Now this is a seriously nifty idea:

Face Tracking

… I thought it would be nice if we could use the front facing camera of a phone for interacting with an app. I had to see if this idea could be implemented.

Since iOS 5 Apple has added a face detection api. My idea was to detect a face and estimate the distance the device is from your face based on the size of the detected face. If the rectangle of the detected face is big, then the device is close to your face, if it’s small, then the device is far away from your face. With a similar technique it is also possible to calculate the angle of the device in relation to the face. This angle is calculated based on how fare the detected face rectangle is away from the center of the screen…

… For implementing face detection in your own application I created a class that can easily be added plus a demo project that changes the zoom level and shadow offset for a text. The only thing you have to do in your application is to add the EVFaceTracker class and listen to a deligate message so that you can react on the rectangle of the detected face.

Pretty cool, huh? Source is on github, check it out!

h/t: ManiacDev!

Here’s a rather nicely executed control for space-efficient options presentation from @joseph_carney:

joecarney / JCGridMenu

This is a simple IOS control that works as a 44x44px menu using rows and columns to show and hide options. It’s not big but it is clever, here is the obligatory screen shot…

Check out the video here to see more capabilities as well as the rather elegant animations. Nice piece of work, yep. Think we’ll drop it right into a video app we needed an elegant way to overlay some controls on, actually.

And Messr. Carney gets a gold medal with oak leaf clusters for the Best. License. EVAR:

Licence

What licence? I built this code for me to solve a problem. It solved my problem. I open sourced as I thought it might benefit the developer community at large.

Use it if you want to use it but don’t come crying to me if it doesn’t work.

If you want to pretend you built it first and start selling it as your own, then grow up and stop being a prick. Nobody wants to buy shit like this, you’ll never be Steve Jobs so wake up and smell the roses.

If you do use it and your app has millions of downloads, all because of the fact that you implemented my menu, then some sort of recognition somewhere would be cool.

Other than that, do with it what you will…

Heh. The WTFPL Non-Prickish Attribution License, we could call it?

So no doubt you’ve heard — and if you haven’t, pay close attention! — that IAP cracking is now easily available,

iAP Cracker by urus; it cracks easy dlc/inapp purchases. As long as the game/app doesn’t check the purchase with a server. It uses mobilesubstrate for this: buy something inapp like normal and youll get it free!

and if you haven’t set it up yet, been thinking “Huh, maybe I should get on that Verifying Store Receipts bit, like, now…”

… well, has the Camera Plus dude and friends got a service for you: Beeblex!

IAP validation. Easy and free.

Simple, secure and free IAP validation for iOS apps.

No strings attached. We promise!

Validate receipts securely

Beeblex verifies IAP receipts against Apple’s servers to help prevent receipt spoofing and man-in-the-middle IAP attacks

We use strong encryption and time-limited tokens to make it very hard for an attacker to send fake receipts to your app.

Easy to use

Beeblex is a fully-hosted service. There is no need for you to install server-side software, or rent any extra hardware.

Integration in your app is easy with out SDK—in most cases, you should be able to get going in a matter of minutes.

Free forever

Beeblex is free, and we intend to keep it free. There are no catches, no time limited trials, no limits.

Well, there doesn’t really sound like there’s any downside here, does there now? For those of us who incline to the cynical, be reassured by

Why are you making this available for free?

Frankly, because we can, and because someone should. We develop iOS apps ourselves, and IAP receipt verification is more complicated than it needs to be.

We thought that a service like Beeblex could help developers of all sizes, including ourselves; therefore, we simply created it.

At some point, we plan on adding more for-pay services, but the basic verification service will remain completely free.

The iOS community is just full of such nice people, isn’t it now? SDK is on github, check it out!

UPDATES:

A Ruby Gem/CLI For Easy iOS In-App Purchase Validation On Your Own Server if you really want.

Here’s a nice-looking abstraction of retrieving pictures from probably all the online services you’ll want to support:

pierrotsmnrd / grabKit

In your iPhone/iPad applications, you may want to let your users access their photo albums hosted on various social networks like Facebook or FlickR, or stored in the device. Unfortunately, the websites hosting these images offer different APIs and different libraries to authentify a user, grab its photo albums, etc.

GrabKit is made to wrap these differences into a simple library. Retrieve photo albums the same way for Facebook, FlickR, or any other implemented service !

So far, GrabKit supports :

• Facebook
• Flickr
• Instagram
• Picasa
• iPhone/iPad

Compare to Photo Picker+ we mentioned before; similar functionality, but doesn’t require an account with any third party, just the appropriate services directly.

h/t: ManiacDev!

So, you really really want to get inside your users’ UX flow? Or feel like putting together a Greatest User Epic Fail demo reel? Either way, here’s a new SDK for you to check out:

UserVOD: Watch how people use your app

UserVOD is a mobile SDK that helps developers gain insights on how people use their app.

Our SDK records videos of user sessions and captures their actions and gestures…

… Screen recording is done without impacting user experience. Videos are uploaded when users are idle and on WiFi only.

You can take a look at some samples or try it out for yourself before integrating it into your own apps, which is pretty much simple as simple gets, whether you’re running a UIKit or OpenGL or even a Unity app.

Also check out this TechCrunch article on them for references to other session recording options!

Got some artists in your asset workflow who just won’t let go of that antiquated Flash thingy? This could be of help:

musictheory / SwiffCore

SwiffCore is a Mac OS X and iOS framework that renders vector shapes and animations stored in the SWF format. It also provides basic support for bitmaps, fonts, text, and MP3 streams.

It isn’t a Flash runtime. It doesn’t enable you to run your interactive Flash games on iOS. It will, however, accurately render your existing vector graphics and animations…

Had a particularly good chuckle at this bit:

… Ultimately, performance depends on the source movie. If SwiffCore has to redraw several objects per frame, and those frames contain gradients and/or complex paths, it’s easy to saturate the CPU and drop frames (even on A5 devices). After a few migraine-inducing Instruments sessions, I am very grateful that Apple never allowed Flash on the original iPhone …

Indeed. Of course it’s not polite to speak ill of the dead, but it can be rather amusing at times, can’t it? Any-ways, although we certainly wouldn’t give the impression that we actually recommend these days any kind of canned animation producer other than the HTML 5 options we touched on a few days back, there definitely have been instances where something that dealt with Flash would have been expedient. And hey, expedience can be its own form of elegance when getting something out the door profitably is the order of the day!

h/t: ManiacDev!

So no doubt if you even vaguely follow computer vision type stuff you’ve heard of the OpenCV library, and as we’ve mentioned occasionally people have been using it on iOS with some degree of effort for a while now; but as of the latest release (2.4.2) it’s officially supported:

…. opencv2.framework for iOS has been created. You can either download the binary from SourceForge or build it yourself using the simple guide. Also, you may be interested to look at some OpenCV on iOS samples, created by our GSoC 2012 students Eduard and Charu and read the slides of the tutorial…

Speaking of tutorials, here’s a series just updated (h/t @romainbriche) for iOS to get you started nice and easy processing both video frames and saved photos:

OpenCV Tutorial – a collection of OpenCV samples for iPhone/iPad – Part 1

OpenCV Tutorial – Part 2

OpenCV Tutorial – Part 3

OpenCV Tutorial – Part 4

Code for these is on github at BloodAxe / OpenCV-Tutorial if you’re in a hurry.

And of course there’s the regular docs and the wiki and the code site and all that, but if you have any more up to date iOS-focused resources, please let us all know!