Ultimate Predator Calls

A friend of mine has wanted to make a predator calling app for quite some time, and we finally agreed to work on it together.  He recorded all the sounds using various methods he uses while hunting and provided the images.  I used Unity3D to put together an App with a scrolling button view and then added some logic to allow the sounds to loop when needed.

For both Android & iOS I was able to hook into the device volume controls directly, so the on-screen slider actually changes the device volume.  I was also able to make use of the iOS method to control bluetooth audio routing without writing custom code. On Android, the user must set the routing using the system controls.

For both devices I had to write a custom audio playback system to overcome the limitations Unity exhibits when background audio is interrupted, or when the device sleeps.  I created a custom NativeAudio class and then hooked into different native code written in ObjectiveC and Java that provided a neutral interface to the device specific systems.

Finally, the App is free to download and has an in-app-purchase to unlock all the sounds.  Without the upgrade only the first 15s of each sound can be played, and looping is disabled.

You can check it out here: ultimatepredatorcalls.com.

Syncthing

We’d been using BitTorrent Sync to share some folders between our team members that were too large for the usual cloud services.  The problem was that the folks there decided to go all commercial and make it quite expensive to use for a small development team.  They also changed the name & branding to Resilio.

We needed to find an alternative and a little searching lead to SyncThing.  This is a similar solution to what BitTorrent Sync used to be, and while it’s a lot less polished, it’s free, open source and multi-platform.

We made the switch and are pretty content with the results.  Check it out.

Visual Studio for Mac

Microsoft recently released a trial version of Visual Studio for Mac.  While not exactly Visual Studio, it does seem interesting.  It’s built on Xamarin Studio, a product purchased by MSFT, and while it has some teething issues we’re all hoping for improvements to make it as useful as Visual Studio is on Windows.

 

BlinkGigs.com

We’re excited to announce our collaboration on the BlinkGigs project. We will be providing the development support for this exciting project. You can read more about it at www.blinkgigs.com

OnePress theme

We’re using the OnePress theme by FameThemes (preview).  We like its simplicity and flexibility.  However, we’ve had a few issues with the way it displays various items and have made some custom modifications.

The best way to do this is by making a child theme, and then modifying the files for the child theme.  This way, the original theme remains unchanged and updating it should break your customizations.

 

Website Launched

Welcome to the new website for SilverMustangStudios LLC.  We’ve been busy working on a variety of projects in the background, but finally managed to pry some time to set this up.