Under The Bridge

Here’s another useful package to stick in your iPhone programming toolbox: the RegExKitLite framework, which wraps the PCRE library in a vast array of Cocoa-oriented conveniences:

RegexKit is an Objective-C framework for regular expressions:

• Support for Mac OS X Cocoa and GNUstep. Mac OS X 10.4 or later required.
• Mac OS X Universal Binary, including 64-bit support on Mac OS X 10.5.
• No sub-classing required. Seamlessly adds regular expression support to all NSArray, NSData, NSDictionary, NSSet, and NSString Foundationobjects with a rich set of Objective-C category additions.
• Unicode enabled. Full Unicode support for NSString objects.
• Extensive, high quality documentation.
• Full source code with a BSD license.
• Uses the BSD licensed PCRE Perl Compatible Regular Expressions library for the regular expression engine.

Tuned for high performance, including such features as:

• Caches the compiled form of the regular expression for speed.
• Multithreading safe, including multiple reader, single writer multithreaded access to the compiled regular expression cache.
• Makes minimal use of heap storage (ie, malloc() and free()), instead allocating most temporary buffer needs dynamically from the stack.
• Uses Core Foundation directly on Mac OS X for additional speed.

Includes support for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard:

• 64 bit support. Pre-built for ppc, ppc64, i386, and x86_64.
• Garbage Collection enabled. Complete support for Leopards Garbage Collection feature.
• Integrated Xcode 3.0 documentation. Get real time API information via the Research Assistant.
• Collection of instruments for Instruments.app.

Everything you need to support regular expression programming goodness!

And if you’re not so familiar with this whole regular expression thing, we’d like to ever so subtly draw your attention to the general programming resources page of the Under The Bridge Store, where you can find the classic O’Reilly Mastering Regular Expressions, which should be on the bookshelf of every serious programmer of every platform out there, not just the Mac/iPhone world!

h/t: iphonesdk!

Here’s a little tutorial of possible utility; how to build an RSS reader for the iPhone!

Whilst that is a pretty straightforward thing to do, this is a little interesting in that it demonstrates the use of NSXMLParser, flying in the face of what appears to be conventional wisdom that one should rely on the cross-platform libxml2 for their XML-parsing iPhone development projects. And people have gone to some work to make that easier with the TouchXML library which, in case we didn’t mention it in our earlier report, is part of the ever more useful touchcode repository over at Google Code.

‘Course, either of the above — or for that matter, anything at all — are probably better than the last time we had to get into that XML parsing thing a lot, which was struggling to make Xerces work in a large cross-platform source base. There were some very … interesting … issues trying to get wchar-based Windows twaddle and OS X style (also known as the “correct” or “real”, type) of characters to work together. Yeeesh. Well out of that, we are!

As a companion to yesterday’s post, here’s another Core Animation + iPhone snippet: 3D Transformations on iPhone with Core Animation!

Apart from getting all my existing CA examples onto the iPhone I’ve also been toying with what the best way to build out the ‘photo city’ demo from WWDC 2008 would be (my next Core Animation screen cast series). The basic idea of the demo was that you had a set of perhaps 30 or 40 images, the images were combined into cubes and the cubes were used to make a ‘city’. After getting a basic cube working I got distracted by some of the stuff I did to make the demo. Namely I finally got around to porting the OpenGL trackball example code to Core Animation.

For those that are not familiar with the trackball example; the idea is that you have a transparent sphere around your scene, you can move the scene around by moving the trackball. As you move your finger to the right it pushed this imaginary sphere around its center to the right (exposing the left side of the scene).

Make sure to follow the “existing” link above for general Core Animation stuff as well as the trackball controller talked about in that article. Nifty stuff, this Core Animation, yes indeedy!

Here’s an inspirational story for you: a detailed chronology of the journey of the game Asterope from concept to the App Store by way of … the Google Android Challenge!

It actually took a while until I started working on the game for real. The deadline for the Google Android Challenge was the last day of February, if I recall it correctly, and although the idea was vividly with me for January I could not get myself to start working on it. I think it had to do with me needing some time to rejuvenate after having stopped working part-time. I almost gave up on the idea with the deadline nearing so quickly, but then Google decided to postpone the deadline to April 14th after they released an update to their SDK. This got me motivated to do it – to take action on the opportunity!

That didn’t work out quite as hoped — although it did get rated in the top quarter which is, well, better than not being in the top quarter, but that’s about it; but then along came the iPhone!

After the iPhone SDK was released I instantly knew that I had to port my game to the iPhone. I could not let Asterope sit still and collect dust on my hard drive…

I instantly fell in love with the device, it had the most beautiful UI I had ever seen on a phone. And it just worked! I’ve had seven Nokias in the past but never have I been as impressed with a phone as I was with the iPhone. It’s just a huge step forward from anything previously on the market.

In late August I had the iPhone, a Mac Mini to develop it on and time to make it happen. Time to roll up my sleeves. I could not let myself pass on this opportunity. And I tell you it felt almost scary knowing I might have everything I need to make a commercial game with potential to make a lot of money.

Heartwarming story, isn’t it? I think we should all reward this young fellow’s ambition by buying his game immediately:

Asterope in the App Store!

h/t: Slashdot!