Why yes, yes there is an app for that, and it’s our app!

Atimi welcomes their first NBA team

The NY Knicks go mobile!

But we’re not posting just to preen about our latest production — although it is rather striking, isn’t it? –

– we’re posting to let you, yes YOU you web developer you, know that we’re looking for some extra help to build these franchises out:

Web Services Developer

We’re looking for a dedicated web services developer to support our mobile app development. You should have at least two years of web services development.

You emit JSON, accept XML and prefer to leave SOAP in the shower. You’ve tinkered with EC2, jump between Python, Perl and Ruby, and get annoyed when people GET when they really should be POSTing. You understand that performance and scaling are non-optional.

Atimi is a premium mobile development firm in the heart of downtown Vancouver. You’ll be joining a team of developers responsible for applications for ESPN, HBO, The New York Times and many more. Your work will be supporting some of the top apps in the world…

And you get to work with us, besides. What, we ask rhetorically, could possibly be a more fantastical position than that? That’s right, there isn’t. So if this looks like the kind of thing you’re suited for, hey pop us off a résumé and we’ll make sure it gets to the right people!

BSKeyboardControls for iOS

BSKeyboardControls makes it easy to put previous, next and done buttons above the keyboard in your iPhone or iPad app. BSKeyboardControls is optimized for both iPhone and iPad and therefore fits perfectly in your universal app…

Don’t like buttons? Try

DAKeyboardControl for iOS

DAKeyboardControl is a collection of UIView subclasses that allow the user to drag the UIKeyboard down from a view…

All cynicism aside, there are a couple takeaways from this pother for the app developer who wants to avoid negative attention, even if you can manage to handle it as adroitly as the Path people did:

1. Be aware of Apple’s full disclosure requirements:

17.1 Apps cannot transmit data about a user without obtaining the user’s prior permission and providing the user with access to information about how and where the data will be used

And also of the requirements with any other services like Facebook, Twitter et al. you may be using: privacychoice.org has a good resource list for starters.

2. Go to at least a little bit of effort to make your app not the easiest avenue to nick user info from. A discussion suitable even for the nontechnical client to get their head around when you’re discussing architecture choices is from the inimitable Matt Legend Gemmell here:

Hashing for privacy in social apps

If the Path use case matches yours, why yes this clever spark has provided a handy AddressBook wrapper for you:

HashContacts: an iOS Address Book Wrapper

… It turns out, however, that it is trivially easy to wrap the Apple provided Address Book frameworks in a way that safe guards the data by:

• Asking for user permission before opening the address book
• Then hashing the desired data so that it is kept private.

After only 3 hours of effort I wrote a class (available in github) that provides both of these functions in an easily dropped-in fashion…

If your needs are a little more complex, the nice Karelia people have in their wide ranging open source collection

KSCrypto – Simple wrapper for sha1 hashing files

which shows you how to get a digest on input streams, from NSData or an NSURL’s contents or whatever, using the SHA-1 functions from the Common Crypto API which is part of libSystem. And is almost certainly good enough for you. But note the discussion here about MD5 being considered broken and SHA-2 considered current best practice before you make any irrevocable algorithmic decisions!

Using PDF images in iOS apps

iPhone developers are familiar with having to provide artwork at both regular and Retina (doubled) pixel dimensions for their apps. With rumours of a Retina Display-equipped iPad being just around the corner, it’s wise to consider moving to fully scaleable vector artwork for as much of your app’s images (such as toolbar icons) as possible.

This brief post outlines how to get your artwork from Photoshop as suitably compressed PDFs, then use those PDFs in your iOS apps…

Note the handy wrappers at UIImage+PDF on github!

h/t: ManiacDev!

YRDropdownView – A Polite UIAlertView Alternative for iOS

From day one, iOS developers have been struggling to alert users about simple warnings and errors that may not interrupt the flow of the app. Popping up UIAlertViews requires the user to click a button to move along, which wasn’t quite necessary for warnings that merely limit useability. Adding a UILabel somewhere on the screen isn’t consistent and doesn’t always look great.

Maybe you just have some more information you want to inform your user about. Simply adding it to the screen is sufficient, but what if your information is added off screen? How does your user know it has appeared? TweetBot found a great solution to that. By overlaying a simple panel, with an icon, title, and message, the flow of the app is uninterrupted, yet informs the user in a concise manner.

Imitation Is The Greatest Form Of Flattery:

Project is here on github, check it out!

h/t: @romainbriche!

