My First iOS Gaming App Experiment – Log1

I got bored of being a iOS App developer i wanna jump to the Gaming Side. How kewl it would be to play a game when you have created that game, That feeling is awesome. So it happened suddenly that i  wanted to develop a iOS game and i have to take the simpler path as i have to go through complex calculations and mathematical formulas for Gaming. But it is not that hard what i imagined when i think now. As a iOS developer for the past 3 years i love the way how Objective-C and iOS evolved inside my Medula Oblangata. It was so so soooo phenomenal.

Ideation So i jumped into the iTunes which i call the iWorld. Searched, Browsed, Surfed 100s of game to pick the right thing. Finally i found that the basic pingpong game(The classic computer pingpong) is the opt one because it doesn’t have complex controls simple swipe and simple mechanics. Also found there are some bored Not-So-Fantastic pingpong apps in appstore. So took that idea and added some wow factors like superpowers in it. I iterated Iterated and Iterated a lot in this game(There was a famous saying i remember now “Innovation is 1%Innovation and 99% Iteration) and finally created a Game design document on that

Design Finally drawing after drawing, sketching after sketching found a good complete gameplay for the app. Simple slider on both ends. Superpowers spawning from both the ends. User has to touch and drag superpowers to acqiure them. Superpower may cause damage to other user. and soooooo oooonnnnn. With some help from our UI team(Hari & Arul) designed the whole thing in Photoshop and created the Visual Elements in iPad Retina size So that i will resize that to any device resolutions like iPhone4Inch, iPhone3.5Inch, Retina and iPad.

Development For any game development. Be prepared with the Images before You start coding. With Xcode 4.6 in my Macmini. Downloading Cocos2d framework and installing in my Xcode created a Cocos2D Project. Cocos2D has been amazingly very easy to develop any game. This can be the best framework that any iOS geek can start his gaming idea. With cocos 2D i started my idea with great help from my friend(Sadesh). Keeping RayWenderlich’s Tutorials(This n this and this one too) on my Browser tabs i opened my Xcode and started coding by filling my coffee mug with Latte. After a week coding in cocos2D making just the 2 sliders on my screen heard that my game can be made very easily using Box2D extension and started reading about Box2D about how physics will be applied to the gaming objects and after reading this tutorial on Ray i got very much excited. Thats how i kicked off with my gaming app. My next Log will be discussing more on technical stuff Next Log…. Coming Soon

5 Things a iOS developer should get used to

You can raise your collars about how cool you are if you develop apps for iPhone iPad android or windows phone. Since these are the most favorite platform in entertainment world. As a iphone ipad app developer i have experienced a lot of information about the app developing world and wanna share with you people. Apart from programming i personally found that these information can nurture any mobile developer into high class programmer. so let me enlighten you folks

1. Stackoverflowing: If you are a mobile developer definitely you would have crossed this site Stackoverflow. We stuck up, we forget, we make stupid bugs and still we wanna make sure everything is perfect and we go fetch code from SO. Whats my idea is instead of searching in SO just for answers you can answer the questions which are asked in SO when you get free time. This will greatly improve your learning curve.

2. Tracking Apps: Tracking your appstore for new apps is a fantastic way to know the trending apps currently in market. After seeing these apps they can make you ask a question to yourself (How did they do it? Is it possible in development?) and when you find answers for these you are definitely becoming pro.

3. Pirate: Don’t get panic by reading the title. This what Steve Jobs said to his employees Good artist copy Great artist steal. What i am trying to say is there are lot of drop-in code files and ready made classes out there. Instead of copying functionality and writing code yourself just steal(with their permission and that’s what i call ‘steal’) and modify it according to your requirement. Get iphone and mac drop-in classes here www.cocoacontrols.com, www.verious.com, www.maniacdev.com

4. Photoshopper: Though you may be good with objects, functions, arrays, strings classes, etc when it comes to mobile mostly it talks about the User Interface so even though you are a mobile developer it is good to have a touch in photo editing knowledge to deal with those UI’s.

5. Githubing: This is a thing which i wanna do for a long time. You would have developed many components that may be useful to a lot of rookies. But you havent commented those code or not organized properly so that the third person can use it easily. If you are a Let-All-Developers-Be-Happy type user then try cleaning those codes that are components  so that it should be easily adapted by a third party. So once you are done Github it.

If you can give some extra tips then most welcome…

iOS Development for Beginners

Hi Nerds

So welcome to the world of objective-C, your future favorite programming language. With just a two year experience, as a iOS developer it has been a Roller-Coaster ride for me with iOS development and I had some thrilling slides, smooth sight-seeings, slow-uprising of my iOS applications. Hope i will give you some tips to become a comfortable and pro-active iPhone/iPod/iPad developer.

If you are really reading this then you should definitely know some programming language at a very basic level. If the answer is “C” then you will be a Rockstar here. Some of the other techie words that you should get familiarize with are the OOPS concepts, MVC patterns and IDE’s.

Assuming you are pro in the above mentioned techs. I would like you to jump into the Apple world. There are two rules which you should obey when you start developing iOS applications

1. Buy/Borrow/Own/Steal/Rent a Mac machine

2. Buy/Borrow/Own/Steal/Rent a iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad device

Without a mac machine you can’t develop a native iOS app(of-course you can go hybrid but thats not your focus now newbie) as Xcode is the only tool for developing iOS apps and it is available only for mac OS. Without a device to test is always a risk. So obey the two rules.

You got everything you got start learning. I would like to suggest you to see as many video tutorials than the normal text blogs. Lynda.com provides some of the best video tutorials with very simple and clear explanations of iOS and Xcode. Apart from that the best is to learn from the people who created it. Apple Documentations are the best  for any clarifications or doubts.

Try to take a simple idea and create the application for that to learn. Learning each feature separately is not going to help. Take a simple idea that has some of the basic controls and start completing that project so that you have a complete app. My idea would be trying these basics in a single app.

• Textfield validations
• Button, Label, View creations
• Transition of views from one screen to other
• Passing data to next screen
• Sqlite DB operations
• Tableview Creations and manipulations
• Delegates

As a starter you don’t  need to be so choosy for glassy interface for your app. While things go on you will be familiar with the user interface so do not worry about it now.

If you are stuck up on middle of a bug/isssue and apple documentation doesn’t solve your issue then go posting your question on Stackoverflow. Be neat, simple and clear on the question you are going to ask provide sample code in that and acknowledge the person who is trying to answer your question. Your hours and days effort will be minimized into seconds and minutes. If you become pro someday you can answer the questions posted by other developers as I do now. Thats me in SO.

RayWenderlich is a good team of iOS coders provide very easy and simple tutorials with sample code for some commonly used functionalities. Feel free to browse through their tutorials.

Appsamuck is site that provides open source iOS projects for free. You can download and play with those codes and feel the awesomeness in you by experimenting in it.

So welcome to the iOS.