To understand my solution, you need to realize that it’s all about statistics. Achievements are unlocked when our statistics reach a certain value. If you think about Modern Warfare 2, the game is tracking tons of stats! How many shots have you taken with the SCAR-H? How many miles have you sprinted while using the Lightweight perk?

It’s the same thing in Hippo Blast: When a user jumps on 50 bats, they unlock the “Dinner With Ozzy” achievement. So our primary goal should be to create a statistics engine, and define achievements that can be conditionally unlocked.

1. Create your achievements on OpenFeint. The Developer Portal allows you to define all of your achievements. You simply set the name, description, and specify how many OpenFeint points the player will receive upon earning the achievement. Icons are optional, but they add a little extra flare to your app.

2. Create your database. I use Base to maintain my databases. We only need two tables:

Statistics – Name value pairs of metrics that we want to track, and their current value. For example, I have a “bat” statistic, and every time the player jumps on a bat, the value is increased by one.

Achievement – This is where we define our achievements. The primary key is our OpenFeint Achievement ID. We specify which statistic this achievement is based on, and the condition required to unlock it. Finally, we store a boolean value for whether the player has already unlocked the achievement.

3. Track your statistics. Every time the user performs a relevant action, we need to record it in the database. I created a singleton class called “StatisticsManager” with a few helpful methods:
- (void) increaseStatisticByOne:(NSString *)statID;
- (void) increaseStatistic:(NSString *)statID byValue:(int)value;
I can quickly call these from anywhere to update the user’s statistics as needed. Finally, when the round is over, we need to see which achievements have been unlocked:

4. Get the unlocked achievements. Using a simple structure like this allows us to retrieve all unlocked achievements with a single SQL select statement:
SELECT openfeintid FROM achievement, statistic WHERE achievement.statisticid = statistic.statisticid AND statistic.count >= achievement.condition AND achievement.iscompleted = 0
Finally, update your database to indicate that the user has already completed the recently unlocked achievement.

All done! Hopefully this has helped you create a simple statistics engine for use in managing your OpenFeint achievements. Please let me know if you find improvements on my method. Happy coding

As of March 20th, Hippo Blast is available world wide for download via Apple’s App Store. The app is free while we compete in the Omniture iPhone App Competition. We’re trying to get as many unique users every day as possible, so if you want to help out, download it http://bit.ly/hippoblast and open it every day until April 9.

The feedback that we’ve gotten from you all has been great. Please keep it coming, and look for updates soon!

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/compresspdfworkflow.html

Enjoy!

http://iphoneapps.oreilly.com/2009/11/parlor-games.html

• To make it work, we must first remove any previous drivers. First, uninstall and delete all HP files in your Applications folder. Next, delete all files in Volume/Library/Printers/hp
• Then, we must install Apple’s latest HP drivers. These can be found at this site: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL907

Restart, and presto! You’re scanning like a champ. I prefer to use Preview to do my scanning. This is simple. Open Preview, choose File > Import From Scanner.

Good luck!

For the fix, simply open Terminal (in Applications/Utilities), and  enter the following command:

defaults write com.apple.Dictionary ProhibitNewWindowForRequest -bool TRUE

Enjoy!

From left to right: Reed Olsen, Dave Wilson, Robert Mount, Devin Collier, Landon Cope and Bryce Clark stand with the awards they won at the competition.

Competing against 61 other universities, some with more than 20 student entrants, the six BYU seniors held their own, leaving with more awards than any other school. The two-man teams won: first and second place in the business intelligence competition; second place in the office solutions competition; third place and honorable mention in the system analysis and design competition; third place and honorable mention in the java competition; and third place in the application development competition.

“Our core experience really preps BYU students for high-pressure, quick-turn-around competitions,” says Craig Lindstrom, assistant professor of information systems and adviser for the competition. “The depth of the subject material taught in information systems courses helped them do well.”

Students who competed were Bryce Clark, from Calgary, Alberta; Landon Cope, from Tucson, Ariz.; Devin Collier, from Provo; Robert Mount, from Provo; Reed Olsen, from Weston, Mass.; and Dave Wilson, from Highland, Utah.

While most teams only registered for two to three competitions, BYU’s teams signed up for all six time slots. This schedule made the competition even more rigorous with some students spending as many as 13 hours competing in a single day.

“The entire competition was a test of mental endurance,” says Olsen. “After eight hours of competing, I could hardly think straight. However, we just pushed through for the remaining five hours of the contests and it paid off.”

The Marriott School is located at Brigham Young University, the largest privately owned, church-sponsored university in the United States. The school has nationally recognized programs in accounting, business management, public management, information systems and entrepreneurship. The school’s mission is to prepare men and women of faith, character and professional ability for positions of leadership throughout the world. Approximately 3,000 students are enrolled in the Marriott School’s graduate and undergraduate programs.

(From http://marriottschool.byu.edu/news/release.cfm?article=462)

If you’ve read my other posts, you know that I’m big into keyboard shortcuts and hotkeys. Here’s how to open up the help-menu without using your mouse

Command + Shift + /

Or you can think of it as

Command + ?

Note that this doesn’t work in some applications (e.g. FireFox, which is just one more reason for me to switch over to Safari…)

Devin, Dave and I working on our submission for the App Dev contest.

This year, I was selected to travel with six other ISYS students to represent BYU at the AITP National Collegiate Conference in scenic Oklahoma City. We flew out on Thursday, and competed in 6 different competitions for three days straight:

• GIS/Business Intelligence
• Microsoft Office Solutions
• Systems Analysis & Design
• Database Design
• Application Development
• Java Development

The trip was awesome, and we competed well in many of the events. Here are some photo highlights. (Thanks to Landon Cope for being the VP of trip documentation.)

Bryce, Landon and Robbi (not pictured) made us proud and brought home a lot of awards.

At the Awards Banquet with our spoils. 9 awards for 6 students in 6 contests!

The meat of the presentations isn’t really in the slides, but here they are for reference!

http://www.reedolsen.com/presentations/scpreso.html