Game Dev is a newish question and answer site about game creation and development. It was launched just over a month ago and is a public beta. It is likely to launch in a couple of months with a new name and design. If you have any interest in game design and development, it is a great resource.

The site is powered by Stack Exchange, the engine behind Stack Overflow.

I have started listening to a new podcast called ‘The Dev Show’. So far it seems promising, though I am a sucker for programming podcasts of any decent quality.

I find discussion on the pros and cons of different open source licenses fascinating. I tend to think of BSD licenses more favourably than the GPL, and increased cooperation is one of those reasons.

Mantia’s comparison of the App Store to MacBooks highlights how people’s perception can flavor their attitude.

Every few days someone finds my site by searching for how to scrape app store rankings. I no longer use that script, since I found it awkward to use. I’ve switched over to using MajicRank by Majic Jungle software.

MajicRank is a Mac application that polls the top 100 lists in iTunes to find your apps. It keeps a history so you can graph and also see the change in rank since the last run. I find it very easy to launch the app every day to keep tabs on my apps’ rankings.

Yesterday, we submitted another iPhone application to Apple. This one is called Egg Painter. As you may guess, it’s an Easter Egg painting app aimed at kids. You can check out the website for it at http://www.fanfoot.ca/eggpainter.

Having become frustrated trying to check iTunes for app rankings, I decided to look for a better way to do it. That search led me to a post on Ben’s Dev Blog. The perl script given is priceless and saved me from having to write something up myself. It would be preferable to have a Mac app that does it, but this works for now.

Edit: I have switched to using a Mac app called MajicRank. See my post for more details.

Ars Technica has an article about changing text in a UISwitch robustly. It looks like a fairly interesting approach, but the issue with localization is probably a deal-breaker for me.