Feed Me Oil

Today, June 2, 2011 is important day for us, AnjLab team, big milestone. Today, under HolyWaterGames brand, together with Chillingo / EA, famous games publisher, we released ‘Feed Me Oil’ game for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. It is available at Apple AppStore

Behind this event more than year of hard work, starting with experiments with liquid physics and finishing with many marketing activities. I can say, this game is unique on iOS market from technological point of view. It is based on math modeling of liquid behavior; ‘oil’ in the game is not animation or set of pre-set templates, it acts as real oil – stream, distribution, mixing. In result, each level of the game has endless number of solutions and space for improving your score.

First version of the game was strong and complex, amusement for real geeks. We saw the game from our point of view, tried to make it attractive to ourselves. Many thanks to Chillingo guys, they looked to the game as average user and gave us many useful suggestions how to improve it, make more friendly. Also we integrated Chillingo’s Crystal technology, which allows users to share results and compete with each other.

Thus, the game was announced on Game Developers Conference 2011 in San Francisco in Fabruary, published as upcoming be Chillingo in May. We have very positive and promising reaction on this. We hope the game will be popular. Maybe as popular as Angry Birds or Cut the Rope. However, nobody knows. Even experienced marketing guys confess the fact: it is very hard to predict success or fail of a game, too many factors influence on it. We have good reviews and preliminary estimates, but will see - now it will be going on.

At least we got very good experience. I mean two things: experience in development for iOS, and experience in creating product from the scratch, from initial idea to completed product for so specific and mature market, which AppStore is. Will keep moving in this direction, updates and new versions of Feed me Oil are already planned.

Integrate Reporting Services 2008 with SharePoint Server 2010

Short instruction:

1. Install MS SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) 2008 R2 in SharePoint Integrated mode. The service should run under domain account, do not use built-in account like SYSTEM.
2. Enable reporting services for SharePoint farm. Go to SharePont Administration Center, open General Application Setings - Reporting Services - Add Report Server. Specify RS URL (http:///reportserver), domain account to connect. If feature activated successfully for all site collections, on Defaults settings page make sure parameters 'Enable Windows Authentification' and 'Enable RS ActiveX sownload' are on.
3. Create reports library. Open your SharePoint site and create new Document Library (by default), open Library settings - Advances Settings and set 'Allow management of content types' on. Return to library settings and click 'Add from existing types' link in Content Types settings. In dialog, choose 'Reporting Services content types' group and add all available types.
4. Deploy reports with SQL Server BI development studio. In your report project properties, set TargetServerURL = http://server, TargetReportFolder = http://server/site/list. The same for TargetDataSourceFolder. In common case you can use different lists to store reports and datasources. Instead VS you can deploy with PowerShell using this script.
5. You can add report on any page of SharePoint site with special RS webpart.