Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Home Care Payroll Management

As the population gets older, more and more people are requiring home care services. Government Health & Social Service departments in Canada often cover all or some of the cost associated with services provided.

However, these Government departments are not the employers of home care workers and neither are the home care agencies.  The individual person requiring the service is often the employer.  This greatly complicates the processing of payroll, instead of having a couple of employers with many employees, you now have just as many employers as employees.

Trying to manage a fluctuating mass of hundreds of employers and their current authorizations for invoicing third-parties can quickly become overwhelming, especially for traditional payroll systems.

Payroll Invoicing handles the entire process in a single, easy-to-user client application.  Setup as many employers & employees as you want, associate your employees with many different employers and your ready to start generating invoices.



Payroll Invoicing
www.payrollinvoicing.ca
+Payroll Invoicing

For more information contact:
   Tim O'Brien
   timobrien@payrollinvoicing.ca






Monday, July 22, 2013

Cross Platform Game Development with PlayN - Architecture

Since PlayN is a cross-platform framework I wanted to have a shared cloud service to provide a data storage for game scores, level data, etc...  I would use this service to allow users to design custom levels on the PC via their browser, and publish it for play on any other device running the game.

I create a Google App Engine project called Play-Plus (www.gplayplus.com). The data architecture allows for the hosting and data storage of an unlimited number of games.  I plan to reuse this framework for ever game I publish, the service will be expanded to allow user in-app purchases and turn\real-time multi-player action.

Once completed, I will provide an SDK for other developer to use.  Initially I explored using an existing API, such as ScoreLoop, Facebook, etc...  However, it required me to configure leader boards for each level, etc... Since levels can be created dynamically, I needed leader boards, rating, etc... to all be created instantly when a level was published.

I have separated the java classes for PlayN - Play Plus which I will package into a JAR, it will include the play plus dialogs which use TriplePlay.  This will be used inside the core project so there are no platform dependencies.  Additional JAR files per platform will connect the core service interfaces with the individual optimize platform implementations.
Next time I will discuss resources to read to get started developing your own game.

Until next time, I would greatly appreciate a like on Facebook or play on Facebook to help it get published in their App Centre.

Thursday, July 4, 2013

Cross Platform Game Development with PlayN - Concept


The first game I developed was very simple and used the LibGDX framework, it was good experience but I wanted to create a game that was more complex and allowed me to build onto a story.  At the time LibGDX only supported Android & Java.

While searching for possible frameworks to use, I came across PlayN which offered Android, iOS, HTML5, Java & Flash.  Not to mention the fact that is was developed by people at +Google and used by Rovio for Angry Bird Chrome.

I love 2D physics games and I really wanted to create one. My game concept was born from a really awesome movie which included a cast of legendary actors.  However, I needed to make them fictional characters, so I made them worms and of course their enemy is birds. 

The idea of what types of birds they would be didn't come until much latter.  I live in Newfoundland... and we have lots of seagulls.  This spring they were all around my house, perched on the roof, about 20 of them and relieving themselves quite often!!  For about 2 week, we would awake to the sound of these gulls, squawking on the roof. Ohhh, how I wanted to get rid of them PERMANENTLY!!  However, seagulls are a federal protected species, errrr.  So I couldn't kill them in real life, but I can in the game :)

Now with my concept started, I begin into programming.  There is a lot to discuss so I'm going to create a post for each sections of the game I've programmed, +Box2D , +Google Cloud Platform integration, graphics, ageing particle systems, triple play, licensing, Facebook integration, and platform specific code.

Until next time, I would greatly appreciate a like on Facebook or play on Facebook, seems Facebook doesn't list your game in App Center unless you already have people liking and playing it.