Roberto Carvajal » Mac Development

Do The Evolution Redux

Roberto — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:59:20 +0000

I learned how to work with NSThread about 15 minutes ago, and updated my evolution simulator on the mac and got it working like I wanted to, I talked about it here.

Before:

After:

Independent Software Vendor

Roberto — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 23:12:36 +0000

After 10 years in the freelancer world and in the middle of a mid 20s crisis I am slowly mutating into an independent software vendor. That’s the kind of people that make products out of nothing and sell them directly to the end user and make a living out of it (or try to). It will never happen overnight, I still need to do freelance in order to survive but I can see each day how it makes sense to steer away from freelancing and start a small online store, release products or both. So I have a couple of ideas and options, so far there is one big app that seems totally fine to convert into a product, resell it and provide support. The other is a small iphone game I’m working on, it’s a very specific niche kind of game that I enjoy playing and thinking about the iphone version gave me this gut feeling that I’ll follow. I have absolutely no idea if any of this things will became real products and end up paying 100% of my bills but I know for sure I want to do them and I want to stop living the freelancer lifestyle for a time.

So, I want to document all the development process and learn as much as I can from this first try at making a product and a game so you are going to read more about this as I work on them.

Of course if everything fails, I can get back to freelancing or get a full time job for the first time (“riiiiiiight”)..

Do The Evolution

Roberto — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:53:19 +0000

I don’t really remember if I learned Darwin’s theory of evolution by the means of natural selection at school, I was attending to a catholic school but as far as I know we never read the bible literally so evolution shouldn’t conflict with god and we must had been taught about it but I just don’t remember, instead I do remember the day I decided to deeply involve my life with computers, I was a kid watching a documentary on TV and they showed computer simulated creatures that evolved to accomplish a certain goal like move in different environments such as land or water, they also of course explained the theory of evolution which is the foundation of their research. I was so amazed by that show that I truly decided I will some day do the same and became a computer scientist, that show changed my life and opened my mind to the sciences, which in turn gave me a wonderful world where faith and belief are useless, I can’t thank them enough.

I found parts of the show on youtube and here they are:

Time went by and my computer skills got better, at some point I taught myself how to write software at the same time I had to learn how to read and write in english to understand the books I was “reading”, so when I say I’m autodidact I really mean it.

Many years later I started reading about religion and evolution and all that controversy around it in the US, this time I was of course completely atheist and a decent programmer, I found another video, this time on youtube that explained how evolution really works. Inside this brilliant video the author runs a software with small creatures that shows a basic feature of many creatures as they change it’s color to mimic their environment, those creatures that mix the best with their environment have less chance to get eaten by predators, some of them die randomly and the remaining ones get a chance to pass their genes to the next generation with a small probability of a small mutation, the process is repeated over and over and something wonderful happens, this small organisms start to gradually change their color and mix with the environment.

Then as a video response I found a Windows version of the same:

Then it hit me! I could try to do the same for the mac, since I wanted to learn how to program on the mac anyways, this is the perfect way to get started!.. so I got myself a couple of beers and a weekend, I learned the basics of Objective-C and Cocoa and this is the result.

WARNING: Beware I’m a complete n00b in the Mac OS X development world, my familiarity with Cocoa is 3 days old and I just got my books yestarday so don’t expect a piece of art here:

Of course the code sucks, I use pseudo-random number generators and a very rough mix and mutation algorithm, but the point is, it seems to work, I was happy and smiling :)

Bonus Track (I couldn’t resist):