New iPhone/iPad cocos2d Book in the Works from Apress


Coming in December 2010 from veteran game developer Steffen Itterheim is Learn iPhone and iPad Cocos2D Game Development, a new Apress title dedicated to the cocos2d game engine for the iOS platform. It’s aimed at beginner game developers with little or no iPhone or OpenGL experience, and follows the practical approach by implementing several sample games over the course of the book.

From the publisher’s description:

The example games are modeled after popular App Store games so that they are relevant, recognizable, and immediately fun and inspiring. The games increase in complexity and highlight common recurring cocos2d beginner questions. As you move along, you’ll learn about possible stumbling blocks and how to navigate them successfully. As you move from beginning to advanced, you’ll encounter general game programming wisdom, tips for performance improvement, as well as pointers to alternative implementations and further reading.

Steffen recently introduced the book on a dedicated blog and is actively soliciting comments about its chapters. You can also follow the author on Twitter.

You don’t even have to wait for the release to learn from him. The site already has a few tutorials available, like this rundown of a cocos2D Xcode project.

Posted in Code | Tagged book, cocos2d, game development, ipad | Leave a comment

Goodie Roundup – August 1st, 2010

Interesting iPhone and iPad development, design or even marketing items. Often new, sometimes old.

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Matt Gemmell Releases MGSplitViewController for iPad

If you’ve spent any amount of time following other iPhone developers, you’ll have heard of Matt Gemmell of Instinctive Code, who regularly speaks at conferences and workshops and has given a lot of code back to the community, including MGTwitterEngine and more recently, MGImageUtilities. His latest release to the public is MGSplitViewController, a modified split view controller class for the iPad.

The default behavior follows the standard UISplitViewController, but a number of extensions let you customize the behavior and look:

  • Toggle the visibility of the master view in either orientation.
  • Vertical and horizontal split orientation.
  • Chose and change the relative sizes of the master and detail views.
  • Drag the split divider between master and detail view.
  • Different preset divider styles.
  • Provide your own divider view.

See it in action in this video:

If you enjoy the code and find it useful, you’re encouraged to send a donation Matt’s way.

Posted in Code | Tagged interface, intermediate, ipad, UISplitViewController | Leave a comment

Goodie Roundup – July 29th, 2010

Interesting iPhone and iPad development, design or even marketing items. Often new, sometimes old.

  • iCodeBlog is back with a new tutorial on using local notifications to schedule events without an online push notification infrastructure.
  • Another new SDK tutorial on the iPhone Development Exchange shows how to switch views.
  • iPhone Friend list a number of classes that enable virtual joysticks for iOS games.

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Dapp iPhone Prototyping App Generates Native Code

Dapp (‘the app design app’) is an iPhone code generator that lets you design your UI on the phone and then publish the screens to PDF and generate native Objective-C code. It allows you to quickly design the look of your app visually and supports a large range of iOS controls that you can link from screen to screen to simulate user interactions. The generated code then gives you a solid starting point for developing the actual application. A number of tutorials are offered on their site, including one showing off the design of a basic RSS reader.

Other iPhone prototyping apps like Interface, Stencils and Briefs exist, and I’ve covered pen and paper or Keynote based approaches here before, but this is the first that I’ve seen to output actual code.

(via 148Apps.biz)

Posted in Design | Tagged app, prototyping | 1 Comment

Preview and Extract iPhone Application Resources with atPeek

atPeek is a small $4.99 utility that allows you to browse, view and export resources embedded in iPhone application .ipa files. Standard file formats like audio, plists and icons can be previewed with QuickLook and crushed iPhone PNG images or PVR textures can be converted back into standard PNGs with two custom developed plugins. Both individual assets can be exported or entire folders in bulk.

The flip side of being a useful little developer tool means it can also be used to extract copyrighted resources from other people’s apps. In fact, the main interface will happily list all of your apps from iTunes, ready to be delved into. So use responsibly, or if you’re a developer, consider encrypting your resources.

On a side note, did you know that iPhone application files are actually just ZIP files? rename them from .ipi to .zip and you can do the same without the pretty interface of atPeek.

Also from atPurpose Technologies is atScreen, and iPhone and iPad simulator capture application and editor currently in beta.

(via Dylan Beadle on Twitter)

Posted in Misc | Tagged utility | 2 Comments

Goodie Roundup – July 28th, 2010

Interesting iPhone and iPad development, design or even marketing items. Often new, sometimes old.

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Apps-on iPhone Shaped Notepad for Prototyping

Apps-on are iPhone-shaped notepads for pen and pencil prototyping with the exact dimensions and look of an iPhone 4. There’s even a fake shine from the front glass panel. They include a 20-pixel dotted grid and use 3M Post-it technology to allow you to stick them on any surface. A starter pack costs $20 for 5 pads of 50 pages each.

What a weird name though. Right? Via iPhone Flow.

Posted in Design | Tagged prototyping | Leave a comment

Goodie Roundup – July 27th, 2010

Interesting iPhone and iPad development, design or even marketing items. Often new, sometimes old.

  • Owen Goss over at the Streaming Color blog offers a tutorial on using the Expressions window in Xcode to aid in debugging.
  • Alex Curylo collected a veritable grab bag of Core Data related tips and tutorials.
  • John Muchow provides code snippets to  truncate a string, and and append an ellipsis, while respecting the font size. Handy if you’re setting a UILabel or other elements with arbitrary text data.
  • The third part of Ray Wenderlich’s Facebook Graph API tutorial is up, covering how to post to a user’s wall, upload photos and add a like button, all frm the iPhone.

Have a goodie to share? Send it in!

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Sensible TableView Makes Writing Table Views a Breeze

Sensible TableView is an Objectiev-C class for the iPhone/iPad and iPod Touch  that promises easy implementation of a fully featured table view in less than 5 minutes, without the cumbersome data source management or custom cell sub-classing to achieve common tasks. Among its notable features:

  • Easily create cells with controls like the Settings app without sub-classing
  • Easily create selection cells like iPhone sound settings
  • Automatically create cells that map to each of your own classes’ properties.
  • Saves values of control cells and selection cells to your own classes’ properties.
  • Manages cell data source addition and reorganization
  • UITableView resizing when a keyboard appears
  • Cell navigation when the user hits return
  • Cell data validation

Several screencasts are available detailing how it will forever change how you build your table views. Sensible TableViews is a commercial product, but comes at a sensible price: Only $19.99.

Via Jake Marsh and Mike Rundle on Twitter.

Posted in Code | Tagged beginner, interface, UITableView | 1 Comment