It seems that with the introduction of the iPad and iPhone 4 there is an explosion in the number of resources and blog posts for iOS development, and it certainly appears that the popularity of the iOS SDK has hit a new peak.

I understand it has become harder to keep up with things so I’d like to introduce a new feature where I will show the previous week’s posts in order of popularity (based on traffic and tweets) .

You can check out the first edition below:

1. Screw Multitasking: How To Make Your iOS 4 Apps Exit For Real
A quick tip on how to set your apps to remove themselves from memory immediately upon exit in iOS 4.

2. Cool Tool For Quickly Making Glossy iOS Buttons
A tool for easily making custom glass buttons using the iPhone simulator.

3. Interactive iPad App Prototypes In Under 30 Minutes Using Keynote
A keynote theme allowing you to easily create an interactive iPad interface prototype.

4. With Just 3 Lines Of Code Add Twitter/Facebook Into Your iOS App
Introduction to the Sharekit library for easily adding social sharing into iOS apps.

5. iPad Development Tutorial and Resources Collection
A list of top-notch iPad tutorials and resources.

6. Easily Adjust Your Images For The iPad or iPhone Retina Display
Introduction to an open source library that allows for easy resizing of UIImageView elements.

7. A Carnival For iOS Developers! Get In Get Traffic
Several developers get together and form iDevBlogADay to grow their traffic.

8. How To Stay Motivated And Actually Complete Your iOS App
Several tips on maintaining motivation throughout a large indpendent software project.

9. iOS Developer Gold Discovered On Twitter
Some great tips found on Twitter for iOS developers.

10. Nice & Easy iOS OpenAL Sound Library – Open Source
A very easy to use open source library allowing for easy integration of OpenAL.

If you like this list then please share it with others.  Thanks!

©2010 iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News. All Rights Reserved.

Now as the title suggests this book teaches you the techniques for performing animation using Apple’s Core Animation libraries.  If you’d like to know specifically what is in the book you can go here and use the search inside this book link to search the book and read the table of contents. The book teaches you through a series of examples that perform specific tasks.  I liked the straightforwardness of the approach, but I would say that this isn’t a book for beginners.  At the very least you will want to have a good understanding of Objective-C, and a basic understanding of the patterns used in Cocoa and Cocoa Touch.  I liked the layout and organization book which makes it useful as a reference.  Something to note is that this book is not specifically an iPhone book, and most of the examples use the Mac and some Mac only topics such as Core Image are covered in the book.

Pros

• Well laid out, makes a good reference book
• Covers differences between Mac and iPhone Core Animation
• Examples are very goal oriented which is good if you have a specific task to perform

Cons

• Not specifically an iPhone book
• Requires knowledge of Objective-C and Mac or iPhone programming
• Some more comments in the code examples would be nice

Overall, I’d say that this is a good Core Animation reference book, or for teaching yourself the principles of Core Animation.  If you’re an absolute beginner you’ll want to make sure you have a thorough understanding of Objective-C and the basics of using Cocoa Touch.  The examples are very well thought out, and if you’re looking to do something specific you’ll probably find it in this book along with some sample code.  The fact that most of the examples are Mac isn’t really a big deal, in the future the extra pages on topics like Core Image may turn into a positive if those libraries are added to the iPhone OS.

The book can be ordered here at $9.90 off the retail price.

©2010 iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News. All Rights Reserved.

Once again I’ve tried to only include sites that update, and are more than just iTunes scrapers (which seem to have multiplied dramatically).  I have included some review sites this time that are not specifically iPhone, but could provide you with a good boost.   I did this after finding out a local programmer was able to get an app reviewed by Gizmodo -  and their app really wasn’t anything special – so don’t think your app isn’t good enough.

Please, if you copy and paste this list on your own blog.. link back.  I put in a fair amount of time finding all these and sorting them.  I heard there is actually a service out there now selling this list so beware before paying for this.

