Best Resources In iOS Development – July 18th 2011
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.
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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.
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Open Source: Easy Multistroke and Single Stroke Complex Gesture Recognition On iOS
If you’ve ever wondered how to code gesture recognition for complex shapes I’ve come across a couple of open source libraries that should be a great deal of help. This goes well beyond finger swiping.
This library is based on the $1 gesture recognizer which I remember being discussed quite a bit a few years back because not only did it run efficiently, but allowed you define the templates to recognize complex shapes very easily. The $1 gesture recognizer only recognizes 1 single stroke from the user. The $1 gesture recognizer was later expanded on to become the $N multistroke gesture recognizer.
Brit Gardner has taken the $N gesture recognizer and created an Objective-C implementation of the code.
You can read about complex gesture recognition, and why Brit decided to use the $N gesture recognizer on his site in these posts:
Complex Gesture Recognition in iOS – Part 1: The Research
Complex Gesture Recognition in iOS – Part 2: The Implementation
You can find Brit’s Github for the Objective-C $N gesture recognizer here:
https://github.com/britg/MultistrokeGestureRecognizer-iOS
Adam Preble has created an implementation of the $1 gesture recognizer which can be found here:
https://github.com/preble/GLGestureRecognizer
You can try out the javascript versions, check out the full pseudocode, or download other versions of the gesture recognizers from the University of Washington here:
The $1 Gesture Recognizer
The $N Multistroke Gesture Recognizer
I’ve received e-mails a couple of times over the years asking about how some drawing games were created on the iPhone. If you are looking to make that kind of game this should help give you a head start.