Tag Archives: android

For the PennApps Mobile 2011 hackathon, I teamed up with fellow STWingers/classmates/friends Albert Kwon, Gianni Chen, and Seth Shannin to form Team CJT and create the Android app, “hypup”, described by Seth as “Stumbleupon, but for local events.”. The official description was as follows: “HypUp aims to present a previously unexplored paradigm in social networking. While services like Facebook and foursquare approach social networking through people and locations respectively, we decided to try a different approach. HypUp is an event-based look at social networking.” The app went through many revisions, feature additions, and changes and we managed to just finish …

For PennApps Mobile 2011, I was invite to present a tech talk on how to get started with Android development. The talk gave a general overview of what Android was, how the app layers worked, what you needed to get started, a live/follow-along setup+Hello World demo, a small stopwatch app demo, the basics of debugging, and then finally next steps for app publishing. Finally, the talk ended with a quick blurb of Beats as an example of what your project could become. Here are the links and slides. Announcement: Android, iPhone, WP7 Tech Talks! Facebook event: Intro to Android & …

After almost two months of development, Beats 1.4b is finally released! There has been MANY improvements and changes, based on your feedback, and plenty of new features to check out as well!

This is a repost from the PennApps Mobile 2011 website prior to the start of the hackathon. Background: Due to my success success with Beats during the very first PennApps 2010, I was interviewed and asked to give advice to new hackers/participants in the upcoming PennApps Mobile 2011 hackathon. ====== Interview by Justin Meltzer from the Interactive Media Group. I took some time to interview Philip Peng, a junior studying Computer Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. As the lead developer of a mobile game called Beats developed on the Android platform, he and his team transformed a concept hastily …

Just another update in case you were curious. Winter break! That means free time to work on Beats. I’ve responded to the flood of emails that you’ve all been sending me as well the handful of questions posted on the forums. Beats 1.4b progress is nicely coming along, but expect it to be a big one since much of the internal code structure is being revamped (that mess that we cranked out during those 48hrs of PennApps is finally being cleaned up). At the least, the next version should run a lot smoother, be less buggy, and a with a …

The new website and forums are now finally up! Aside from a bunch more info copy-pasting, you’ll be noticing some graphical improvements over the next few days as we have a small but talented graphics/web team helping out here on UPenn’s campus. Beats 1.4b’s progress is progressing smoothly as you can see via the latest Changelog and the To-Do List. As of the moment, on-the-go song installation is pretty much ready to go, a few nice graphical upgrades have been made, and the scoring system has (started to) become stabilized in preparation for Scoreloop integration (e.g. future scoreboards, achievements, etc.). …

An update based on some user suggestions. And before you ask, no .dwi support isn’t here yet, but its being worked on and definitely will appear soon. And no reverse play, leaders board, or any of those other major things on my To-Do list. Good news though is I figured out what was causing all those crashes with certain .sm files and have put up a preliminary warning about them. When .dwi support is added, the .sm parser will also be rewritten, so hopefully Beats will be able to support 90%+ of those StepMania/Dance With Intensity stepfiles out there! I’ve …

A quick update with a few changes that’ll hopefully fix a lot of crashes and make your gameplay experience a lot better ; 3 Going through the crash reports, I quickly realized that there were a lot of bugs that involved simple fixes, or, in the case of .sm file parsing, simple error catches. I admit, the current .sm compatibility of Beats isn’t so great. After all, I wrote the parser (alongside the rest of the alpha build of the app) in under 48hrs (sleep, or rather lack thereof, included), so things are very, VERY buggy. I will be completely …

The first release was a surprising success, with a lot, lot more downloads and feedback than I ever expected for my very first Android app. Obviously people want StepMania/DDR for their Android phone – and thats exactly what they’ll get! In 1.1b are a handful of new settings that I’ve added based on user feedback (a developer that listens, yay!) as well as others I though would be nice. A nifty preliminary pause/resume functionality has been added, and so has an auto-start setting. Numerous things have been tweaked and now crashes/buggyness should occur a lot less (if they do occur …

After almost a month of cracking out code (spending numerous sleepless nights using over the Google API) and weeks of closed beta testing, “Beats, Advanced Rhythm Game” is finally out for Google Android! Beats is a clone of the popular cross-platform rhythm game/engine StepMania, which is most well known as a simulator of Konami’s popular arcade game Dance Dance Revolution. Beats 1.0b (the initial beta release) is now available on the Android Market. Just search using the keywords beats, rhythm, or stepmania and look for the app released by Keripo. You can also download it directly here. (Direct download) (Direct …