These are new sites that were previously not on the list:
http://www.applesauceblog.com/
http://www.iusethisapp.com/
http://app-reciationreviews.blogspot.com
http://www.macworld.com/appguide/index.html
http://ifanzine.blogspot.com/

The rest of the listings are ranked based on their Compete.com rank.  Lower means more traffic.

http://gizmodo.com – 703
http://arstechnica.com/apple/iphone/apps/ – 2,164
http://www.macworld.com/appguide/index.html – 2,964
http://toucharcade.com – 17,963
http://appsafari.com – 20,008
http://148apps.com – 28,493
http://appadvice.com – 30,224
http://appcraver.com – 35,313
http://iphoneapplicationlist.com 35,793
http://iphonealley.com/reviews/apps/ 38,385
http://appleiphoneschool.com/ – 46,571
http://appvee.com – 63,609
http://apptism.com – 64,156
http://appstoreapps.com 83,324
http://whatsoniphone.com/ – 103,990
http://krapps.com/ 126,102
http://iphoneappreviews.net/ 127,765
http://dailyappshow.com – 182,541
http://freshapps.com/ – 190,649
http://theiphoneappreview.com/ – 219,643
http://reviewmyiphoneapp.com/ – 237,569
http://appshouter.com/ – 250,748
http://nativeiphoneapps.com 331,810
http://slapapp.com/ – 729,423
http://www.imedicalapps.com/- 1,073,964
http://apptheater.com 1,157,874
http://tapcritic.com/ – 2,158,175
http://iphoneblog.de – 2,864,164
http://alliphoneappsreview.com – unknown
http://app-reciationreviews.blogspot.com – unknown
http://ifanzine.blogspot.com/ – unknown
http://www.iusethisapp.com/ – unknown
http://www.applesauceblog.com/ – unknown

If you have or know of any other good app review sites please post them below.  Thanks!

©2010 iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News. All Rights Reserved.

At some point you will need to compile your app on the official iPhone SDK running on the Mac OS X if your goal is to get your app in to Apple’s iPhone app store.  Now, I know there is the obvious "hackintosh" solution, but I won’t get into that, not only is it possibly illegal, but I’ve seen someone try it… and it was a major continuous hassle, every update of the OS and SDK cost them valuable hours, when they could  just get a sub-$600 Mac Mini and avoid all hassles.  That being said there are ways to develop your iPhone app in windows.

I am limiting those shown here to those from which apps already available in the store have been created with, and some that appear to be exceptionally well done.

These two Windows alternatives are specifically for entertainment apps, and will allow you to (when the projects are loaded on a mac) compile directly into code usable on the iPhone.  Both of these game development engines offer a free trial.

1) Unity 3D – Game development engine and editor that utilizes Boo and C# and the editor works on both Windows and Mac.

2) Stonetrip S3D – Game develop engine and editor utilizing LUA, the editor runs within Windows.

Both these solutions can compile to code that is native to the iPhone and many apps available in the app store have been created using them.

These solutions allow you to create apps using web technologies (HTML/CSS/Javascript) and then run them through an Objective-C framework that responds to actions within a UIWebView, thus allowing you to access native functionality on the iPhone.  These frameworks are free.

3) Appcelerator Titanium – This is probably the most complete of these development platforms at this stage (other than the above game engines), and extensive support is provided.

4) Genuitec MobiOne – This is an interface designer that uses the Phonegap framework to deliver native functionality.  It only runs on windows.

There are a couple of other solutions that were either in testing, required payment without any form of trial (or in some cases even screenshots), or just aren’t out yet.  The most promising of those solutions are  Flash CS5 (which supposedly may let you bypass the Mac altogether), and the Dragonfire SDK (you can visit their site, and sign up for the dragonfire beta.).

Best of luck, if you know of any other alternatives that enable iPhone Development on Windows then please list them below.

©2010 iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News. All Rights Reserved.

