Galcon for iPhone: Awesome.
I haven’t had this much fun playing a computer game in a long time.1
There are a bucketload of mediocre iPhone apps, but few great ones. Today I found one of those rarities.
Michael Carter and Mario Balibrera introduced me to the PC version of Galcon back at PyCon this past year. I enjoyed playing it there, but didn’t have the urge to drop twenty bucks on it at the time.
Phil Hassey recently ported Galcon to the iPhone. Regularly it sells for ten bucks, but it was on sale today, so I figured I’d give it a go.
I’m very impressed.
I can play against other human beings within seconds. On my phone. Multiplayer online games. In my pocket. Galcon on the iPhone is just fantastic. Go buy it now.
iPhone games that can do multiplayer, over-the-internet matchmaking have tremendous potential. Let’s do more of those!
PyCon 2008 Wrapup
PyCon was a great experience.
I was fortunate enough to walk into the conference right before lunch. (Meals on the trip were very good, both the catered ones and the various restaurants we visited in Chicago.) As luck would have it, Mario Balibrera — whom I would be working with during the then-upcoming sprints — was the first person I met. From there the week was filled with lots of cool stuff.
I spent most of the week with Michael Carter and Mario, core developers of Orbited. We talked about Orbited’s direction, architecture, and code, and made a lot of progress toward releasing a new version. I sprinted the whole time, which allowed me to understand Orbited’s internals a lot better.
Not all of PyCon was spent developing, though. Michael, Mario and I had some good times, most notably getting lost in Chicago. I blame that on whoever designed the street layout… it is a bad idea to make two streets intersect in two different places without naming each street differently.
Orbited continues to look even more promising as a comet server, and we made good progress this week. I hope to check out Eventlet as an alternative to Twisted. A lot of projects were represented at PyCon, some doing really cool things with Python (even 3D virtual reality). Python continues to look better and better, and I’m still in love with it. What guy wouldn’t fall for its charm?
I hear PyCon 2009 will be in Chicago too; I hope to be there. While I wasn’t too happy with the lightning talks (the main talks were all right), the experience was well worth the money and time.
Getting Ready for PyCon
PyCon 2008 will be the first time I attend a development conference. PyCon is already underway; it formally started on Friday, but I won’t arrive there until around lunchtime on Saturday. Fortunately I’ll still be able to catch most of the sessions I wanted to attend, and I’ll probably stay through the entire development sprints, which run through next Thursday.
During the sprints, I plan on helping out with Orbited (a Comet server), and I might stop by for Pylons a bit too. This will all be very new to me, so I’m not sure what to expect. I’m looking forward to it; it’ll be nice to see some of the faces behind the names I read about in the Python world.
The only thing I’m not too excited about is the six-hour drive to Chicago; I haven’t driven that long myself before… hopefully I won’t be too bored along the way.
