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ipod touch review
Today, I teased my Twitter followers with this and this. I thought it would only be fair to elucidate a little bit.The first half of More iPhone 3 Development has been a struggle to write. In the first half of the book, we create a navigation-based application using Core Data. Although the chapters are primarily intended to teach different aspects of Core Data, I also wanted to set a good example design-wise. If you've ever written a table-based detail editing view, you know that's a challenge. Even Apple's sample code uses kludgey, hard-to-maintain techniques because the table view architecture simply wasn't designed primarily for creating this type of view; it was designed to display values from a collection or list not for displaying or editing different attributes of a single object.My...
Rabu, 30 September 2009
PatrickJ Interviews Loren Brichter
An interesting and apparently amicable end to the Twitter 2 controversy? It sorta looks that way. Not everyone will agree, but I think now people have a better understanding of the situation Loren was in and the reasons he made the decision he ma...
Critical Thinking from Critical Thought
This is an excellent blog post by David Whatley of Critical Thought Games. I was already bummed about not being at 360 iDev (the first was awesome), but I really would have liked to have been in the audience for David's talk, especially to watch the crowd's reaction.I've been known to grouse about things from time to time, but I also try to keep a sense of perspective and not lose sight of just how amazing this thing that Apple has enabled with the App Store and iPhone SDK is. David does it better. Well worth a few minutes of your time to read th...
Madden NFL 10
iTunes LinkMadden NFL 10 is a football game by Electronic Arts. $9.99If you read the NFL 2010 below you would know how much I think Madden 10 is the better football game. Everything in Madden has been kicked up a notch from what we got from Gameloft in NFL 2010. What else would you expect though for a game that not only got higher than NFL 2010 on the App Store charts but at full price was also $2 dearer. The other thing Madden has going for it is its name. The reason Electronic Arts has been super successful on the App Store is because people will buy their games first just because of the brand name. Obviously Madden 10 is the most successful...
Selasa, 29 September 2009
Comments are Broken
Note: No word from Blogger.com yet, but the comments to this post seems to be okay, it's just the original post that's not working, so the discussion has started back up in the comments to this post.Yes, I'm aware of the problem. I've posted the error code and information to Blogger's tech support forums and am hoping for more information sometime today. It is a shame, though, the Just Another iPhone Blog author I linked to in my last post wants to respond to my post, and can't. We've tweeted back and forth a bit, and I think the discussion will be both interesting and fruitful and, believe it or not, civil.As several C4 attendees became painfully aware this past weekend, the way our words are received are not always the way they were intended when written. It's altogether possible that I...
Senin, 28 September 2009
A Sense of Entitlement: Tweetie 2
For the most part, I stay out of discussions about App Store pricing. The so-called "race to the bottom" is, I think, somewhat blown out of proportions in many discussions held between iPhone developers, who have a very personal and one-sided view of the market. There's a lot of competition and prices are lower than traditional software markets, but there's also a large volume of buyers (2 billion applications sold so far and counting according to Apple), which means you can still make a living charging relatively low rates. If EA or Infinity Ward can make a profit selling a game for $49.99 that takes a team of literally hundreds of people two years to create, it seems like 1-5 person iPhone development shops should be able to make a profit at a much lower amount if the program is marketed...
The Grass on the Other Side of the Fence
Here is an short account of the experiences of one of the earliest Palm Pre developers. Be warned, though: The neon green on black is a little hard on the eyes.Not intending to pass judgment here, just think it's interesting to see what life is like developing for other mobile platforms. I think keeping a little in touch with what's going on in the Palm and Android development world helps us keep a sense of perspective when we get frustrated with the App Store and iPhone development proce...
Two Billion and Counting
Today, Apple announced that they have reached another milestone: two billion applications have been downloaded from the App Store. Other numbers from the press release include the fact that there are 85,000 applications available in the store, and 125,000 registered iPhone developers. The App Store is currently available in 77 countries and allows you to reach 50 million potential customers.Holy hell, those are some big numbers.via Michael Jurew...
Minggu, 27 September 2009
NFL 2010
iTunes LinkNFL 2010 is a football game by Gameloft. $2.99Gameloft got in first with their own football game, picking up some early cash before Electronic Arts own Madden 10 was released onto the App Store. NFL 2010 is the first true football game that we could call anything near good. Earlier on we reviewed a game called PocketSports Football, but this game was far from anything we would call a good game these days. NFL 2010 features not only a complete football experience, but has somehow also managed to scrap up the permission to use complete NFL teams and player names, just as Madden 10 already had. This is the main reason why this game got...
