bits.toPixels()

As a game developer you often want to show off parts of your work, for example on Twitter or Facebook. Sometimes plain images are enough, but other times you might have a cool game sequence that requires animation to come alive and get the proper attention. You could record video clips and share them with your followers on YouTube etcetera, but most of the times you're probably better off by just creating an animated GIF instead. Creating animated GIFs is of course nothing new, and not only useful to game devs. From my experience it's an excellent way to quickly demonstrate new features and ideas no matter what you're developing, without the need to have a working prototype. It took me a while to find my favorite tools that allow me to create GIFs of decent quality quickly and without hassle. Which tool to use depends on what you need to do. Basically, there are two different scenarios where animated GIFs come in handy. 1. Record an actual video sequence (e.g. gamepla...

Not very long ago you had to upload your App Store screenshots in many different resolutions for all the different iOS devices. A real pain. Fortunately, Apple realized this and simplified the screenshot upload process a lot. Now you only need to upload screenshots for the 5.5" iPhone and 12.9" iPad displays, and automatic scaling will be done for remaining devices with lower resolutions. It's recommended to grab your screenshots from a physical device, but what do you do if you don't have a 5.5" iPhone? Well, instead of buying a new device or scaling lower resolution graphics you can use the Corona Simulator to get the high resolution screenshots you're looking for. This is how I do it for my Corona SDK apps on my Windows machine, and my example assumes that your screenshots are taken in portrait mode and that your app is primarily designed for iPhone rather than iPad. You must of course also have a monitor that can handle the resolution of the screensho...

I'm working on the Android version of a React Native (v0.43.4) app on my Windows 10 machine, which has turned out to be a real pain compared to working on the iOS version on my Mac. I've got everything set up with Android Studio, platform tools, the Android emulator and so on. Running my app in the emulator also works, but almost every single time I issue the react-native run-android command, it fails with the following error from the React Packager: EPERM: operation not permitted, lstat <some_path_here> I have no idea what this problem is or why it happens. I don't even have to make any changes to the code or included libraries for it to appear. It's enough to just stop the React Packager and run react-native run-android again to get the error. It's really starting to get on my nerves since rebuilding seems to be required a lot more often on Windows than what I'm used to on OS X. I'd love to know what causes this, but until I manage to figure...