71² – The ramblings of two 30-something developers

News Roundup: Grand Central Dispatch is Open Source

I find this fascinating.

Apple has open-sourced libdispatch, better known to most people as Grand Central Dispatch.

Grand Central Dispatch is something that developers – at least those who attend WWDC – have known about for well over two years. It’s not something that your typical computer user would get excited over, but from the perspective of a developer, it’s a really exciting technology that allows you to leverage the power of all the processing units in a given machine relatively easily.

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Why Apple loves iPhone games right now

Wasn’t the Apple event last night supposed to be all about music? That was the impression given by the invites – ‘It’s only rock and roll but we like it’ – with speculation leading up to the event focusing on new iPods, interactive albums and the possibility of The Beatles on the iTunes Store.

Well, there was no Fab Four announcement in the end, and the biggest device news was a new iPod nano with a video camera. But the strangest thing – and most exciting from a Pocket Gamer perspective – was the high priority given to iPhone games at the event.

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Spotify on iPhone: nice app, but no multitasking

The Spotify application for the iPhone extends the usefulness of the service greatly – at the cost of a tenner a month. However the app has one show-stopping flaw: you can’t play music when the application is in the background.

This is not a hindrance shared by the iPhone or iPod Touch’s default music application – and even on the earliest iPods, you could play Blocks or check your diary while music continued to play. For some this may merely be an irritating quirk, but for others it could be a deal-breaker. The whole point of getting a top-of-the-range music player is for its versatility.

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Apple To Kill Off iPod Classic, Double Down On Touch, iPhone Developer Predicts (AAPL)

Apple’s annual iPod/iTunes product event will take place this Wednesday in San Francisco. In addition to announcing new iTunes features, Apple will almost certainly introduce an updated version of the iPod touch, and perhaps the iPod nano; rumors suggest they’ll both get cameras. (Video cameras, ideally.)

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Rumour: iPod Touch With Camera And Microphone Coming

Rumors have swirled about Apple readying a new version of the iPod Touch with a camera and microphone, which, combined with a Skype account, would pretty much obviate the need for a home phone line once and for all.

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iPhone Simulator Application Creator

Create 1-click installers of your iPhone Simulator apps to share with other developers for testing. Or to send it to someone to create Screencasts for reviews.

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Processing XML on the iPhone

For Tutorial 6 I needed to process an XML document produced by a tilemap editor. I was most disappointed to find that the iPhone SDK does not come with very much in the way of classes to process XML.

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iSnort: Real or Video Editing?

At work we think this is a fake app :) A very cool idea though.

I am not sure that the iPhone can respond to these kind of touches on the screen, so I think its either video editing or just a clever animation playing on the screen :)

Let us know what you think!

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Skype to Launch iPhone Software

EBay Inc.’s Skype unit plans to release a version of its Internet-based phone software for Apple Inc.’s iPhone.

The move, set to be announced Tuesday, puts Skype more directly in competition for wireless voice services with network operators such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless.

Read full article here

iPhone Game Programming – Tutorial 2 – Image Class

I have finally been able to upload the second tutorial on writing a game on the iPhone using OpenGL.

This Tutorial has turned out to be longer than I thought and comes in at around 1.5 hours. It covers the creation of an Image class which wraps around the Texture2D class and functions which I think would be useful in a game such as scaling, rotation and applying a colour filter and alpha etc. This image class will form the basis for the next tutorials where we will create a class for handling sprite maps, animation and bitmap fonts.

This Tutorial also gives you a quick look at some of the other classes we are going to cover in action, so not only how scaling, rotating and colours work but also animation and bitmap fonts.

Play Tutorial 2

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