Posts
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iPhone Dev: The Honeymoon is Over.
Last December, I had a bunch of unused vacation time and took a couple weeks off, stayed at home, and learned me some iPhone dev. I submitted my first iPhone application in January and I was hooked. I now have six apps / games in the store (not counting full/lite versions as different), making close to an app per month.
Those are my personal apps. At my job at Infrared5, we are also flooded with iPhone development. I’ve been flat out on iPhone games there for a couple months, and scheduled for another two months forward.
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Spyware vs. Analytics
Had an interesting conversation today with Aral Balkan and others via twitter, which began when Aral mentioned some concern over the iPhone analytics package available at Pinch Media.
If you don’t know what Pinch Media Analytics is (or analytics in general), there are multiple ways I could describe it. I could describe it as “spyware that secretly gathers information about you and sends it across the Internet without your permission.” Of course, that would be a carefully designed statement, specifically engineered and worded to scare you into thinking it was evil and dangerous, and generally just an attempt to create FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt). Or, I could go the other way and carefully craft an innocuous description that makes it sound wonderful. But let’s instead look at the facts of what it is, what it does, and what it can and cannot be used for.
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Skinning UIKit (iPhone) Sliders
In my recently released app, Wire Draw (which you can read more about here) I wanted to create a color picker to allow the users to choose the colors of lines. Unfortunately there isn’t a color picker control in UIKit. I did find one on line, with full code on how to implement it, but that was a full screen affair and I just wanted something that would fit nicely into the existing settings UI. I finally decided on RGB sliders, which are easy enough to implement, but not very visual. I wanted the user to know instantly which was the red, green, or blue slider. I finally came up with what you see here:
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Wire Draw released!
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=323630346&mt=8
Remember, it’s free. Have fun with it. 🙂
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Falling Balls rewrite
This is what I’ve been up to:
https://wickedpissahgames.com/?p=131
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Coming Soon: Wire Draw for iPhone
[Edit: as of today (July 26), the app is now available in the app store. Get it here.]
The latest iPhone app / game from Wicked Pissah is Wire Draw.
This app lets you draw lines and shapes in 3D. Alter line width and color. Rotate your drawing around in 3d using the device’s accelerometer. Even draw while rotating.
Fog features provides atmospheric effects where lines further from the camera fade out. Fog is adjustable in the settings for anything from a serious pea soup to barely perceptible.
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iPhone App Dev Business Models.
I saw a message from someone on LinkedIn today, asking about “luring” iPhone developers to do a project, by offering them a revenue share in order to “minimize the overhead”.
I thought that was pretty interesting. Here was my response:
Good app ideas are a dime a dozen. Your great idea isn’t guaranteed to make any money in the app store. Why should a developer develop your whole app for just a percentage of the money you are going to make? Just because you have a good idea? Most developers have good ideas too, and if they are going to risk not making anything for their hard work, they might as well balance that by doing their own work and making 100% of the profits.
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Start your career in game reviewing!
Or not.
Anyway, when you get an app approved in the iTunes app store, they give you 50 promo codes. For Bug Out! I gave a few out on my blog and twitter and sent a bunch to various app review sites. Still have quite a few left over. They are just wasting away. Might as well put them to work. So if you have a blog or web site or some other massive fan base that follow your every move, let me know and I’ll whisk you over a free code that will save you 99 pennies on the game. Just promise that you’ll tell people about it.
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Memory Allocation for the budding Objective-C programmer
… or, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love malloc”
OK, here’s a scenario:
You have a whole crapload of ints, or floats, or even CGPoints or CGRects. You need to hang onto these things and use them later. Hopefully you are not even considering making a whole crapload of variables to store them in, i.e. myNumber0, myNumber1, myNumber2, etc. If that even crossed your mind, close the browser, turn off the computer, go straight to the book store and pick up the first Programming for Dummies book you can find.
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Bug Out! Released!
Man, app store releases take forever to get approved these days. Used to be like 3 days, not it’s almost 2 weeks.
Anyway, it’s here. I hope people have fun with it. I’ve already got a few ideas on some improvements, but looking forward to feedback.
Here are a few promo codes to scramble over. Click “redeem” in the top right of the front page of the App Store in iTunes and enter the code. If you are quick enough to get one that works, and you like it, it would be great if you could blog about it, twitter about it, tell your mom to buy it, etc. 🙂
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