SwiftUI rocks! ❤️🎉🚀

Spent the last few months getting up to speed and applying SwiftUI. It’s crazy flexible, promising, and looks wonderful. This year I’ll be working mostly on non-game apps using SwiftUI and try to get them published within a shorter time frame than in the past. Of course, I will try to publish just as many games as well. Last year was mostly a learning year for me. About 3/4 of it on machine learning and then SwiftUI for the remaining of 2020. I’ll be publishing more this year on various topics at this blog and start adding more to Github. 😃

Artwork time with a sprinkling of ML 😆

Starting off the month making artwork on various media for a few stickers apps. This time my workflow is a touch different starting off with pencil/pastel sketches, and then making them on either Affinity Designer or Procreate. What’s different is that this time around I’m going to try to create different styles or unique stickers based off my artwork using a machine learning model(s) so i’ll need to create enough artwork to feed into the models, set up the models correctly, and see what happens. 😅

Testing out Unity Platform and having fun with it 🤪

Deployed my first test game using Unity with Xcode and a physical test device. It’s very different than using just Swift and Xcode. Unity has so many features, it’s crazy. 🤪 So far, I have seen a few errors already on Xcode console (shaders and memory issues mainly) so will have to research those. My main focus at this time is to make sure i’ll be able to get a game deployed to the iOS app store using the Unity platform within a reasonable time frame.

https://unity.com

Storyboards for ML notebooks week(s)...

This week I’m spending most of my spare time organizing my ML notebooks into something I can apply to my projects for production. For example, a background art generation iOS/Mac app using a machine learning model that uses my personal artwork to help me create variations of my own artwork. I’ll also wondering about how to apply this to animation as well but that’s for later! 🤣🖌🖼

SwiftUI fun 😆 and machine learning adventures.

Recently went through all of the WWDC 2019 topics on SwiftUI and machine learning, and they are all really great. Since all of my projects are in various stages, I’m going to take the time to convert them to SwiftUI. This should also help me to work through and get a better understanding of different programming paradigms such as protocol oriented programming.

As far as machine learning goes, this is definitely an adventure. I’m currently working through Fast.ai’s Practical Deep Learning for Coders, v3 and it’s simply amazing! Its a top to bottom teaching approach so you’ll learn how to do things first then theory. The DeepLearning.ai courses are more bottom up approach and are just as amazing. Links below.

https://www.deeplearning.ai

https://www.fast.ai

First virtual race completed on Amazon's AWS Deep Racer circuit! 🏎 🤠

Tried out Amazon’s AWS Deep Racer virtual circuit last month and I was amazed on how easy and fun it was to do! I entered the May London Loop and ended up # 169 out of 859! Not too bad since this was my first time using AWS. AWS did a great job on how easy it is to set up and train a machine learning model on SageMaker, then use RoboMaker for the simulator, and handle all the backend connections. I’ll be trying out the Kumo Torakku race next since there is about 2 & 1/2 weeks left until it closes. 🤖

Racer name: StarlightDreamStudio

For more info on deep racer:

https://aws.amazon.com/deepracer/