The lasts weeks I have been trying and playing with different frameworks, methodologies and alternatives to mobile cross-platform development. In today’s post I would like to share with you my conclusions and… headaches.
So, you know, by definition cross-platform development is never an easy issue. Every platform is very different from each other just because it needs to differentiate from the competitors. So you, as a cross-platform developer, have to deal with it. Period.
In today’s post I would like to share with you a little piece of code. If you need to integrate in-app web browser control into your iPhone apps, this handy module will save you some time.
There are already some solutions to this problem out there but non of them offers the features I needed. First, the solution I present in this article uses a work-around for the well-known UIWebView bug that causes erratic behavior when combining “zooming operations” and “landscape orientation”. Moreover, the solution presented is highly customizable.
I have called it TSMiniWebBrowser. You can download the source code at the end of the article.
Today I would like to share with you a little but useful class to post highscores to Twitter on your games. This tutorial is the perfect companion for the Facebook one I wrote some weeks ago. It basically adds a new abstraction layer to the MGTwitterEngine from Matt Gemmel and the OAuth Twitter Engine from Ben Gottlieb providing the needed UI to send tweets to the user timeline.
The tutorial also shows how to figure out the iOS version and use the Apple’s Twitter API for iOS 5 if available.
You can download the entire project at the end of the article.
Today I would like to share with you a very simple and specific little class that may be very helpful if you encounter the same situation than me. Imagine that you need to manage the language of your app or game independently of the system language settings. It is kind a weird requirement but it is indeed a mandatory requirement for the iOS project I’m currently working on.
So, today I will share with you a little handy class that allows you to change the language of your app’s interface within the app and without the need of restarting. Moreover, the class uses the same dictionary system and files than the localization support offered by Apple.
Today I would like to share with you a little piece of code that I find very handy. A class that helps you managing “updates”. I use it in my apps that work with cached data. You could encounter the situation where you need to develop an app that queries a web service to obtain the data to be shown on the device.
However, sometimes the information you need to access doesn’t change so often and it is not necessary to bother the user with a loading message only to end up showing the same information than 2 minutes before. If being up to date accurately is not critical for your app, the code I’m going to show may help you.
Some months ago I wrote an article on this blog titled “Tools for creating a game“. On that article I talked about the tools I used to develop my first iOS game New Sokoban. The message of that article was summarized with this mental note:
Mental note: always use existing tools. If there is a tool that barely fits your needs use it. You will be amazed about how quickly you adapt yourself to that tool and how your productivity increases.
However, currently I’m working on a new game that needed a very specific and game dependent developing tool. So, unfortunately, I spent about two weeks developing, testing and refining a development tool for my new game. In today’s article I’m going to share the experience.
In today’s post I’m going to share a piece of code that allows your games to easily connect to Facebook. It is a singleton class designed to be reusable, very simple to use and with only one task in mind: post new high scores on Facebook. You can find the example project source code at the end of the article.
The aim of this post is not to teach you about how to use the Facebook API to connect your iPhone games to Facebook. There are a lot of articles covering this topic and the official Facebook developers site. In this tutorial I would like to put the emphasis on the reusable and simplicity to use aspects. It is very easy to integrate in your projects the piece of code I’m going to show you.
Today’s post is going to be a tutorial-style one. One of the (few) annoying things of cocos2d is the fact that it is very unrelated to UIKit and the Model View Controller paradigm of Apple’s views a view controllers. This is a problem when you need to show, for example, a view controller modally to send an e-mail or show Game Center leaderboards and achievements.
In this tutorial I am going to describe the technique I use to connect with “Apple’s layer” from cocos2d in an easy, modular, reusable way. You will find the project source code used on this tutorial at the end of this post.
In today’s post I’m not going to talk about New Sokoban development 🙂 A few weeks ago I got the opportunity to work on a project for developing and iOS universal app. So, today I’m going to talk a little bit about the development of this app called Trucoteca and developed with Trucoteca.com.
Today’s post is the second part of last week post about using sprite sheets with cocos2d and Tiled. In the previous post we saw what is a sprite sheet, how to to create it from a collection of individual sprites using Texture Packer and how to code it using cocos2d for iPhone. Today I’m going to explain how I used sprite sheets as source libraries in Tiled to create and edit New Sokoban puzzles. In this previous post I partially covered this topic. However, today I’m going to enter in more detail into some technical issues.
As we saw in the first part of this article, sprite sheets are mainly used to drastically improve our games performance in terms of both memory and CPU usage. We basically need to group our original individual sprites and then have some way to refer to them in our game code.
Vegeta Sprite Sheet
