Another excellent week to be an iOS developer, and some big news in the department of iOS game development with the release of  Cocos2D V1.0.0 and the opening of the Moai SDK beta to everyone.  Also some great open source libraries and tutorials were shared.

If you have written a tutorial, open source library or tool that you would like to share you can submit the url here.

I’ve been contacted a number of times about advertising on this site so I decided to add support for BuySellAds, and added a section for small button ads.  If interested you can check out the advertising page here.

Here are the resources from the last week in order of popularity:

Open Source: Easy Multistroke and Single Stroke Complex Gesture Recognition On iOS - A couple of great libraries if you are looking to quickly implement complex gesture within your app.

Open Source: iCade Library For Easy Integration In iOS Games - Library that allows you to easily support the iCade classic arcade box/controller for iPad.  Makes a good example if you are trying to support a specific bluetooth interfacing device.

Tutorial: Manipulating Images With Touch Gestures - A tutorial with sample code demonstrating how to add touch features for image manipulation.

Tutorial: iOS Map Kit For Beginners Guide - A getting started tutorial for those beginning with the iOS map kit including a tutorial on displaying data from XML locations on a map without using any libraries outside of those included with  the iOS SDK.

Open Source: Active Record For Core Data Library - A great open source project modeled after Ruby On Rail’s ActiveRecord for more straightforward data retrieval.

News: Cocos2D Game Engine v1.0.0 Released - News about the highly popular Cocos2D game engine finally reaching the v1.0.0 release.

Tutorial: iOS Multithreading With Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) Basics - An excellent step by step guide beginning with the basics on multithreading with iOS ‘s Grand Central Dispatch.

News: Moai SDK Game Development Kit Made Available To All - The lua based open source Moai SDK has now opened the beta for anyone to download and use.

Tutorial: Calculator App Style Glossy Buttons With Core Graphics - An explanation of the technique used to create buttons just like the calculator applications that come with iOS devices.

Tutorial: How To Use The iOS Keychain To Store Names And Passwords - A guide on using the iOS keychain in order to securely store usernames and passwords.

Thanks for reading, please bookmark and share this post!

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

As you may have noticed if you have been reading this site for awhile, I occasionally mention product updates. This one is pretty significant as after numerous release candidates the incredibly successful open source Cocos2D iPhone game engine has finally released v1.0.0.

There are an incredible amount of feature updates since the previous official release of Cocos2D. This update from the last release candidate itself even adds support for non-power of two PVR textures.

You can read the full feature list showing the updates included in v1.0.0 vs the last major release:
Cocos2D v1.0.0 Release Notes

Steffen Itterheim, author of the Learn iPhone and iPad Cocos2d Game Development book has created an installer that you can run on your Mac to easily install Cocos2D 1.0.0, Cocos3D and all the templates automatically.  You can find it here.

You can find the Cocos2D source on Github here:
https://github.com/cocos2d

Exciting news for Cocos2D devs.

Read more: iPhone Dev News

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

There’s been alot of hate from the “hardcore” gaming and game development crowd towards iPhone and iPad gaming.  They don’t like it that on the iPhone you can purchase high-quality games at a small fraction of the price thanks to the relatively low cost of the iPhone SDK vs. the “hardcore” gaming platforms.  They seem to like it even less when independent developers achieve some level of success.

According to the Game Developer Research 2009-2010 Survey, the Wii is the big loser dropping from 42 to 30 percent of console developers.   The iPhone and iPod touch developer numbers more than double those on Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.  This bodes well for the iPad which will allow for more complex games.

The fact of the matter is that the iPhone 3GS has tremendous graphical power.  The controls are intuitive, even though there’s no available gamepad (yet…), and there are first class tools and libraries available at little or no cost.  The more traditional platforms will need to let independent developers in at a low cost, or they will continue to lose support.

You can read more about the survey and it’s results  on Gamasutra here: State of Game Development Survey Reveals iPhone Support Surge, Wii Lull

If you are looking to get started with iPhone game development, and are looking to go the Objective-C route you should check out these excellent iPhone game programming tutorials.

You can also check out some open source iPhone game engines, and commercial iPhone game engines.

Please post any comments below, thanks!

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

You’ve probably heard by now that Flash CS5 is coming with iPhone support. I know several artists that are extremely excited, and I’ve been doing some fiddling around with Flash game development, and I’m getting excited too. I came across this interesting story from some developers who have already created a game using Adobe Flash CS5 that has been able to reach a top 10 download position in several countries.

The game is Alchemist (iTunes link), and the original article can be found here.