Marcus Zarra of Cocoa is My Girlfriend and author of the Pragmatic Programmers Core Data book has written an excellent tutorial on Core Data in the January 2010 Issue of Pragpub magazine (PDF link).  The tutorial begins on page 24.

In this tutorial Marcus explains how integral NSFetchedResultsController is in keeping the UI updated.  He goes through explaining the complicated construction of an NSFetchedResultsController, and it’s usage in a UITableView.

Marcus also goes through the implementation of four NSFetchedResultsController methods that are used to automatically notify the interface that changes have been made, and to update accordingly.

Marcus has posted a full example of  NSFetchedResultsController in an RSS reader code on Github.

Be sure to check out the above links, and post any comments below.

©2010 iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News. All Rights Reserved.

I don’t want the podcasts to sound like the audio press releases that I’ve heard on so many blogs.  For one, I don’t want these calls to take longer than 15 minutes as I’m an efficiency freak, and I would also like to transcribe the calls.

So what I’m asking for is some questions, so, what would you ask if you could ask someone with a successful iPhone app anything?

Please enter your question ideas in the form below, tweet them at me, or paste them in the comments.

Also, if you have a successful app, and are willing to share your story (this is considerable free PR as this site gets 60k+ pageviews per 30 days) please contact me at webmaster@maniacdev.com.  Please note I’m just looking for independent developers as they make up most of the developers to this site.

©2010 iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News. All Rights Reserved.

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.

©2010 iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News. All Rights Reserved.

The finished product is shown below.

Rather than sticking with stock components included in Interface Builder, this demonstration shows a simple technique that gives your app a more professional look. As a developer, it can be difficult to create nice looking graphics for your app. Hiring a designer can quickly exceed the budget. However, creating some nice looking graphics is certainly achievable as a beginning designer. In addition to picking up some new great skills, a polished off UI can lend more creditability to your app and provide an overall better user experience.

In the demo, Photoshop Elements is used, which is 80 bucks at adobe.com with a mail-in rebate. To get started, create a new image with these values:

• Width: 80 pixels
• Height: 40 pixels
• Background Contents: Transparent

Select a foreground color from the toolbar, as shown below:

Now select the gradient button, as shown below:

With the gradient selected, swipe from bottom to top on your image. This should produce a gradient color. Now choose File and “Save for Web”. You’ve just created the image we’ll use in our tableview. Let’s switch over to Xcode and implement the image.

In Xcode, we start by creating a navigation based application.

Once the application has been created, add the newly created image by right clicking the Resources folder then “Add” and “Existing Files”, as shown below:

The following code snippet creates two views. Both are then added to the cell’s view. Because the label, which is a view, is added as the last view, we need to ensure its background is transparent (clearColor). Otherwise, it will cover part or all (depending on the size we set) of our background image. Thinking about what this stack of layers will look like, below is a screenshot of the same scenario in Interface Builder:

From the screenshot, you can see the cell’s view owns the imageview and label. Although closer to the bottom, the label is actually top most to the user, hence the reason we need its background to clear.

Let’s take a look at the implementation in Xcode, which is all done in the UITableView delegate method cellForRowAtIndexPath:.

UIImage *image = [UIImage imageNamed:@"gradientcolor.png"];
UIImageView *imageView = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:image];
imageView.contentMode = UIViewContentModeScaleToFill;
cell.backgroundView = imageView;
[imageView release];

UILabel *label = [[UILabel alloc] init];
label.text = @"testing colors";
label.frame = cell.bounds;
label.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];
label.textAlignment = UITextAlignmentCenter;
[cell addSubview:label];
return cell;

In the above snippet, we create an image object using the image we added to our app bundle. Next, we create a UIImageView object with the newly created image. The image view will be assigned to our cell’s background view. The backgroundView will retain an instance of the imageView. Therefore, we release our instance, as follows:

[imageView release];

If we had not released our instance, we’d have two instances of the imageView in memory and thus a memory leak. Moving on down in the code, we create an instance of a label. We set the label’s size to cover the entire cell. The label’s background is set to clear or transparent so it doesn’t hide the cell’s background image. Our assigned text is centered and finally, we add the label to the cell’s view, making it the top most view in the cell.