Also note BlockAlertsAnd-ActionSheets library for TweetBot-styled block-based alert handling!

UIImage-Sprite-Additions

Useful UIImage category for handling sprite sheets. This add-on smoothes the way of extracting images from a sprite sheet (texture atlas).

This can be useful in UIImageView animations where animationImages array has to be filled with a set of images representing frames. UIImage-Sprite category makes this process trivial…

The basic trick is to get a CGImageRef with CGImageCreateWithImageInRect you then pass to [UIImage imageWithCGImage:]. Simple once it occurs to you!

h/t: @cocoacontrols

Cocos2d for iPhone 1 Game Development Cookbook

SHORT REVIEW:

Buy it now. No, seriously. Buy it now.

SOMEWHAT LONGER REVIEW:

We absolutely guarantee that just about anyone will find the book worth way more than its price in time saved. To see for yourself, head over to the book’s website

http://cocos2dcookbook.com/

and check out the Explore The Book section for videos and explanations of the recipes in each … and download the demo apps. Yep, the demo apps, there’s free demo apps up on the store for you to check out the recipes in action:

Cocos2d Cookbook Ch1-3

Cocos2d Cookbook Ch4-6

Cocos2d Cookbook Ch7-8

Now that’s how you go about supporting a book!

Also check out the book’s thread on the cocos2d-iphone forums for some subtle understated commentary like

• “This book looks like it is going to be a requirement in every developer’s library!”
• “Ok, I have read a handful of recipes and I am completely sold. This is an awesome book.”
• “…every developer needs to have this book.”
• “this book is an absolute must for anyone developing cocos2d apps.”
• “Great book, instant buy!”

Gee, gushing much? But it actually does deserve all that and more. Let us take the very first recipe, “Drawing sprites”. Oh for crying out loud, you think, how does that merit a recipe? Is this thing going to be full of fluff I already know? Well, no actually, that simple sounding recipe goes over drawing from files, images, textures, and frames; explains mipmapping and batch nodes; and tops it off with colorizing rectangles. Well, that is pretty good for a first recipe, isn’t it now.

The first graphics chapter goes on to cover not only common drawing and animating but movie playing, particle effects, simple 3D effects, texture animation, palette swapping, screenshots, parallax, and lighting. Pretty much a worthwhile purchase already, and we’re barely started!

Second chapter covers user input of varying types, including virtual joysticks, d-pads, and accelerometer; nothing too novel here, but useful time savers here if you’re newish to cocos2d.

Third chapter covers data management; reading and saving plist/JSON/XML … and even SQLite and Core Data. Probably not much completely new to you here either, but the details of working with sprites and the like are handy.

Fourth chapter is on physics and is a particularly valuable one for those of us weak on the background there; focusing on Box2D, takes you from basic setup through impulses and forces to joints, bullets, ropes, and ending up with a 2.5D isometric game engine! That’s a pretty standout one there.

Fifth chapter, ‘Scenes and Menus’, is mostly pretty straightforward but still handy code. The sliding menu grid and minimap are particularly nice.

Sixth chapter, “Audio” is another notably useful one, nice explanations of sound manipulating, positioning, metering, recording, iPod library usage, and finishing up with creating a MIDI synthesizer with MobileSynth and then speech recognition/synthesis.

Seventh chapter, “AI and Logic” is well-nigh invaluable for those without a background in it; basic waypoints, targeting, line of sight, flocking, pathfinding (the “in a Box2D world” getting special mention, good luck figuring that one out without some help!) and finishing off with discussion of Lua integration.

We figured the last chapter “Tips, Tools, and Ports” was a bit weaker; the tools picked here mostly aren’t up to the currently regarded best of breed mentioned in yesterday’s roundup, and the cocos2d-x and cocos3d intros were too short to really be of much use. But hey, still worth a read.

Closest thing we have to a real complaint is that you have to email the author to get the extra chapter which was omitted from the print versions; really, how hard would it be to put it as an addenda in the electronic versions most of us are going to be buying anyways? But hey, if mild inconvenience is the worst whine we can come up with, that’s pretty solid.

So, yeah. We pretty much can’t imagine anyone developing with cocos2d who won’t find something in here well worth the price; for those just starting out it might be a bit over your head, but it would make a perfect second step after one of the introductory books or our starting recommendation The iPhone Game Kit. So buy it now!

Check back soon Take a look here for our thoughts on that!

