iAds and the iAds for develoeprs program has been a boon for developers showing iAds within their apps due to the extremely high CPM rates.   The cost for non-developer ads has been said to be as high as $18 CPM while those of AdMob are considerably less than a dollar.   The cost for developer ads is 0.25 cents per click.

It’s been suggested that these new ads perform quite well.  Personally I’ve been extremely skeptical as even the much lower cost for AdMob ads does not make for easy profit.  Fortunately, the developers at Cross Forward Consulting performed a test, and decided to share their results.

The overall results of Cross Forward Consulting advertising their app, Audiobooks Premium, a pretty successful app in it’s own right have shown absolutely dismal results.

The end results were $1251.75 spent on iAds providing 5,007 clicks and  just 48 downloads..   The overall cost was $14.90 for each download.  There were 2,052,929 impressions.

You can see the full writeup, and further details in the article here:
iAd for Developers

Sure, some might say a more expensive app could do better, but it’s hard to imagine how it could be worthwhile.  Considering the extremely high CPM rates non-developers are paying for iAds it looks like the iAds CPM rates are about as stable as a house of cards unless somehow iAds performance were to dramatically improve.  Especially given the much lower AdMob rates. Imagine if the test was done at the rate those big-wig advertisers are supposedly paying.. the cost would have been over $750 for a download.

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©2012 iPhone, iOS 5, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

Let’s face it.. it’s easy to get distracted.

Following through on your app ideas all the way to completion can be difficult, especially if someone isn’t looking over your shoulder.

I found this great article from Cliff Harris, developer of some excellent indie games providing some tips on how he keeps himself motivated when working on a project.  While he’s not an iPhone or iPad developer the tips certainly apply.

Here’s 3 key ideas that I got out of it – that I personally feel would be helpful:

1. Work on projects you actually like – not projects that are just meant to capitalize on something you have absolutely no interest in.
2. Work on the cool stuff in the project early - special effects, graphics, stuff that actually can be inspiring to see and makes you think “this is going to be awesome” – Cliff picked up on this from Lionhead games.
3. Keep a log of your work every day – I always try to get away from doing this myself, but when I do it really does help to stay motivated and efficient.

You can read all of Cliff’s ideas in his article:
How To Stay Motivated Whilst Programming A Game

This video below is from Cliff’s game “Gratuitous Space Battles” which he developed with a small team (looks too cool to be indie but it is – too bad it’s PC only.. great idea for an iPhone game).  The game has incredibly cool graphics and I hope that you enjoy the eye candy.

Btw, if you’ve written an article 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.

[Source: Cliff Harris]

©2012 iPhone, iOS 5, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

 This is the second part of the tutorial on building your iPhone App’s interface in interface builder.  In this video I quickly drag out all the elements, and connect the interface elements with the appropriate outlets, and actions, and build the class file automatically.

This is the 5th video/tutorial in this series, and I hope you enjoy it.

The first tutorial can be found here:
>>> Developing Your First Apple iPhone App <<<

The project containing the app at the end of this video can be found here:
Project file for tutorial

We will finally get into writing code in the next video!

Here it is:

Thanks for reading.
 

©2012 iPhone, iOS 5, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

Continuing where I left off yesterday I will describe some of the potential hangups when converting OpenGL code to OpenGL ES. The first thing I noticed when trying to convert some OpenGL code to the iPhone’s OpenGL ES was that on the iPhone there is no glVertex function.  Instead of glVertex you will need to use a vertex array.  I’ll give an example from Nehe Tutorial #2.

For example, in Nehe OpenGL tutorial #2 you see the lines:

What these lines do is create a triangle with the vertices specified through the glVertex3f function (3 dimensional locations).

In OpenGL ES the glBegin and glEnd, and glVertex functions do not exist, the above lines would be rewritten using a vertex array.
In my remake of the Nehe Tutorial #2 for iPhone this is done using the following lines:

glEnableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY);
glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 0, triangleVertices);
glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, 0, 3);

Here, an array is created, and then in order to draw the array we:

1. use glEnableClientState to enable use of a vertex array
2. use glVertexPointer to specify the size, datatype of the points stored in the array, and name of the array.
3. use glDrawArrays to draw the vertex array, in this case using the 3 points to draw a connected triangle.

Now you can see that this code provides the exact same result, just in OpenGL ES they’ve removed all redundancies so you need to use vertex arrays, and the glBegin, and glEnd semantics are removed.  Next I’ll be exploring the differences using perspective functions in OpenGL ES.

©2012 iPhone, iOS 5, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

Lee Barney the founder of QuickConnect for Iphone recently informed me that his framework has been and is being used in apps currently available in Apple’s app store.

For those that don’t know, I mentioned QuickConnect a couple of times in the past week as a framework that allows you to write your apps in javascript, and publish them on multiple mobile platforms. It appears as though the frame work is quite far along on the Iphone, and it’s great to see that one of these frameworks really is being actively developed. The prospect of being able to develop apps for all the coming app stores without having to rework any code is definitely enticing.

For those looking to get started with QuickConnect for Iphone I suggest checking out the wiki which contains a couple of video demonstrations. The framework is available from here and contains many examples.

It’s definitely worth checking out, and I may even write an app I’ve been working on now in QuickConnect as I need native database access, but am finding it very tedious to connect with all the various web services using raw Objective-C code.

Any tips for those that have used it would be great.  Have a great weekend.

©2012 iPhone, iOS 5, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

Ok, if you’ve been following my last few posts I introduced several frameworks that are designed to enable developoment of native Iphone apps using HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

First, a visitor asked why would you write an app using Javascript instead of Objective-C?

I can think of several reasons.

