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The Best Resources In iOS Development July 19th 2010 (For Week 07/10-07/16)

John — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 07:15:09 +0000

Thanks for visiting, things have continued to accelerate in the iPhone and iPad developer blogging world. It seems like each week there is more and more great content being put out. I am continuing to look through, and filter for the good stuff to share with you, and I still have a lot to look through.

If you have a resource that you would like to share then you can submit it. This site received about 40,000 page views in the last week according to Google analytics, and I try to give submitted content priority. I also like to give priority to those who are new, have linked back or have shared content from this site on Twitter.

Anyways, here are the resources from 7/10-7/16 in order of popularity and sharing!

How To Program A Fully Functional iOS Photo Viewer Quickly With Three20
A great tutorial from Ray Wenderlich on using the photo viewer in the uber handy Three20 open source library.

3 Great Tutorials For Beginning iOS Developers
Three great tutorials for beginners from Nick Vellios.

Drag-In Straightforward Pathfinding Library For iOS Game Developers
An excellent open-source library for adding pathfinding into iPhone and iPad games from the creator of ASIHttpRequest.

Programming A Non-Fullscreen iOS Movie Player That Even Runs In Portrait
A handy code snippet from John Muchow on creating a movie player that works in portrait mode, and doesn’t automatically go full screen.

4 Ridiculously Handy Custom iPhone UI Tricks and Libraries
Four very handy code snippets from Hans Pinckaers for UIKit user interface builders.

How To Add Turn Based Multiplayer Into Your iPhone Games Easily With Openfeint
A nice tutorial on how to easily implement turn based multiplayer using Openfeint from Kwigbo.

Glossy iPhone Buttons Without Images Or Private APIs
A very nice open source library for adding glossy colored iPhone buttons that can be laid out using interface builder from Hwee-Boon Yar.

Using Objective-C JSON To Do Translations In An iOS App
Another great tutorial from Ray Wenderlich this time on using JSON with Google Translate to add translations into an iPhone app.

Easily Accommodate Different iOS Versions With This Clean Code
A nice tutorial with sample code showing how to accomodate different versions of iOS with uglifying your code.

That’s it – If you liked something on this list, please share it!

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How To Add Turn Based Multiplayer Into Your iPhone Games Easily With Openfeint

John — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 06:48:30 +0000

I am a huge fan of multiplayer games. Especially on the iPhone… in fact at one time I did consider starting an app review site just for multiplayer games. The nature of multiplayergaming could also cause your game to go viral.

What I don’t like about multiplayer games is handling all the small details such as building a lobby for the players to find each other through, and making sure all the small details work. And in the end with an indie title you may not even know if there will be players who will play it multiplayer.

Fortunately OpenFeint has made this considerably easier when they added turn based multiplayer to their already extremely popular social gaming platform on iOS devices.

Kwigbo, developer of the open source game Artifice (listed in our open source iphone app listing) has created a straightforward tutorial showing the code that he uses within his game which you can find here:
OpenFeint Multiplayer In Artifice

The tutorial features code showing you how to use OpenFeint in order to:

Create a new game
Find open games
Challenge friends
Take turns
And More…

Some details about OpenFeint’s multiplayer capability are stated here:
http://www.openfeint.com/ofdeveloper/index.php/kb/article/000074

This looks like a very nice and easy to add turn based multiplayer into your games.

If you liked this, please share it with others!

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4 Ridiculously Handy Custom iPhone UI Tricks and Libraries

John — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 21:45:58 +0000

The iPhone has a great UI library, but there are still times when you think to yourself when programming — why didn’t they include this feature?

Whenever that thought pops into my head (probably because I’m an efficiency freak who likes to do things in the least possible time) and I can’t easily find the answer in Apple’s documentation I look to see if someone has done it before, and shared their results.

Hans Pinckaers, an 18 year old developer from the Netherlands submitted in a collection of several tips and custom UI classes that he has put together.

They include:

1. A multiline/auto-resizing UITextView element which operates similar to the SMS app. (here)

2. How to perform a custom action when the user presses a UIBackButton. (here)

3. A High performance rounded corner UITableView implementation. (here)

4. How to create a copyable UITableViewCell. (here)

Btw, if you’ve seen a good iOS tip feel free to submit it, or a link to it here and if I think the readers will like it I’ll feature it on the site in front of our 2,000+ daily visitors.

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Screw Multitasking: How To Make Your iOS 4 Apps Exit For Real

John — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 00:06:55 +0000

This post is in response to a question on the iPhone Dev SDK forums about how to make your apps not run in the background now that multitasking has finally appeared on the iPhone.

