Back in December we posted about Cocos2D, a 2D graphics development framework for the iPhone (and Python, if you prefer). Since then, it’s come on by leaps and bounds with lots of bug fixes and support improvements, as well as new features (demonstrated in this video) including: Effects (Lends, Ripple, Liquid, Waves, Twirl, etc) – [...]
Archive | March, 2009
Interview With Paul Cantrell: High-Powered Graphics, Low-Powered CPU
The iPhone inherits its UI rendering approach from OS-X. Every view is rendered in an off-screen buffer, and the OS is responsible for compositing what ends up on the screen. This approach has interesting performance implications, especially given that the OS can offload much of the work to the graphics processor. This design is how [...]
Some Brutally Honest iPhone App Sales Numbers: $32k Spent vs $535 Revenue
Owen Goss is the developer of Dapple, a cute color matching puzzle game for the iPhone (you may also remember his memory leaks tutorial here on Mobile Orchard). Despite having a slick site, good gameplay videos, and so forth, it hasn’t sold too well. So Owen’s written The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty) where he [...]
Mining App Store Rankings For Popular Apps Worldwide
Manually tracking the popularity ranking of an app in iTunes App Stores worldwide is cumbersome. Ben Chatelain of SOPODs.com (Profile) has written a script that automatically extracts this information and has generously shared the source code for anyone to use. The script works by downloading iTunes’ top-100 lists for every country. It reports an app’s [...]
Review: Becoming Productive in Xcode Screencasts
Making good use of Xcode has become a popular topic. We published 14 Essential Xcode Tips, Tricks and Resources for iPhone Devs a month ago and it’s still our most popular post. When Mike Clark from the Pragmatic Programmers asked us to review his new Becoming Productive in Xcode screencast series, I mistakenly figured that [...]
A Giant List of iPhone Developer Related Links
Ari Braginsky (a.k.a. lemonkey) has been busy putting together a frankly intimidating list of links to resources that iPhone developers will appreciate. Blogs, Twitter accounts, tutorials – you name it. There are perhaps 60-80 links on there so far, and he’s trying to grow it. (You can send him an e-mail to ask him to [...]
SCListener: The Easy Way to Detect iPhone Microphone Sound Levels
Let’s say you have an app that requires the user blow on the microphone to perform some activity (blow out some candles, scare a virtual creature, or whatever). Instead of getting down and dirty with the complex Audio Queue Services, you can now do things in just a few lines with Stephen Celis’ SCListener. SCListener [...]
Interview with Michael Tyson, Creator of the Audio Mixing App “Loopy”
Michael Tyson (Profile) is the creator of “Loopy,” a very cool audio mixing application. Highlights from this interview include: From UIView to OpenGL: the seven different implementations it took to finalize its unique — and Best App Ever award-nominated — UI. From audio-queues to Remote IO: the four different architectural approaches he tried before finalizing [...]
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