©2010 iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News. All Rights Reserved.

Math Resources

If you don’t have a basic understanding of 2D and 3D math for computer graphics your head will probably explode once you try learning OpenGL.  To prevent that from happening you should at least understand the terminology, and the reasons why this math is needed.  No need to grind through math problems like in college.. that’s what computers are for.

1. The Black Art of 3D Game Programming Chapter 10 This is a great introduction to graphics math, and really tells you what you need to know about 3D math without getting into what doesn’t really matter.  What I really love about this book is that unlike most similar books this is not a textbook, but rather designed for personal learning which makes a huge difference.The whole book can be found here for free.  It is an old book, but the math still holds true.

2. Vector & Matrix Math Tutorial If you feel that everything in the resource above is flying above your head then you probably will want to take a look at this.  I normally wouldn’t reccomend a resource that brags about being "book sized", but it is very good.

iPhone Specific OpenGL ES 2.0 Resources

3. The OpenGL ES Shading Language This is a free pdf book from Khronos, and actually a really good read, and will teach you what you need to know, again don’t try this until you at least have some OpenGL understanding or your head may explode. Thanks to Bill Dudney one of the authors of iPhone SDK Development for pointing this out.

4. Hello Triangle: An OpenGL ES 2.0 Example – This is a sample chapter from the OpenGL ES 2.0 Programming Guide.  If you’re thinking of getting this book you will probably want to check this out to see if the book is for you as it is, how should I say this… rather academic.

5. The OpenGL ES Programming Book This code from this book has been updated to run on the iPhone and can be found here, and you’ll probably want it if you go through the chapter listed above.  Make sure you have a solid understanding of OpenGL (or OpenGL ES 1.x) before starting this book.  Now it might seem odd to put a paper book here, but you can learn alot from the sample code, and what’s given from the book. 

6. The Oolong Engine An Open source 3D OpenGL ES Game Engine for Iphone, MIT licensed. Written by Wolfgang Engel former Rockstar Games programmer, and author of some intense DirectX books.  Great to see the libraries in here for handling memory, loading 3d models, performing math, and now code is rapidly being added for support of OpenGL ES 2.0 features.

7. Getting Started with OpenGL ES 2.0 on iPhone 3GS A getting started with OpenGL ES 2.0 tutorial that explains some of the most basic differences between OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0.

iPhone Specific OpenGL ES 1.1 Resources

8. iPhone OpenGL ES Tutorial Series I don’t know if Maurice SImon is the smartest person alive, but this is the smartest set of OpenGL ES tutorials I’ve seen.  A terrific resource.

9.  Jeff LaMarche’s iPhone Blog Blog from one of the authors of the excellent Beginning iPhone Development book with many articles on OpenGL ES, and an ongoing OpenGL ES from The Ground Up series.

10. SIO2 Engine this is an excellent Open Source 3D OpenGL ES engine, look at the code, understand, and maybe even use the engine rather than write your own from the ground up (nothing wrong with that).

11. Cocos2D Iphone This is an excellent Open Source 2D OpenGL ES Game Framework for iPhone you can learn alot from going in and looking around the code.  As far as Open Source frameworks go this extremely easy to use, well documented, and has an active community.

12. SDL for iPhone (SDL Version 1.3) The SDL library has been a popular open source library for probably over a decade, and has been used in many games. This is the iPhone port, and a great resource.

Non-iPhone OpenGL ES 1.x Resources

If you use these resources you’ll need to put in some time to get things running on the iPhone, but they are still excellent.

