Posted on March 3rd, 2010 by Alex Sikora
The Pragmatic Programmers have just released a new book aimed at new Mac Developers with no previous programming experience. The book covers many topics for new programmers and applies them to both Mac OS X and the iPhone OS. The book is Beginning Mac Programming: Develop with Objective-C and Cocoa by Tim Isted. The book is available from their website in book or ebook format (DRM Free), and on Amazon. List price is $34.95 from The Pragmatic Programmers, or $22.00 for the ebook version. It’s $23.07 on Amazon.
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Posted on December 14th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
‘iPhone Game Development’ by Paul Zirkle, Lead Mobile Programmer at Konami Digital Entertainment and Joe Hogue, a mobile programmer with Electronic Arts. Together, provides an experienced iPhone developer with the knowledge needed to make games for the Apple iPhone. Starting with a basic overview of game and technical design particular to the new device, the book moves on to detail the development process with examples. You will find everything from game development basics and an introduction to iPhone programming to tips on using APIs to develop in-game physics and strategies for AppStore publication. Topics include:
- Learn how to develop iPhone games that provide engaging user experiences
- Become familiar with Objective-C and the Xcode suite of tools
- Learn what it takes to adapt the iPhone interface to games
- Create a robust, scalable framework for a game app
- Understand the requirements for implementing 2D and 3D graphics
- Learn how to add music and audio effects, as well as menus and controls
- Get instructions for publishing your game to the App Store
This book promises you everything from game development basics and iPhone programming fundamentals to guidelines for dealing with special graphics and audio needs, creating in-game physics, and much more.
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Posted on July 8th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Creating applications for the iPhone requires a machine capable of running the iPhone SDK app development environment. Despite Apple providing a free, full-featured copy of its developer tools to make every single user of Mac OS X a potential developer and Macs being competitive with most PCs in terms or price, there are still many developers looking to enter the world of iPhone app creation without learning Objective-C or using Xcode. One such group is generating a great deal of interest from the open source community, as well as JAVA programmers. Circumventing the problem of development of a virtual machine for the iPhone, the project XMLVM allows developers to cross-compile a Java application to Objective-C and execute it on an iPhone. Of course in order to get applications to run on a real device, you still require a Mac and Xcode in order to properly sign the applications using Apple’s code-signing tools. Without the code-signing step, applications will not run on normally provisioned (i.e. non jail-break) devices.
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Posted on June 9th, 2009 by Jake McArthur
If you are looking for an extensive index of articles on Cocoa programming, such a list has been graciously provided on the Hyperjeff Network. The articles are organized by category for convenience. Topics covered include Core Audio, OpenGL (ES), Core Animation, Networking and much more.
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Posted on June 1st, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Izatt International has announced a new evening format iPhone Developers Course to be held June 23-27, 2009 at the Larry H. Miller (SLCC) Campus in Sandy, UT. Class will be 6-9:30pm Tue-Fri, June 23-26, plus 8:30-5:30pm Saturday, June 27th. This new evening format is designed to serve the working professional without requiring time off work. Izatt has been offering such courses since January 2009. These courses have included a 3-day iPhone SDK course, a 2-day 3D iPhone Gaming course, and a 1-day Beginning Objective-C course. Many former students now have apps of their own in the iTunes App Store, have started companies of their own, or have found new employment doing iPhone development.
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Posted on May 13th, 2009 by James Dessart
Taking Advice From a Veteran Programmer
When I read that uDevGames was happening again this year, I got excited. I had just read an interview with a successful casual games developer about how he achieved his success. It gave me some ideas, and one of them blossomed into GnomeSpy.
Following the advice in Justin Ficarrotta’s article on A uDevGames 2008 Survival Guide , I wrote up a prototype using Cocoa through Xcode. I play-tested GnomeSpy internally until the gameplay reached a certain level of fun, then released the prototype to iDevGames’ forum members. Along with play-testing by friends and family, this provided an invaluable resource for determining reasonable completion times for the basic six-color game.
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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 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 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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