The developers state that even though they have never developed a mobile game, that they were able to make a high quality app that is almost indistinguishable from a native app in actual use. That being said there were a few negatives:

• Performance is not as good as a native app so they don’t suggest using frame heavy engines, and Papervision 3D (a popular 3D graphics engine for the Flash platform) was unusable.
• The game will need some optimization to run on the iPhone, don’t expect a web game to run straight out.
• No way to integrate social gaming support used in native apps.
• No support for in app purchases.

Despite these negatives the developers felt like the whole experience was “a breeze from start to finish”, and will allow anyone with Photoshop, and basic Flash knowledge to build a high quality app.

I look forward to playing with this thing.. I have to admit Flash game development is pretty fun, it’s nice to see results so quickly… need to get my Photoshop abilities up to snuff though

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

The terrific open source Cocos2D for iPhone game engine has been updated, the new release contains Chipmunk 5.0 (physics engine) integration, better spritesheet handling and more.

You can read more about the update on the Cocos2D blog here along with how to upgrade your game for use with this release:
Cocos2D for iPhone 0.9.0 Beta Update Released

The update can be downloaded here:
http://cocos2d-iphone.googlecode.com/files/cocos2d-iphone-0.9.0-beta.tar.gz

If you haven’t checked out Cocos2D before and are looking for a free 2D game engine for the iPhone be sure to check out my listings of Cocos2D Resources and Open Source Cocos2D Games.

Thanks.
 

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

Hi everybody, just wanted to clear something up.  I received a message on MSN stating that the popular Unity game engine for iPhone was now being offered for free, this was exciting, and I decided to go check things out.  So here’s what’s really going on. 

The Unity Indie edition has now been completely removed.  This was the lower priced version of Unity that required you to show a splash screen and had several features removed that existed in the much more expensive Unity Pro version.  Unity Indie is renamed just plain Unity which is now free. 

The Unity iPhone Basic edition still costs $399.. this is the bare minimum of what you need to develop games with Unity, run them on the iPhone and get them into the app store.  That being said this is still a great thing for iPhone developers.  The reason? Unity no longer requires you to apply to download the iPhone edition of Unity, but rather offers a direct download to a 30 day trial for iPhone users (internet communists you need not worry.. these Unity links are not affiliate links so you can d/l).   Since you can also get a feel for the engine completely free of charge since you have an unlimited time to use the editor, and can run games on your desktop computer is also great just in case you end up realizing it’s not for you, you can find the download for "Unity" the new free version of Unity Indie here for mac.

All in all, this is a great thing… that is unless you owned Unity Indie in which case I would probably be a bit upset although they are offering Unity Indie owners a discount on upgrading to Unity Pro.

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

You may have heard that Adobe Flash CS5 will include support for the iPhone.   Due to Apple’s restrictions on code interpreters the flash will actually be compiled to native machine code rather than run through an interpreter.  You can read the blog post on Adobe’s website about the addition of iPhone compatibility in Flash CS5 here.

So what does this mean?  Will this change anything?

For those who already develop with Flash his is a very significant development, you can see on the Adobe page linked above how ecstatic some developers are, they seem to feel as though they have found the holy grail.  I have converted Flash projects to the iPhone platform, and it’s a cumbersome task, but creating simple applications visually in the Flash environment is not difficult at all.  There will no doubt be a flood of simplistic 2D games created by graphics artists with little programming knowledge.

For more sophisticated 3D games, which seem to be becoming more and more commonplace in the app store, the addition of Flash is probably not as meaningful even if there is more advanced support for 3D graphics in Flash CS5 as there are already wysiwyg 3D gaming solutions such as Stonetrip and Unity 3D.

For simplistic non-gaming apps Flash may be a solution for some, but I really can’t see it being too significant, while there are numerous Adobe Air apps available, Adobe Air has never really gained significant market share.  Cross-platform compatibility may mean even less as Apple dominates in mobile application sales.

For more sophisticated apps we will need to wait and see what capabilities of the iPhone are accessible, but it looks like Cocoa Touch and Objective-C will remain dominant in that regard.

Overall, I’d say this could be a very significant development for artists and programmers for which Flash is already part of their work flow, dependant on when Flash CS5 is actually released.  For the rest of us developers this doesn’t really mean anything at this stage, but once released I will be using whatever development environment allows me to release the best products as fast as possible.  I had the feeling something would come out like this awhile ago so I went through the excellent Actionscript 3.0 Game Programming University book which was a fun, and easy way to become acquainted with Flash development.

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