In the meantime, first off let’s take a look at how the various flavours mentioned a year ago have developed:

• The original cocos2d went from 0.4 to 0.5;
• cocos2d-iphone finally hit 1.0.0! At writing downloads are 1.0.1 stable and branched off into 1.1 and 2.0 beta versions, the 2.0 version eponymously supporting only OpenGL ES 2.0 devices (3GS or newer) and iOS >= 4.0, blog-featured new supplements are the 3D extension ‘cocos3d’ and the collection Cocos2D-iPhone-Extensions;
• cocos2d-javascript went from 0.1 to 0.2;
• cocos2d-x has been humming right along, current version at cocos2d-1.0.1-x-0.11.0 and widely used;
• All others mentioned then are apparently pretty much dead.

Other particularly notable developments:

• Kobold2D™ is a customized distribution bundled with many popular supplements, definitely worth looking into as a simple option for starting new projects;
• The iPhone Game Kit is updated to 4.0 with cocos2d 1.0.1 — still our top recommendation for anyone new to game writing;
• More cocos2d books from Steffen Itterheim and from Ray Wenderlich + Rod Strougo;
• LevelHelper and SpriteHelper are new design tools widely raved about -
  • How To Use SpriteHelper and LevelHelper Tutorial
  • Tutorial: Building Complete Games With SpriteHelper And LevelHelper
  • Tutorial: Quickly Create A Jetpack Joyride Like Game With Cocos2D, Box2D, LevelHelper, And SpriteHelper
  • Creating Physics Enabled Game Using Cocos2d, LevelHelper and SpriteHelper
  • Implementing Nutty Squirrels Using SpaceManager, LevelHelper and SpriteHelper
• There’s some interesting options in progress for getting your Objective-C code to those other, lesser, platforms.

Moving on to more ‘comprehensive’ as opposed to ‘notable’ listings, the tools scene in general has been getting more active; besides Level Helper and Sprite Helper mentioned above, things out there to help you are:

• TexturePacker 2.4.0 reviewed here is the most capable sprite sheet editor around and being actively developed.
• PhysicsEditor from the same author supports Box2D and Chipmunk in a variety of engines.
• GlyphDesigner is the go-to font rendering tool, from the people who brought you Particle Designer.
• FontStruct is a font creation tool recommended by the GlyphDesigner folk.
• iTileMaps looks pretty handy for your TMX Map Format tilemap editing needs.
• CocosBuilder is a tool for basic scene layout.
• Cocoshop is another layout tool, this one open source.
• Leveraging cocos2d actions for cutscenes provides a work-in-progress cutscene editor.
• Check out The Complete (?) List Of Cocos2D Tools for anything else we missed here.

So has the tutorial scene:

• At this point it’s getting hard to find anything not covered by the Ray Wenderlich team; notable cocos2d additions this year besides the LevelHelper+SpriteHelper ones above include
  • How To Mask a Sprite with Cocos2D 2.0
  • How To Integrate Cocos2D and UIKit
  • How To Create Dynamic Textures with CCRenderTexture + How To Create A Game Like Tiny Wings
  • How To Implement A* Pathfinding with Cocos2D
  • How To Create a HUD Layer with Cocos2D
  • How To Make A Space Shooter iPhone Game
  • How To Make a Catapult Shooting Game with Cocos2D and Box2D
  • How To Make a Multiplayer iPhone Game Hosted on Your Own Server
  • Introduction to Augmented Reality on the iPhone
• iPhone Game Tutorials has a wide variety of good stuff too.
• Creating a Vertical Scrolling Car Game Using Cocos2d
• How to use CCRenderTexture for Motion Blur, Screenshots and Drawing Sketches
• How to Download Modified Files from a Web Server for a Cocos2D Webcam Viewer
• How to take in-game screenshots with Cocos2D and upload them to a Facebook album
• Loading Cocos2D Sprite Frame Animations from Plist Files
• Cocos2D Tutorial – Dynamically Coloring Sprites
• cocos2d meets MVC – Implementing simple board game
• Creating Dynamic Scaling Menu Interfaces in cocos2d
• Getting Started With Core Motion in Cocos2D
• The One Day Help System, in Cocos2d for iOS
• Task Sequencer or how I was lazy to learn Lua
• Positional audio with cocos2d and CocosDenshion
• Cocos2d tutorial: Creating a reusable pause layer
• Todd’s Box2D Tutorials are Flash-targeted, but still of interest