1. You’ve already written an Iphone web app, but want to expand your reach by placing your app in the app store.
2. You are or are working with web developers who don’t understand Objective-C and are unwilling or unable to learn how to use Objective-C.
3. You want your app to run on other platforms without having to port your code. (can be done using some of the available javascript Iphone frameworks)
4. You want to interact with web services, and find it cumbersome to do so using Objective-C code.

The third and fourth reasons are why I’m interested in this type of development. I like Objective-C development, but writing the code to interact with different web services can really be tedious, and there are many more examples and libraries available for doing this using Ajax. Also, every platform seems to be coming out with an app store.

On to the topic at hand.

Sending data from your Objective-C code to an app written in Javascript is not difficult, as Apple has written a command.

The procedure for doing this is shown here: Iphone App Development For Web Hackers.  In a nutshell you send Javascript commands by using the stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString: message in the UIWebView class.   In this example, this is done with the following code:

This code executes the update_position function within javascript contained on the page loaded in the UIWebView very nifty. The strings is executed as if it were javascript actually on the page. This can be used to easily send values like location as above, touches, or accelerometer details that normally wouldn’t be available to your javascript code. This is an excellent tutorial if you have not created a “native” app on the Iphone using javascript before.

Tommorow I will get into the more complex matter of interacting with Objective-C code using javascript running in a UIWebView.

©2012 iPhone, iOS 5, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

This article is about quickly developing 3D games on the iPhone using free game engines and with  CoreAnimation, for information about free 2D iPhone Game engines please check the Previous Article Here.

If you are determined to get into developing a 3D game there are a couple of free engines. The first one I’ll mention is the SIO2 Engine. I haven’t explored this engine in detail, but from running the examples and going through a couple of the tutorials it looks to be well made, it is written in C, but the learning curve is easier than you would think especially if you have used Blender.  The second engine is the Oolong Engine created by well known graphics programmer Wolfgang Engel from Rockstar Games.  I’ve been messing around with this engine for awhile, and find it to be excellent, be warned though it is extremely low level, and has no documentation so you will be learning simply from example.  It is basically the PowerVR 3D SDK optimized for the iPhone with added memory management, 3ds loading, and a math library, and is essentially meant for programmers with an understanding of OpenGL ES, which probably makes it fall into the “not quick” category of development, but I thought I should mention it for those wondering what I would use.

The final alternative for “quick” game development on the iPhone is just to use CoreAnimation, from what I understand game development using CoreAnimation can lead to performance issues, but if you’re developing a game that doesn’t include any fast action such as a board or card game then it may be your best bet.  I’d suggest looking at the GeekGameBoard example from Apple. While the example is a Mac OS X the syntax is very similar, and you should be well on your way to coding a game in CoreAnimation.  There are a few missing features, but you can certainly develop a non-action oriented game using CoreAnimation.  I left CoreAnimation for last simply because from what I’ve read on the iPhone boards it really is only viable for specific games.

Thanks for reading, and if you know of any good free iPhone game development tools that I haven’t mentioned then please comment about them below.

©2012 iPhone, iOS 5, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

I’ve been asked by several visitors to my videos as to how one can develop games quickly on the iPhone, and I understand that learning OpenGL ES and building your own game from scratch can be a daunting task.

Then when I respond talking about some of the commercial frameworks out there that cost $500 a seat per developer, the next question of course is there anything that can do it for free.

In all honesty you won’t find anything at the level of say, iTorque for free. However, there are some good free frameworks out there.

In my opinion the easiest free framework is Cocoas2D. This is an excellent open source framework for creating 2D (yes, sorry just 2D) games. In my opinion this is probably the best starting point for someone who is fairly new to game development on the iPhone and just wants to jump right in without having to worry about learning OpenGL, or even having to learn any of the finer points of iPhone development. You will need an understanding of Objective-C however as the documentation is somewhat minimal you will be learning how to do things mainly from the given examples. What I’ve found Cocoas2D great for is as a means to learning OpenGL ES, I was able to see from looking at the source code how to translate several OpenGL tutorials, and quickly learned how to do what I needed.

Some of the games created with Cocoas2D can be found here . You’d be surprised with how many games in the app store were created using this framework.

That’s all for today, check back tommorow when I get into a couple of free 3D engines for iPhone game development.

©2012 iPhone, iOS 5, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

I updated the iPhone Objective-C 2.0 Cheat Sheet Today which I created earlier to accompany my video on transitioning to Objective-C. 

Please watch this video if you are new to Objective-C as I explain things in more detail during the video. I have updated the sheet to include syntax examples from Objective-C which are similar to those in other languages.  You will find short examples from C/C++ and Java that will allow those knowledgable with those languages to pick up on much of the Objective-C syntax immediately. I am constantly looking to improve this cheat sheet, and would like to hear your opinion on ways that you think this sheet could be improved, or things you feel should be added.  My goal is to turn this into the best possible cheat sheet. Also, I am going to create an advanced iPhone Objective-C   cheat sheet later on, so please if there is something you feel should be included on that sheet mention it below.

Thanks for reading, the next video will be out soon! >>> Download the iPhone Objective-C Cheat Sheet <<<

The cheat sheet has been updated please check out the iPhone SDK Objective-C Development Cheatsheet here.

©2012 iPhone, iOS 5, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

Hi everybody,

I got a couple of e-mails asking what Objective-C categories are, as a couple of developers ran into them when looking up stuff using the jump to definition, research assistant and help in Xcode.

I didn’t explain them in my first Objective-C tutorial as they are not too identical to something that already exists in C/C++ or Java, and they are not neccessary to use in your code.

However they are frequently used by Apple so you will run into them in your code, so in this video I explain the details, and talk about why you might want to use Categories in your code.

Please post any other questions you may have below.

©2012 iPhone, iOS 5, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.