Multi-tasking can be great, but it has added some complexity to programming on the iPhone. For many apps there really is no advantage. For instance, does the “That’s What She Said” button really need to stay in memory?

It’s some added complexity that programmers don’t need.. some of the more complex memory intensive apps will just exit anyways, and programming the app to suspend can be a highly complicated task.

Fortunately there is a simple way to make your iOS 4 apps terminate for real when the user taps the home button.

This is a simple process:

Open your info.plist file
Add The Key UIApplicationExitsOnSuspend or Select Application does not run in background
Set the new key to YES or Fill in the tick box

Now your applicationwillterminate: method will be run when the user taps the home key, and your app will exit for real.

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Get iAds Into Your App Fast With This Tutorial

John — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 02:16:11 +0000

You may have heard about how some apps have been making a lot of money through advertising.

The eBuddy success story comes to mind, but for most of us it’s a tough way to earn money, and to earn the most money we’ve had to put a price tag on things. It’s really been an up or down thing, and since the early rush from advertisers the payouts went down dramatically and stabilized.

Apple has added their iAds platform into the mix which is supposed to create ads so engaging that the end result for developers is suppose to be much higher ad revenue when compared previously provided. We’ll see if that’s true and how long it lasts.

All over the forums right now I see posts form people having trouble getting iAds to work properly.

Fortunately Ray Wenderlich has posted a complete tutorial and project with actual working iAds.

So if ou’re interested get those iAds into your app fast… if it’s like when the previous platforms first appeared the initial payouts should be at a high CPM rate.

[Source: Ray Wenderlich]

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Free Advanced iPhone and iPad Development Course Available

John — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 22:28:28 +0000

Good iPhone training can be tough to come by, and it seems like there are now hundreds of course available. Unfortunately many of the local courses are just taught by the book so there is little to no advanced instruction.

So here is some good news for those looking for some professional, advanced instruction.

A free advanced iPhone development course has been released on iTunes featuring Dr. Brad Larson of Sunset Lake Software, creator of the popular open source iPhone app Molecules. The course features 14 sessions (over 35 hours!), and comes complete with notes.

Topics covered include iPad specific programming, threading, Core Animation, Quartz 2d and OpenGL ES.

You can find the course on iTunes here.
The notes are available in html format here.

Update: It was suggested that I compare this to the CS193P course for iPhone development that was previously released on iTunes. This course is completely different, expects that you already know Objective-C, and is much more advanced. From what I’ve seen so far this course goes much deeper into the advanced topics which are barely mentioned in the Stanford CS193p course. It is not a course for new programmers who only have a basic Object Oriented programming class under their belt like the Stanford one.

[Source: Sunset Lake Software Via: Alex Curylo]

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Book Released Featuring Cocos2D and Unity 3d Programming

John — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 22:22:37 +0000

Just got an interesting note that a new book has been released early from Apress featuring Cocos2D and Unity 3D programming.

I haven’t talked about iPhone and iPad development books on here for awhile because for the most part the ones I’ve seen in the last few months have just been re-releases of the same old stuff.

This one caught my eye because it features chapters that are of particular interest to me specifically those on Unity 3D, Cocos2D, importing 3D assets into your games, and on using OpenCV in iPhone apps.

Hopefully I’ll be able to check it out in the future, no Kindle version yet (can’t wait for it!) and I didn’t see it available locally, but you can search through the contents or get the paperback book here.

Thanks to the eBuddy blog for pointing out that this was available, they are also featured in the book with a tutorial on push notifications.

Please post any thoughts on the book below, especially if you have had a chance to read it.

[Source: eBuddy Blog]

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Free Development Videos From WWDC 2010

John — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 19:59:23 +0000

Apple has given devs a pretty nice present, if you haven’t seen this I suggest checking it out.

Just taking a look at these now, and wanted to share with anyone who hasn’t seen this page yet.

You can find the videos through here: WWDC 2010 Videos

There’s also a ton of sample code that has been added which you’ll find a link to on that page in iTunes.

Please Click Here To Retweet This Article.

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Great Beginners Core Data Tutorial

John — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 07:28:51 +0000

Core Data is a very powerful library, and easy to use, but it’s so different from database libraries you have used in the past that it may seem frustrating and tedious when you first start using it.

Fortunately, Ray Wenderlich has written an excellent an easy tutorial for those beginning with core data.

[Source: Ray Wenderlich]

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Recording Of Actual iPhone/iPad App Store Submission

John — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 20:53:08 +0000

The guys at 71 Squared have been nice enough to create a recording showing a full submission to the appstore along with an excellent description of exactly what’s going on. This can be a very tedious process, especially the first time you go through it, and this video shows you exactly how to get it done.

Check it out:
App Store Submission

Source: 71 Squared

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