Aaaaaand here’s a grab bag to finish up with of interesting techniques, projects, libraries, and snippets:

• Irregular Touch Detection is nifty enough to merit a repost.
• Knight Fight is an isometric 2D tile based action RPG.
• Another take on Tiny Wing’s hills. Also note Tiny Wings Remake clone.
• Cocos2D/Box2D Endless Platformer
• CCNotifications implements Notifications in OpenGL
• Flood fill implementation for CCMutableTexture2D
• Astar Pathfinding with source
• CCTMXTiledMap A* pathfinding class
• Cocos2D/Box2D Collision Filtering + Cocos2D/Box2D – Detecting top collisions
• CCBox2D is a cocos2d-flavored wrapper for Box2D.
• Cocos2D iPhone Particle Engine Class Using A Sequence Of Images
• CCShake is a neat effect.
• The Sketchshare Colour Picker is pretty nice.
• Create A Lightning Effect In Cocos2D Using OpenGL ES
• CCBlade is just the thing for your Fruit Ninja cloning needs.
• How To Make Realistic Water Ripples With Cocos2D
• cocos2d-PRKit has a handy filled polygon node, discussion here.
• Cocos2D Joystick (zJoystick v1.0) for a joystick controller … if you really must.
• Lagrange curve source link, discussion here
• AdRootViewController supports iAd and AdMob.
• Library For Easier Gesture Recognizers, Scrolling Views, And TableViews In Cocos2D
• SuperSuRaccoon (follow that blog!) has a 102-item mostly cocos2d Demo List at Google Docs.
• Particularly worth attention are Three simple but cool effect demos with source code.
• iUridium sells its code and has a list of open source goodies here.
• iLabyrinth and Bubbsy are new additions to the always worth watching Maniac.dev Open Source Apps List.
• Learn iOS Game Development By Example: 10 Projects to Get You Started picks arguably the best for learning out there.

That should keep you busy reading for a while!

UPDATES:

How To Build a Monkey Jump Game Using Cocos2D, PhysicsEditor & TexturePacker is by Andreas Loew the tools’ author.

Deformable terrain with Chipmunk.

#1: Cocos2d for iPhone 1 Game Development Cookbook

Tweet this: I’d like to read this book on cocos2d! http://is.gd/uMGIcA

#2: Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript: Beginner’s Guide

Tweet this: I’d like to read this book on UnrealScript! http://is.gd/D59QkK

#3: Android 3.0 Animations: Beginner’s Guide

Tweet this: I’d like to read this book on Android animations! http://is.gd/T0g0Wi

#4: XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example: Beginner’s Guide – Visual Basic Edition

Tweet this: I’d like to read this book on XNA4 game development! http://is.gd/R42Uoa

And if you don’t so happen to be a lucky winner, fear not, you can still get your hands on any of these for a little quid pro quo, that being to post a review on your blog and Amazon and the like: just drop a line to Shaveer Irani of Packt with the subject “book name- review request copy” to join our Distinguished Fraternity Of Review Writers!

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the iBooks Author EULA

… Let’s say, for giggles, that “book stealing” was Apple’s intent, and such an intent was found to be both legal and the actual intent of the contract, and Apple decided to exercise those rights to steal my books. You know what? Even with all that, it’s still a hell of a lot better deal than I’ve ever gotten from a traditional publisher. Apple is offering 70% of the sale price to me. The most favorable contract I’ve ever gotten from a publisher starts at 12% of the net price the publisher gets from the distributor, wholesaler, or retailer (which is half or less of the retail price). That percentage does slowly escalate up to 20% if I sell a ton of books, but if I publish a new edition of an existing book, the escalators go back down to 12% and I have to start all over. To put this in more concrete terms, if I were to sell a book in the iBooks Store for $9.99, I would get $6.99 per book sold, which is about four times what I get when one of my current $39.99 books sells, and I’d get that money months sooner. Oh, and guess what? I don’t own those books published through a traditional publisher, either. My publisher can even have someone else update the book and can continue to use my name to promote it, even if I don’t like the revisions or think the update sucks…

Wow! We were vaguely aware that writing books was for most people a pretty low return endeavour, but we had no idea that terms were on the order of a twentieth of the cover price. That rather puts all the huffing and puffing from excitable quarters into its proper context, doesn’t it now?

UPDATES :

A rather more amusing take on the huffing and puffing types: In Favour Of iBook Author

Lots of thought-provoking iBooks Ideas from @mattgemmell!