Under The Bridge

Here’s a list of tools you may find handy for creating your OpenGL texture atlases, aka “sprite sheets”:

• Texture Atlas Creator that we mentioned back in our cocos2d roundup
• Zwopple which we just noticed as being highly recommended over at 71^2
• Sprite Grabber is a commercial alternative which looks like it has some pretty nifty image processing

As always, if you have other suggestions, or direct experience with any of these, comment away!

So as you’ve no doubt noticed if you’ve tried to port conventional DNS resolving code like ares to the iPhone, your desktop Mac OS code to get DNS servers like this

SCDynamicStoreContext context = {0, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL};
SCDynamicStoreRef store = SCDynamicStoreCreate(NULL, CFSTR("init_by_defaults_systemconfiguration"), NULL, &context);
CFStringRef key = CFSTR("State:/Network/Global/DNS");
CFDictionaryRef dnsDict = SCDynamicStoreCopyValue(store, key);
CFArrayRef addresses = (CFArrayRef) CFDictionaryGetValue(dnsDict, kSCPropNetDNSServerAddresses);

doesn’t work so hot, as SCDynamicStore APIs aren’t available. What to do? What to do? Well, when we first encountered this problem, after asking around the developer forums, and StackOverflow, and macnetworkprog, we didn’t get any good advice besides “rewrite using Bonjour”, essentially. Luckily, in our particular application we could put in hardcoded server addresses and pretend the problem didn’t exist.

But even more luckily, there are people out there better informed and/or more tenacious than trolls; so here is a solution using resolv.h that some bright spark who stumbled across our begging on the dev forums came up with, which you could try should you find yourself in this situation. As a patch to ares_init.c, it looks like

if ((_res.options & RES_INIT) == 0) res_init();
channel->nservers = _res.nscount;
channel->servers = malloc(channel->nservers * sizeof(struct server_state));
memset(channel->servers, '\0', channel->nservers * sizeof(struct server_state));

int i;
for (i = 0; i < channel->nservers; i++)
{
    memcpy(&channel->servers[i].addr, &_res.nsaddr_list[i].sin_addr, sizeof(struct in_addr));
}

Excellent, excellent. It’s so nice to have competent people around to sort you out, isn’t it?

So you ever thought to yourself “Now wouldn’t it be convenient if UILabel would wrap on its own so it would be as convenient as UITextView but still have convenient shadows?” but never quite got around to bothering to write a replacement yourself? Yep, we’re there.

So here is your dropin replacement: UILabelWrap.

Nothing particularly tricky, but hey, code that you don’t write is the best kind!

So it’s been a couple months since we dragged our posts on various artistic bits into UI Design For Artists, and yep, we see in this vancouver-iphone-developers thread that things just keep moving along. Let’s take a look at what’s new in the non-programmer UI design world, shall we?

Template:

MockApp — This Keynote (or PowerPoint, if you’re stuck with really hopeless designers) template claims to be the most comprehensive vector iPhone tool out there, and we see no reason to question that. So if you’re currently using the Photoshop, OmniGraffle, or whatever templates linked through the post above, might want to check this one out.

Demo Framework:

Briefs — “is a framework for packaging concept screens & control schemes that run live on the iPhone and iPod Touch. This allows you to experience the feel of your concept without the expense of development.” Personally, if we were going to as much trouble as it would take to put something together with this, we think we’d just slap together a real application shell … but hey, no doubt it has its place, and we do like to be exhaustive in our roundups, yes.

Sketch paper:

OK, we thought that a steel UI stencil was pretty neat a few months back — and there’s an acrylic one available now too — but it seems the latest trend is actual preprinted dead tree products for offline UI design:

• Sketch paper for the mobile designer and iPhone stencil paper are PDFs you can print out yourself.
• The steel stencil people mentioned above now sell a 50-page iPhone Sketch Pad to go with it.

And for actual books, courtesy of TUAW’s shootout we learn about

• iPhone Application Sketch Book– 150 pages, 1 template at 150% size and lots of room for notes on each page. Now published by Apress — an update since the TUAW article, apparently — and from the same fellow who did the acrylic stencil mentioned above, so presumably they would work together well.
• App Sketchbook — “Designing iPhone® Apps? There’s a sketchbook for that.” How cute. Wire-bound, 50 double-sided pages perforated or not, 3 templates a page.
• The Developer Sketchbook for iPhone Apps was TUAW’s favorite, the most elaborate by far of the bunch by far. As advertised:
  • 100 Pages of 320 x 480 Grids for Portrait User Interface Design
  • 100 Pages of 480 x 320 Grids for Landscape User Interface Design
  • 200 Pages of Flowcharts for Outlining an App’s Navigation
  • 100 Pages of Square Grids for App Icon Design
  • Dedicated Space on Every Page for Detailed Notes
  • 518 Pages Total = Great Value!

So there you go. And if that sounds like just the kind of fun you’re looking for, here’s your handy ordering link, go wild!