Posts Tagged 'Programming'

Now this is certainly a Herculean endeavour: Messr. Steffen Itterheim of Learn Game Development with Cocos2d renown is launching a subscription-based full-blown fork of cocos2d!

In case you’d missed it so far, cocos2d has had its vision … refined … after the Zynga acqhire:

Vision

Currently cocos2d is: A fast, easy to use, free, and community supported 2D game engine.

And we want to do is go redefine it as: A fast, easy to use, free, multi platform,/ and community supported 2D game framework.

By multi platform, we mean iOS and Android in the mobile space and Web Browsers:

• Write once, run it on the supported platforms. The common language is JavaScript

By framework, we mean:

• An integrated framework for building 2D games:

Game engine: cocos2d

Physics Engine: Chipmunk

World Editor: CocosBuilder

Well, that’s a thing there, isn’t it? Always nice to have a new cross-platform game option joining the plethora already available, but if you’re reading this, chances are you’re of the attitude that you want to craft an awesome iOS game first and foremost and spend time thinking about those other, lesser, platforms sometime between “much later” and “never”, amirite? Well, you’re who KoboldTouch is aimed at then:

… It’s going to be a framework to program iOS & Mac games in, where best practices evolve naturally, where Cocoa programmers feel right at home, where beginners are not left in a void * EXC_BAD_ACCESS … and where Cocos2D is still at the heart of it.

KoboldTouch takes control over Cocos2D, to allows users to implement best practices naturally. Cocos2D provides the view, KoboldTouch provides the controllers, models and the framework to write your code in.

The Goals for KoboldTouch

Take the good parts of Cocos2D, improve Kobold2D and fix what’s been criticized, build KoboldTouch as a Cocoa-esque game framework around Cocos2D views, add Lua scripting and ensure tight integration with Apple’s OS features.

Little by little I want to transform Cocos2D from the rendering engine that it is and embed it into KoboldTouch, the game development framework…

And that’s where the money comes in. KoboldTouch is going to be a $200/year subscription product. How many out there think this sounds like a good enough idea to pay for it? Well, if you’re thinking it might, head to the KoboldTouch product page and check out the video and all the other links there!

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So this is a monetization platform that you might want to check out seriously for your advertising needs:

MoPub — “Mobile Advertising Done Right”

For mobile publishers, MoPub is the only “one-stop shop” ad server designed to manage all your app monetization needs. MoPub’s three-pronged platform means that you can choose how you monetize through direct sold ads, ad networks, and our real-time bidding system, MoPub Marketplace. Designed for unmatched control over and transparency into how ads are performing on your app, MoPub’s platform makes sure that you’re maximizing your ad revenue potential — without sacrificing your user experience. And, since MoPub was founded by app developers, for app developers, our single, open-source SDK is easy to integrate and our platform scales to serve billions of ads every month…

Seems pretty much like the set of services you get with Burstly that we liked on first try a couple years back, right? Well, we’re a good bit wiser since then in the ways of ad mediation. Not to put too fine a point on it, all ad SDKs suck. If one appears to not suck, wait for the next system upgrade. And they conflict with your code, and you can’t get a patch for crashes in them even when you can prove where the problem is, yadayadayada. We worked for more than we care to remember of last year on a custom Mobclix-based mediation layer bringing in something like a dozen different kinds of custom video/rich media interstitial providers for an app that gave up on attempting to integrate Burstly because of a vast array of issues, but what it really came down to was that it wasn’t open source so we couldn’t do anything about the problems we found. Compare and contrast:

MoPub’s client code is hosted on GitHub in the mopub-client project. As app developers, we got frustrated with the fact that most ad networks required a separate SDK binary integration and constant updates to get the latest features. We came up with the “low footprint,” source level approach as a solution to that problem. Integrate a single set of source files into your app, directly through subversion or git, and then you will never have issues with updates…

A compelling consideration, that. Especially as one thing we learned doing that custom mediation layer mentioned above is that all the big money in advertising these days comes from the small upstarts doing rich media and geolocated ads and so forth, so if you’re serious about making money off your advertising you’re going to be messing around with custom SDKs with low fill rates and having them fall back to the chump change you get from the bigger networks. And that process will be much MUCH easier with an open source mediation layer.

