A couple of months ago I got my Kindle 2. I was a bit skeptical, but fell in love with it. Even then, I thought, well, it’s new and shiny, see how much you like it in a few weeks. I still love it. In addition to books, I found it was a great tool for reading stuff later, such as blog posts or articles you see on the web. Of course you can subscribe to blogs (for $$$) and you can set up Instapaper to send stuff to your Kindle, and there are other services that also allow you to subscribe to and send blogs to your Kindle. These work through the Kindle conversion process, which is going to cost you $0.15 per megabyte or any part thereof. Not a big deal in the big picture. And there is the convenience of having it go straight to the device wirelessly.
Read more...Just got tripped up here. Was doing some runtime type checking… if an instance is this class, do this, if it’s this class, do this. A bit hacky, may clean it up later, but anyway…
I was using something like:
[c]if([[myObject className] isEqualToString:@“SomeClass”]) {…}[/c]
And it was working just fine.
In the simulator.
Then I tried it on the device. Suddenly, I’m getting crashes and with some investigation, find that “NSObject may not respond to className.” But I saw it in the docs! Honest! Let me look it up again… Wait, it’s not there anymore. Search a bit more… oh, yeah, there it is. WTF?
Read more...I know it’s a ways away, but FOTB will most likely be the next conference you see me out and about at. And probably the only remaining one this year. I had planned to cut down a bit on travel this year, but wound up doing FiTC Amsterdam and 360iDev earlier this year, and Flash on Tap just recently, which was right here in Boston, so a no-brainer!
But I have to say, that if I could only travel to a single conference per year, it would not take me any time to decide on Flash on the Beach. I was at the original in 2006, and went back in 07 and 08. It never fails to be my favorite. Not sure if it’s the location (Brighton is a lot of fun), the people (seems to be the only conference my Norwegian friends care to go to), or the organizer (John Davey rocks!) or probably just the combination of all that and much more combined. But there’s something about being there. I get very psyched up for it every year. And already I’m starting to look forward to it. It’s like Christmas for me. I know others feel the same way, too.
Read more...So I’m back to using Safari. At least for a while. I’ve tried just about every new release that has come out over the last couple years, including the betas. This one seems actually useful. But one thing that really bugs me is the behavior of the zoom button. Actually, I’d consider it a flaw of OS X as a whole – namely that every app seems to implement the zoom button differently. For many, if not most apps, it functions as a “maximize” button, much as you’d see on Windows. For others, it seems to try to figure out how big the window should be based on the content. This is what Safari does. And it bugs the crap out of me, because it’s always way smaller than I want it. I understand that “maximize” behavior may not be too workable for someone with one of those massive cinema displays, but whatever it does now sucks, IMHO.
Read more...I had a vague awareness that things like this were out there, but finally went ahead and tried this one. Works great.
https://code.google.com/p/accelerometer-simulator/wiki/Home
Basically, you check out this XCode project, fix it up so you can provision it to your own phone. Add a single class and a single import to the project you want to use it in, then run the simulator app on your phone. The app looks like this on your phone:
Read more...I’ve made a few games in my time. And made various parts of a few other games for other people. Most of the games that I’ve worked on have been pretty simple, but recently I’ve been working on some more complex ones, both in ActionScript and in Objective-C. And one of the things I’ve been struggling with as things get more involved is how to best architect these things.
After giving it a LOT of thought, one bit of insight I had is that we (meaning those of us who have been brought up in the Flash world) have picked up some really bad habits. Maybe we could label it “MovieClip-itis” or something. Its major symptom is making everything a Movie Clip, or in modern terms, making everything a Sprite. It’s ingrained in us. And I’m just starting to realize how bad it is.
Read more...If you attended my “From Flash to iPhone” workshop at Flash on Tap last week (has it been a whole week already???), I’m finally getting around to putting up the slides and code I promised. If you didn’t attend the workshop, I can’t guarantee the slides or the code are going to be very helpful to you, but if you were there, and listened or took notes, this should help you digest all that information at a little better pace.
Read more...Here’s a vid:
Here’s the URL: https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=316802490&mt=8
Lite version coming soon.
Read more...I was going over the stuff I’m going to cover next week in my “From Flash to iPhone” workshop at Flash on Tap, and I started getting into how an iPhone app launches when you tap its icon. It might be a bit heavy to go into detail on it at the workshop, but I thought it was pretty interesting and writing about it might shed some light for developers moving past the newbie phase.
Read more...I just had a comment from someone at memo.tv, and the links were cool enough that I’ll just share the whole comment. Definitely looks worth checking out:
Hey, you’re posts on cocoa are great and very useful, and cocos2d looks really cool too. But I thought I’d let you know (in case you didn’t know and might find it interesting), that you can develop for iPhone using openFrameworks and C++ (syntax much closer to AS3 than ObjectiveC). https://www.openframeworks.cc/download
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