13. Nehe Tutorials Converted To OpenGL ES Michael Gorchak creator of the GluES library has put together this collection of tutorials converted from their original Nehe form.  In case you haven’t heard of them the Nehe tutorials were the definitive free tutorials for learning OpenGL.  Michael has done an excellent job of writing comments for these tutorials.  These tutorials have been updated as of late, and more has been added so be sure to check it out.

14. Khronos OpenGL ES Page This is the OpenGL ES "homepage" on which you will find the reference manual, and lots of examples.  Not specifically IPhone, but there are some great examples here and even a complete racing game BSD licensed.

15. Khronos OpenGL ES 1.x Step-By-Step Tutorials This page is from Imagination Technologies makers of the Iphone GPU, and it contains the Khronos tutorials converted to OpenGL ES and created for the PowerVR technology.  Good to lean from especially as to how they load Pod files.

16. Zeus CMD OpenGL ES Tutorials This site contains 25 Great OpenGL ES Tutorials and they are extremely well paced, this was a site I learned alot from.

17. Typhoon Labs OpenGL ES Tutorials Another excellent set of OpenGL ES tutorials if you’re addicted to tutorials you might want to check these out too.

Interesting OpenGL ES Related Sites

18. GLBenchmark This is a just an interesting site that compares the different mobile devices available that utilize OpenGL ES.  At this point it’s only showing OpenGL 1.1, but you can see how much faster a 3GS is than a 3G even at this stage. 

This is just a quick video on an approach to getting started with iPhone OpenGL ES, emphasizing that it’s helpful to start with learning 3D math:

That’s the latest version of the list, be sure to post below if you find out about any other useful OpenGL ES resources.
 

©2010 iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News. All Rights Reserved.

Xcode, the IDE provided by Apple for iPhone and Mac development is widely purported by beginning iPhone developers in online forums to be terrible.   For awhile I believed the forum trolls, and I accepted that Xcode was a subpar IDE.  In months of usage I didn’t think much of it only making a few preference changes enabling little more than code completion.  Recently however, I came across a great set of tips that opened my eyes to the possibility that Xcode wasn’t as bad as these newbies (interestingly enough.. mainly Java developers) said.

A Great Set of Tips And Tricks

So a few days ago I came across a collection of Xcode tips.  Now most of these tips I knew about, but a few of them I didn’t even after months of using Xcode.  I hadn’t really explored all the shortcuts, or even clicked all those little buttons in the coding environment.

Link:  10 Xcode Tips And Tricks

Xcode Objective-C Macros Cheat Sheet

Since I didn’t know all those tips, I decided to look further, and while I was aware that macros had existed, I had never come across this excellent cheat sheet of the 34 most commonly used Objective-C Macros.

Link: Cheat Sheet Of Xcode Macros

How To Make Custom Macros In Xcode

Now, I’ve seen some developers upset, and even say they’d rather use TextMate.  For those guys I found this post on creating custom TextMate like Macros in Xcode

Link: Custom TextMate-Like Macros In Xcode

Xcode All-In-One Window Mode

This was a great feature that I already knew about, but if you’re not using this and you hate Xcode, well, chances are not knowing this could be why:

Link: Enabling All-In-One Window Mode

Using all-in-one mode could change your life, and I’m not kidding.

Xcode Shortcut List In One Printable Page

Eventually I found this massively cool Xcode shortcut list, and yes, seriously.. there are that many.

Link: Xcode Shortcut List

Ultimately, Xcode is a very competitive IDE.  Sure, when you first start it up it won’t compare with that IDE you’ve customized to your exact likings over the years, but before you added those plugins, and changed all those settings wasn’t your old IDE bad too?  Once you’ve got it all set up, and understand all the features that have been shown the article above you’ll be shocked at how productive you can be with Xcode.

Be sure to check back, I’m still perfecting things, but I feel an ultimate Xcode setup guide coming on.

Photo Credit: Freedigitalphotos.net

©2010 iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News. All Rights Reserved.