Posted on December 8th, 2009 by Sean Maher
Examples for every iPhone feature
‘iPhone SDK Development’ by Bill Dudney and Chris Adamson is one of the ‘third wave’ of iPhone programming books, and an excellent tour of Cocoa Touch and Xcode — the libraries and IDE for iPhone programming.
Audience
The book assumes that you have some experience with C and/or an object-oriented language. You’re expected to know what pointers and arrays are, and the control structures (for loops, if and switch statements) that are common to most curly-brace languages. This is the Achilles heel of most iPhone and Cocoa books — they assume you have a C or OOP background. In this case the litmus test is page 27 — read that one in the bookstore, and if it makes no sense, put the book back.
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Posted on December 2nd, 2009 by Joe Flores
Still a Solid OOP Cross-Platform Rapid IDE
REALbasic users have been creating and compiling applications on the Mac since 1998. iDevGames’ published a review of REALbasic 5 almost six years ago and most of what was reviewed still applies to the current version of REALbasic — it is still a solid OOP cross-platform rapid IDE. However, REALbasic has also grown up over the intervening five years, and now supports Linux builds, native OpenGL, and a variety of new features and improvements. But is it any good for developing games?
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Posted on December 2nd, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Power Game Factory is a game creation tool written in REALbasic. Released by Sawblade Software, it has now been open-sourced. This game engine is great for 2D side-scrolling action/adventure games. It features an easy to use graphical user interface and can compile stand-alone game applications that take advantage of the latest graphical technologies.
Power Game Factory is capable of producing games similar to many of the most highly regarded 8-bit and 16-bit console video games, but with far superior graphics and sounds. Best of all, no programming is required.
You’ll need a SourceForge account and REALbasic to take advantage of this game creation tool. Version 1.0 was released for the Macintosh in 2005, and the software received a substantial update in February 2009. The compiled engine includes a sample game called ‘Eskimo vs. Snowmen game.’ (see screenshot)
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Posted on December 1st, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Cheetah3D 5.1 was released today. Version 5.1 adds many new features like a new automatic skinning algorithm which generates almost perfect weight-maps. Binding a skeleton to a mesh was never easier. The timeline has been enhanced too. It is now possible to select, move and delete keys of a whole object hierarchy and not just of the selected object. Version 5.1 finally also adds copy and paste of polygon, edge and point selections.
A often requested feature which is a true time saver in daily work. Also the memory usage of Cheetah3D has been optimized considerably. Especially large scene with many small objects load much faster (up to 10x) and consume less memory. The new node based material system also got some helpful enhancements. It is now possible to get a preview of all node types and not just the shading nodes. Last but not least Cheetah3D 5.1 contains many bug fixes and improvements.
Related Link: Cheetah3D
Posted on November 18th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Big Nerd Ranch, Inc. is starting the new year with three of their most popular classes:
Class: Beginning Cocoa Bootcamp
Instructors: Mark Fenoglio and Scott Ritchie
Date: January 9-15, 2010
Location: The Big Nerd Ranch, Atlanta, GA
Cost: $4750, including meals, lodging, and ground transportation to and from the Atlanta airport
To register: http://bignerdranch.com/RegistrationForm?cid=1198
Class: Beginning Ruby on Rails Bootcamp
Instructors: Brian Hardy and Charles Quinn
Date: January 16-22, 2010
Location: The Big Nerd Ranch, Atlanta, GA
Cost: $4300, including meals, lodging, and ground transportation to and from the Atlanta airport
To register: http://bignerdranch.com/RegistrationForm?cid=1198
Class: Beginning iPhone Bootcamp
Instructor: Mark Fenoglio and Joe Conway
Date: January 30 – February 5, 2010
Location: The Big Nerd Ranch, Atlanta, GA
Cost: $4750, including meals, lodging, and ground transportation to and from the Atlanta airport
To register: http://bignerdranch.com/RegistrationForm?cid=1198
Posted on November 17th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
The interactive media group at Apple is looking for a skilled software engineer to work on interactive multimedia experiences on the iPhone and iPod Touch. The position on the team is to help design and implement interactive multimedia experiences on the iPhone and iPod Touch. The position also requires a creative thinker who can contribute and comment on the design process as well as being flexible enough to aid in all aspects of production such as asset management and able to work to a deadline. The position requires the following:
- Strong C / C++ / Objective-C / iPhone background preferred
- 3-4 years of video game development experience, shipped at least one AAA title
- Must be a passionate gamer
- Have skills in audio systems, graphics pipeline, and network programming a plus
- Demonstrate the ability to work in small dynamic team
This could be the dream job for someone in our community so please spread the world.
Posted on November 16th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Software development company Runtime Revolution Ltd introduced today Revolution 4.0 for application and Web development, available for the first time in a free version. Rev 4.0 brings the ability to deploy your application straight to the web, without recoding or writing a line of html. Just select “Build for Web” from the file menu and exactly the same application as you previously deployed on the desktop can run in any standard web browser. And on Mac, Windows and Linux. A descendant of Apple’s HyperCard, Rev enables software construction for everyone. The revTalk programming language is easy-to-use and memorable, making it easy to comprehend months after code is written, and therefore more effortlessly maintained. With a free version and Web plugin, anyone can begin writing software right away.
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Posted on November 13th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
The ShiVa Editor allows developers to publish games and applications for the Web, PC, Mac and iPhone. This release adds stunning new visual effects expected in next-generation games such as depth of field, velocity blur, cascaded shadow maps algorithm, infinite ocean simulation with advanced shading system, dynamic textures, video streaming, Voice-Over-IP, DWF import, etc. The developer, Stonetrip, has also made a number of performance improvements.
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Posted on November 11th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
iVersion allows you to access your subversion projects on the move with an easy to use interface. iVersion brings native svn support to the iphone and allows browsing of the folder hierarchy, viewing and editing of small files such as programming code or txt files. iVersion also allows you to view the commit log or history of a file, including dates, commits and usernames. With iVersion you have a powerful SVN client at your fingertips even when your away from your desktop. Are you hosting your SVN projects on your PC? Use iVersion to backup your projects. Spotted a typo in your code? Use iVersion to edit your sources without needing to turn on your PC.
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Posted on November 8th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
SDL_mixer is a cross-platform sample multi-channel audio mixer library. It supports any number of simultaneously playing channels of 16 bit stereo audio, plus a single channel of music, mixed by the popular MikMod MOD, Timidity MIDI, Ogg Vorbis, and SMPEG MP3 libraries. This release features the following improvements:
- Added
Mix_Init()/Mix_Quit() to prevent constantly loading and unloading DLLs
- Check for fork/vfork on any platform, don’t just assume it on UNIX
- Fixed export of
Mix_GetNumChunkDecoders() and Mix_GetNumMusicDecoders()
- Use newer MIDI API on Mac OS X 10.5+
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