SproutWorks Software Blog

I decided to work on a javascript canvas experiment where I can drag the mouse and scroll within a map. I got a simple "map" drawing colored squares that can be dragged around. I found a perlin n...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1962

The other day I read an article about how to create fractals using the midpoint displacement algorithm. It's a simple recursive algorithm where you take a square, and split it into 4 smaller squa...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1936

The other night while watching a cartoon, I thought of a way to create levels for my iPhone game by scanning an image drawn on graph paper. To do this I need to access the raw pixel data from a C...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1935

I just discovered twitterfeed.com/ , where I can post to my blog, and twitter feed will find new posts in my RSS feed and post to twitter and facebook automatically. Hopefully this will encourage...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1933

Dreamhost has just added beta support for PHP 5.3. I can finally start implementing the new language features I've read about. Unfortunately, I just discovered it breaks all my scripts that use G...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1932

Yesterday I moved the code that draws the walls in my maze app to the MazeParts class. Now it can share memory with the floor drawing code and got rid of the allocating/deallocating memory on eac...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1927

Did some more iPhone programming. The other day I took some of the maze drawing code and put it into a new MazeParts class. This class will be handling the drawing of the floor and walls of the m...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1926

I'm excited about the new iPhone 3GS. The hardware support for OpenGL ES 2.0 will make it more fun to explore advanced graphics in my projects. I have a basic 3D maze running on my iPod touch, an...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1897

Last month I purchased a new unibody 15" Macbook Pro. It is my first Mac in over 10 years. It's so nice owning a Mac again. I've been dabbling in iPhone development since I got it, and I have a b...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1887

Presenting SproutWorks 3D Digg Explorer www.sproutworks.com/digg3d.php I have just put SproutWorks 3D Digg Explorer online. It is my latest attempt to display textual information in an interestin...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1879

www.problogger.net/archives/category/birthday-prize-giveaway/ ProBlogger is having a birthday bash with $54,000 in prizes. ProBlogger is a blog dedicated to the topic of making money with bloggin...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1875

I have just added a new animation program to the logo area of this site. I have been working on variants of this system for a while. First, I wrote a JavaScript program that uses a drawing method...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1874

I have just optimized the performance of the Blogshares Idea Tracker's graph rendering program. The graphs are loading much faster now. The industry listing page now allows you to load the graph ...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1873

A few days ago I ordered a Viewsonic VG2230 22" widescreen LCD for about $300 from www.newegg.com It replaces an ancient 19" Viewsonic G790 CRT display. I also have a little 15" Gateway LCD as a ...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1872

I have purchased a few new video games over the last month or so. Here is a little info on each of them. I bought Bioshock for PC on it's release date, right after I got off work. Bioshock is set...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1871

I just noticed that the Blogshares Price Tracker has not been updating for a couple weeks. When I looked into it, I discovered that something happened on the server so that the include files were...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1870

I got an email from Feedblitz saying that they are adding some new features to the free accounts. I have customized the appearance of the email with some graphics I had laying around. I'll try to...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1869

A few months ago I purchased the Hoover Mach 5 vacuum cleaner from Walmart for around $160 at Walmart. I was looking for a replacement for our Hoover Fold Away. The Fold Away did not have much su...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1859

John Carmack demoed Id tech 5 at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference. Id tech 5 is his latest game engine that features technology that allows artists to use unlimited textures. This sounds li...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1856

I have just signed up at the search engine submission service www.blastengine.com . They submit to over 1 million search engines. I used this service a while ago and it resulted in more traffic f...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1855

I have been busy at work, and I've been neglecting this site for the past few months. I looked at the forums today, and I was shocked to see that there were over 500 spam messages here. I have cl...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/1459

I have started work on version 7 of the SproutWorks layout. I have decided to incorporate a scrolling tile engine I made. It uses scrolling tiles in a similar way that Google maps does, only it's...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/528

A while ago my old computer's power supply fizzled out. I bought a 430 watt Thermaltake power supply, but something was wrong with the motherboard (an Asus A7M266-D with 2 Athlon 1900 MP processo...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/527

I've just updated SproutSearch's blog spider. It now tries to fetch the RSS feed for a blog before parsing it with my HTML parser. This should save some CPU time and give me better results. It al...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/516

I have noticed a lot of queries of SproutSearch's main database table are getting slow as SproutSearch passes 8 million indexed blogs. I finally decided to do something about it after trying to a...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/515

My blog search engine SproutSearch is now indexing over 8 million blogs. I am now working on changing the way the blogs are ranked. For now, they are sorted by the sheer amount of content they co...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/509

I've just uploaded a new program I'm working on. It's an icon editor that uses AJAX to provite a multi-user editing experience. At this early stage in the program, many features are missing, but ...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/500

I have just uploaded version 6 of the SproutWorks layout. This layout has a "grassy hills" theme that I think looks more pleasant. I will be adding more to this layout as I develop new features a...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/496

It was my 28th birthday a little over a week ago. My little brother Garett got me a Nintendo DS Lite and New Super Mario Bros. It was a nice surprise. The DS Lite is a smaller version of the orig...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/495

I have been writing simple AJAX applications for a while now. Up to now I have stuck with procedural JavaScript that fetchs raw HTML and inserts it in the page. I knew these methods were lacking,...

http://www.sproutworks.com/posts/492