Chess Elite
iTunes LinkChess Elite is a chess game by 99Games. $3.99After reviewing Chess Lite and Chess Pro from the same developer back in January or February I was pretty satisfied with a good game to play chess on. Chess Lite was for more of the casual gamer and the Premium version had more graphics and a bit more to play around with. I thought Chess Elite would have added onto what Pro offered, but it has seemed to have taken a different route and removed features. Pro offered multiple game modes and 3D play as such, but Elite has the one game mode with limited modifications, but online play. Chess Elite is aimed more at the casual gamer, while the...
Sabtu, 26 September 2009
Read for You, Write for Me, Right?
Properties are a way to expose data to other classes. Because they make memory management more convenient on the iPhone and in non-GCC Cocoa apps when you declare them retain, many of us also use properties within our class. When we use synthesized instance variables, we don't have a choice, because the underlying instance variables created by the runtime aren't available even to our own class, and we have to use the accessors and mutator or dot notation to use them.What happens, however, when you want a property to be read-only to other objects, but you also want to be able to use the synthesized mutator within your own class to assign new values? In other words, what do you do when you want a property to be read-only to the rest of the world, but read/write within your own class?Extensions...
Kamis, 24 September 2009
Barcode Generator Application
For grins and giggles, I tried compiling an Xcode project I created back in 2002. Well, technically, it was a Project Builder project created in 2002 that was converted to an Xcode project a couple of years later, but the bulk of the code was written back in 2002. I wanted to see how much work would be involved in taking a project that was written when Puma was the current version of Mac OS and Macs were shipping with PowerPC processors and getting it to compile to work in 32/64 bit mode for Intel Macs.Code changes required? Not a one.There were a bunch of warnings that I would address if this were shipping software, since a couple of methods...
HYBRID: Eternal Whisper
iTunes Link HYBRID: Eternal Whisper is a RPG by Gamevil. $5.99[This is a modified post from TheAppEra]Earlier this year the iPhone community went RPG-crazy when the excellent Zenonia was brought onto the App Store by Gamevil. This Fall, Gamevil unleashes their next hit (?). Can Gamevil possibly bring out another big hit game? Read on to find out. Hybrid has seemed to have grown on me after a few hours playing this game, as the storyline really gets you involved unlike so many failed attempts before it. This game seems to be alot more story orientated with large cut scenes between fights with some story to why the next fight is happening. It...
Rabu, 23 September 2009
Opacity - Export as Source Code
Okay, I don't ordinarily repost items covered by Daring Fireball since most of you probably read it anyway, but this one's just too cool and too relevant not to include. The vector art program Opacity now has the ability to export your graphic as source code, presumably as CoreGraphics calls that you can use in your Mac and iPhone applications.Now, in most cases, you don't want resources contained in code - you should just store the graphic file as a resource in your application's bundle - but there are times when this would be hugely helpful, like when you want to animate the vector art, or when the specific appearance of the image depends on values only available at runti...
Preview: Alice in Bomberland
Here is a special preview of a upcoming game by SonicBoom Games that has caught my attention. Just looking at the screenshots wants me to see more of this game. Check out the info we have at the moment.As you move on you’ll unlock new types of levels, more story, new powerups, and new characters and artwork.From the designer/programmer of the hit game iPhone/iPod Touch game Topple, and the visual artist from Braid.Based on Lewis Carroll’s classic stories Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, featuring famous quotes, poems and more.Unlockable content including developer commentary and endless mode.Original illustrations...
Selasa, 22 September 2009
More Housecleaning
Here's another category I found while cleaning out my dev folder. It's another bit of Quicktime code for Cocoa. This is a category on QTMovie that makes it easier to deal with standard movies (i.e. ones with one video track and any number of audio tracks). This same category exists in the MovieStepper project, but that version won't compile for 64-bit Cocoa applications because Apple has removed access to the underlying Quicktime data structures like Track and Media. This version uses only QTKit objects to accomplish the same tasks, and thus will compile for both 32-bit and 64-bit applications.QTMovie-Frame.h//// QTMovie-Frame.h// MovieStepper//// These are methods designed to be used on movies that contain only // sequential frame data, e.g. straight movies. These methods make// the...
