Apple has released a new developer agreement and some new rules have been outlined. The biggest one states that 3rd party development tools will be allowed as long as they don’t download code on the fly. With this new rule, I can’t help but wonder where iOS development will be a year from now. Will this site now be a Flash development resource as well? I’m thinking not, but who knows.
Things are changing, new development tools will be popping up left and right. Get ready for it.
Ask any developer of fast-paced iPhone games what language they use and none will say Objective-C. I am not referring to card games, or simple games like SpaceBubble. I am talking about processor intensive, special effects, things flying at you from all angles, kind of games. Of course every iPhone game has to use SOME Objective-C to get the app up and running and for certain API calls, but those kinds of things should not take up more than a few hundred lines of code at most in a large game.
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In this tutorial we will expand on the previous Core Location tutorial. Here we will extract specific location attributes such as coordinates, altitude, and speed.
Core Location is a powerful yet simple iOS framework allowing easy access to the iPhone’s GPS. You can access the coordinates of the device with GPS or cell triangulation, compass, and direction and speed of travel.
Apple’s description:
The Core Location framework lets you determine the current location or heading associated with a device. The framework uses the available hardware to determine the user’s position and heading. You use the classes and protocols in this framework to configure and schedule the delivery of location and heading events. You can also use it to define geographic regions and monitor when the user crosses the boundaries of those regions.
In this tutorial you will learn how to access the raw Core Location data, including the iPhone’s GPS coordinates and speed of travel. (more…)
I started to write a tutorial today but got a bit burned out in the process. I will finish it eventually, but here is the code for you to tinker with in the meantime.
The code demonstrates Core Location and makes use of custom protocols. The app updates a UILabel with GPS coordinates and speed of travel. Stay tuned, the tutorial will be finished up shortly!
[Source: CoreLocation GPS Demo - 25k]
Let’s say you have a view overlaying another view that you would like to close in a fancy fashion when the user click a button, thus displaying the view directly below it. Put this code as your button’s IBAction message handler and tell me that doesn’t spice up your app like crazy! I am not going to explain how it looks, just try it. You’ll love it. It’s a nice use of code blocks too. 
-(IBAction)onButtonClick:(id)sender { [UIView transitionWithView:self.view duration:0.2 options:UIViewAnimationOptionTransitionFlipFromLeft animations:^{ self.view.frame = CGRectOffset(self.view.frame, 0, -self.view.frame.size.height); } completion:^(BOOL finished) { [self.view removeFromSuperview]; [self release]; }]; }
The learning curve of Cocoa can be steep depending on your background, but it’s a climb that is sure to leave a smile on your face every few steps of the way. Just enough to offset the hair pulling and cursing that is sure to ensue from jumping into Cocoa programming for the first time. One of the features that sweetened things up for me was Cocoa’s UIView animation capabilities. There is a lot to cover, and I just don’t have the time to even think about how to approach a lesson on all the animation features. I will give you an example of basic animation and a possible implementation and point you in the direction of Apple’s documentation so that you can build upon what you learned here.
For more information make sure to read Apple’s documentation on the UIView class. There is a lot more you can do with but let this be simply a foundation for you to learn the basic concept.
Here is the source code to a simple iPhone project I made that demonstrates the Navigation Controller.
Here is the source code to a simple project I made in an iPhone development class I took. Click the + and – signs to increase / decrease the number of sides on the polygon. It was one of the funner projects in that class, so I wanted to share my solution to it.
With iOS 4 comes 1500 new features for developers to take advantage of. Unfortunately, not all of your users will be able to enjoy this new experience. For example, if your user has a 1st generation device only capable of running OS 3.1. Or an iPad which (at the time of writing this article) only runs 3.2. Utilizing some of these new features will make or break a cross version app, but some can be worked with. This tutorial demonstrates how to solve this problem.
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