of useful things.

Finally, since TMApps is a mobile applications development company, this blog can neither forget the most relevant new of this world.

We hope all these elements will be of your interest.

See you in the next post. Regards,
the TMApps’ team.