Posted on May 4th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Chris DeVore conducted a survey of iPhone App developers to learn what works and what doesn’t. He’s made the data available below for the benefit of everyone in our community.
Nearly 9,000 developers have shipped more than 27,000 iPhone apps through the App Store. A small (but well-publicized) minority have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars for their developers, but the vast majority enjoy a brief spike of downloads upon release and quickly fall off as other newly-released apps fill in behind them. With little ability to influence their position in the App Store, developers have started applying their considerable creativity to building and sustaining demand for their applications in other ways. Our survey captured the experiences of 35 published developers and shines a light on what’s working – and what’s not working – in the realm of iPhone application marketing.
In other iPhone news, Fizzy Software is looking for experienced industry veterans and recent college grads for the positions of Associate or Senior Web Engineers.
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Posted on April 30th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Unity iPhone 1.0.2 has been released and some of its highlights seem very impressive. The Mono runtime, and memory usage by textures and uncompressed audio have been reduced by about 50%, and they improved the script call optimizations significantly. This makes your games take less memory and run faster, while still looking and playing like the state of the art. New and improved splash screens were added — five splash screens are included in every built Xcode project (3 portait, 2 landscape). Unity iPhone audio playback has been significantly revamped, all significant memory leaks swatted, several low-level .NET things like threads and sockets have been made to work, and the scripting reference has been updated across the board.
Posted on April 29th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) has posted a short tutorial on creating an app on the iPhone. The ‘Hello’ app, which runs on the iPhone simulator, provides a simple introduction to Xcode. Over at TheAppleBlog they have an in-depth tutorial on creating a Navigation-based application in Xcode for the iPhone. Need more of a reason to program the iPhone? The San Francisco Chronicle has an article on newbies making apps for the iPhone.
Some are learning Cocoa, Xcode and Objective-C, the tools and languages necessary for iPhone development, while others are looking for contract designers to get their apps made. The iPhone, perhaps more than any other device, has sparked the imagination of non-developers, who see in it an idea waiting to take shape.
We’ve certainly seen an increase in requests for apps and coders in our forum, as well as over at iDevApps. Sites like eLance are also full of ads looking for iPhone developers. If you’d like to submit a tutorial on programming the iPhone or the Mac, please contact us.
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Posted on April 27th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Objective Modula-2 is an extension to Modula-2 which follows the Objective-C object model, adopting the bracketed Objective-C message passing syntax derived from Smalltalk. Like Objective-C, Objective Modula-2 is a reflective, object oriented programming language with both static and dynamic typing. It is intended as a safer alternative to Objective-C for Cocoa, Cocoa Touch and GNUstep software development. It retains most of Modula-2’s features, most importantly data encapsulation via modules, explicit import lists, strong type checking and nested functions. Objective Modula-2 can be considered a safer programming language than Objective-C because its base language, Modula-2, is safer than Objective-C’s base language, C. Yet, it has all the capabilities of Objective-C. Classes written in Objective Modula-2 can be used within Objective-C and vice versa.
The Objective Modula-2 project is a non-profit volunteer effort. More information is available at the Objective Modula-2 home page. Modula-2 was developed by Professor Niklaus Wirth at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ). Prof. Wirth is well known for the programming language Pascal, the predecessor to Modula and Modula-2. More information on Modula-2 can be found at Wikipedia. Objective-C was originally developed by Brad Cox to combine the flexibility of Smalltalk with the execution speed of C. It is now the main application development language at Apple. More information on Objective-C can be found at ADC
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Posted on April 25th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
We might be a little Apple-platform centric here right? But what does Google’s Android offer developers? Infoworld compares the two smart phone SDKs in Neil McAllister’s article ‘SDK shoot-out: Android vs. iPhone.’
A smartphone that never expands beyond the capabilities that it shipped with is hardly worth the price. Smartphone vendors, like any OS vendor, must rely on healthy developer ecosystems to keep their platforms thriving and competitive. Apple has definitely succeeded in this area if the reports of big payoffs at the iPhone App Store are to be believed. Will Android be able to match that success?
Although written back in the Fall of 2008, its a nice little comparison, which covers obtaining the SDKs, tools that are used and market share potential.
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Posted on April 23rd, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
MDN (Mac Developer Network) ‘Developer Lives’ series has an interesting audio interview with Aaron Hillegass of the Big Nerd Ranch. Aaron is author of the excellent text on Cocoa programming, ‘Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X’. We interviewed Aaron back in 2001, covering topics such as his roots at NeXT and the virtues of development on Mac OS X.
Posted on April 22nd, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
AsmJit is complete x86/x64 JIT Assembler for C++ language. It supports FPU, MMX, 3dNow, SSE, SSE2, SSE3 and SSE4 intrinsics, powerful compiler that helps to write portable functions for 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) architectures. AsmJit can be used to create functions at runtime that can be called from existing (but also generated) C/C++ code. AsmJit is crossplatform library that supports various compilers and operating systems. Currently only limitation is x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) processor. Currently tested operating systems are Windows (32 bit and 64 bit), Linux (32 bit and 64 bit) and MacOSX (32 bit).
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Posted on April 22nd, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Revolution 3.5 is a major upgrade featuring data presentations using the all new Data Grid, object-oriented behaviors, which allow you to streamline your coding, and RevOnline II, an easier way to share code or get help. RunRev has an all new interface and also boasts 100 bug fixes and minor enhancements.
You can now add notes to documentation entries. These notes contain helpful explanations of how to do things easily or efficiently or show you how to avoid potential problems. User ratings save you time picking out the most helpful comments. We’ve also made changes to the group object to support behaviors. You can now prevent objects within a group from being selected with the mouse and a new set of messages get sent to allow you to redraw the contents of custom control before they are shown on the screen or resized.
Also of note to multimedia game authors is Revolution Media, a low-cost version that ships with and adventure game construction kit, enabling you to write the next “Myst” or “Cosmic Osmo.”
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Posted on April 20th, 2009 by Matthew Woods
Overview
I have always loved strategy games of all types. Unfortunately, I find most computer strategy games to be very long and involved and difficult to sit down and play in one sitting. Board games are great, but finding enough players is always a challenge. I’ve noticed a distinct lack of good, short, turn-based strategy games for the computer — most of them seem to be cheaply made knock-offs of table top board games.
There are a few exceptions to this. One of them is a very old, very obscure game that I had as a kid and missed playing. Constellation is a game that I wrote for myself because I wanted to play that game again. That other people have enjoyed it, and that it has won second place in the uDevGames 2008 Contest is icing on the cake.
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Posted on April 17th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Ingemar Ragnemalm, best known for writing the Sprite Animation Toolkit (SAT) and the book ‘Tricks of the Mac Game Programming Gurus’ has released a new Mac OS X IDE called Lightweight IDE.
Lightweight IDE was written after the observation that IDEs have gotten more and more complex, to the result that it is a problem. The IDE is not always a help, it is a burden.
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