However, it’s the money that most of you will quite sensibly make your final call on, no doubt; any of you Dear Readers have actual deployment experience with MoPub and can tell us how it compares to Burstly or Mobclix or whatever else you tried?

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So you got a client that’s demanding to support Passbook in the next release, somehow, someway? Yep, us too, so let’s take a look at what resources are available out there, shall we?

As you’d expect, over at Caer Wenderlich there’s some nice introductory tutorials,

Beginning Passbook in iOS 6: Part 1/2 and Part 2/2

which are much abbreviated excerpts of a couple chapters of iOS 6 By Tutorials — which if you haven’t bought yet you should immediately, covering as it does pretty much everything significant new in iOS 6.

But back to Passbook in particular, here’s another good introduction set with sample code (h/t ManiacDev):

iOS 6 Tutorial: Integrating Passbook into Your Applications

iOS 6 Tutorial: Supporting Passbook within Your Enterprise Systems

Another nice one that goes into great detail on how to handle the provisioning portal is found at, of all places, the Xamarin online docs:

Introduction to PassKit

If you don’t feel like creating passes yourself, there’s a wide variety of services springing up to help you out with that:

PassSource – “Your source for free iOS 6 Passbook passes”

PassTools – “The easiest way to build and manage passes for Apple® Passbook®.”

PassKit – “Create, Distribute and Manage Apple® Passbook® Content Across All Major Mobile Platforms”

Passdock – “So cool to create Passbook passes with Passdock!”

PassPages – Hmmm, no allegedly catchy tagline here.

Or there’s some helper implementations showing up on github:

mattt / passbook_rails_example – “This project is an example implementation of this web service specification in Rails, and will serve the basis for a more comprehensive Rails generator in the near future.”

renstrom / passbook_flask_example – “An Example Implementation of a Passbook Webservice on Flask, based on matt’s passbook_rails_example”

tschoffelen / PHP-Pass – “A PHP class for creating a Pass for Passbook in iOS 6.”

SimonWaldherr / passkit.php – “a php function to create passes for Apple Passbook”

skyzyx / passbook – “PHP component and CLI app for creating Apple PassBook files for iOS 6.”

bitzeche / jpasskit – “jPasskit is an Java™ implementation of the Apple™ PassKit Web Service.”

Any other resources you’ve found particularly helpful setting up Passbook integration with your projects, Dear Readers?

UPDATES:

PassSlot “is a free service for developers that aims to make Passbook integration easy – Really easy.”

Getting your business on Apple’s Passbook, DIY style

iOS Passbook Tutorial

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This is a slick little helper for if you’re writing software designed to run presentations, or if you want to record some screen tutorials:

developmentseed / fingertips

Fingertips: Presentation mode for your iOS app

Fingertips is a small library (currently, one class) that gives you automatic presentation mode in your iOS app. Note that currently, this is only designed for the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S (or later), which feature hardware video mirroring support. This library does not do the mirroring for you!

Just drop in our replacement UIWindow subclass and your app will automatically determine when an external screen is available. It will show every touch on-screen with a nice partially-transparent graphic that automatically fades out when the touch ends.

Here’s a demo video…

Handy if you need it!

h/t: @romainbriche!

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So if you’ve paid any attention to new iOS 6 stuff at all, you’ve probably noticed that this UICollectionView thing sounds remarkably interesting:

A collection view is a way to present an ordered set of data items using a flexible and changeable layout. The most common use for collection views is to present items in a grid-like arrangement, but collection views in iOS are capable of more than just rows and columns. With collection views, the precise layout of visual elements is definable through subclassing and can be changed dynamically. So you can implement grids, stacks, circular layouts, dynamically changing layouts, or any type of arrangement you can imagine…

Yeah? That kinda strains your credulousness a bit, doesn’t it? Let’s look for a second opinion, shall we?

The Awesomest UI Class I’ve Ever Seen

UICollectionView is spectacular. The combination of a clear interface and incredible flexibility make it an absolute masterpiece of API design. The UIKit engineers who designed it have truly outdone themselves. It is by far my favorite feature of the iOS 6 SDK. Make sure to watch WWDC sessions 205 and 219 if you haven’t yet seen them…

“Awesomest”. “Spectacular”. “Masterpiece”. Don’t hold back, tell us how you really feel. How about a third opinion? A fourth?

… Barely containing excitement. ) UICollectionView* stuff is Magic, pure Magic.

… UICollectionView is fucking awesome. It will change the face of iOS apps.

“Pure Magic”. “Fluffily Awesome”. Yes, a concrete degree of enthusiasm can be ascertained there as well. Anyone else?

UICollectionView is possibly the most important enhancement Apple has ever made to iOS’s base control set … Expect to see amazing new UIs in iOS 6 apps that do things with visual data presentation that were never possible before. Expect to see dynamic grids that can be resized, reordered, and visually transformed in imaginative ways…

Well, then. Looks like UICollectionView winds hands down the Industry Achievement Award for “Most Gushing Fanboism Ever Over a Flippin’ API”, indeed. Looks like it’s pretty safe to predict that there’s going to be a lot of people doing nifty stuff with it, and we might as well get a jump on that by collecting the first few introductions to it out of the box here:

First off, if you haven’t got it already, we thoroughly recommend you head over to chez Wenderlich and pick up the iOS 6 By Tutorials book; the two chapters on UICollectionView are worth the price alone if you haven’t been experimenting with it already, and hey there’s 25 other chapters bonus covering pretty much everything significant new there is.

Second off, rather than completely splitting your presentation layer code at iOS 6, you might wish to look into steipete / PSTCollectionView:

Open Source, 100% API compatible replacement of UICollectionView for iOS4.3+

You want to use UICollectionView, but still need to support iOS4/5? Then you’ll gonna love this project. I’ve originally written it for PSPDFKit, my iOS PDF framework that supports text selection and annotations, but this project seemed way to useful for others to to keep it for myself Plus, I would love the influx of new gridviews to stop. Better just write layout managers and build on a great codebase.

The goal is to use PSTCollectionView on iOS 4/5 as a fallback and switch to UICollectionView on iOS6. We even use certain runtime tricks to create UICollectionView at runtime for older versions of iOS. Ideally, you just link the files and everything works on older systems…

Ideally, yes. In practice, no doubt this is a good opportunity for collaboration by us all, yes? (h/t: ManiacDev)

It’s even there for people too cool to use Objective-C:

Xamarin: Introduction to CollectionViews

RubyMotion: RubyMotion gets iOS 6, iPhone 5, debugger

And here’s other intros and tips to get you started … which will no doubt become a longer list in the nearish future:

UICollectionView Example (h/t @romainbriche)

How to Use NSFetchedResultsController with UICollectionView (h/t ManiacDev)

UICollectionView Sample code for iOS 6

A simple UICollectionView tutorial

UPDATES:

Example iOS Source Code Of A Customizable Coverflow Container Using UICollectionView

Beginning UICollectionView In iOS 6: Part 1/2 and Part 2/2

LXReorderableCollectionViewFlowLayout for iOS

Sticky Headers for UICollectionView using UICollectionViewFlowLayout

LXReorderableCollectionViewFlowLayout “Extends`UICollectionViewFlowLayout` to support reordering of cells.”

A Springboard-Like Layout With the UICollectionView Class

UICollectionViewWaterfallLayout “This layout is inspired by Pinterest. It also is compatible with PSTUICollectionView.”

How to Add a Decoration View to a UICollectionView

UICollectionView custom layout tutorial

MagrackCollectionView

Deleting cells from UICollectionView via NSNotification

Pinterest-style UICollectionViewLayout for UICollectionView

RFQuiltLayout “is a subclass of UICollectionViewLayout that positions various sized cells like a mason laying bricks.”

MSCollectionViewCalendarLayout ” is very similar to the “Week” view in the Apple Calendar/iCal app.”

UICollectionView Example with UICollectionViewFlowLayout

Workaround to vanilla UICollectionView+UICollectionViewFlowLayout using non-integral origins.

Custom iOS UICollectionViewLayout Modeled After The iCal App

Putting a UICollectionView in a UITableViewCell

mpospese / IntroducingCollectionViews has several samples from a conference talk.

How To Create A Rotating Image Wheel Using UICollectionView

Creating a Paged Photo Gallery With a UICollectionView

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