71² – The ramblings of two 30-something developers

TBXML – XML parsing on the iPhone

Just wanted to remind people about TBXML developed by Tom Bradley. This is an Objective-C based XML parser for the iPhone that is QUICK and light on resources. It has a really simple API and can be implemented really quickly.

If all you want to do is read and parse XML then this is a library you should check out. It is open source so you can see how its been done and change as necessary. If you don’t want to change it yourself then drop Tom a note and he is very quick in making changes that fit with the purpose of the library.

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Table View Cells in Interface Builder – the Apple Way™

When Dave and I originally wrote Beginning iPhone Development, the SDK was very much in beta, and a lot of the documentation was incomplete or completely lacking. Given that, I think we did a pretty good job trying to stick with Apple’s “best practices” and at guessing at which techniques would later evolve into best practices. In a surprising number of places, we do it the Apple Way™, even though we weren’t 100% sure what the Apple Way™ would be when we were writing the book.

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ObjectiveResource is an Objective-C port of Ruby on Rails’ ActiveResource.

ObjectiveResource is an Objective-C port of Ruby on Rails’ ActiveResource. It provides a way to serialize objects to and from Rails’ standard RESTful web-services (via XML or JSON) and handles much of the complexity involved with invoking web-services of any language from the iPhone.

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Fixed & Improved Blender Export Script

The Blender Objective-C Export Script script has been updated to fix some problems, and to use interleaved data structures. There’s a sample project, complete with a (cheap & dirty) texture, the source Blender project and the UV template for the ship.

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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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iPhone Game Programming – Tutorial 1

OK, so I have finally managed to get my first video tutorial done for writing a game on the iPhone.

This Tutorial will cover the basics of taking an OpenGL ES Application template available in Xcode and making the changes necessary so that we can use it for writing out game. The game I am going to be creating is a 2D game to keep things simple as I’m still learning myself :o)

I have found some very using sites for learning OpenGL on the internet. Its important to remember that the iPhone use OpenGL ES which is different to normal OpenGL. For our needs it should not present a problem, but it something you need to be aware of. I’ll be mentioning in the Tutorials where I come across the differences.

A couple of sites I have found useful are:

NeHe Productions

OpenGL ES 1.1 Ref Page

I am sure there are many other sites out there that can help as well.

The basis for my learning to write a game on the iPhone so far is the CrashLanding exmples provided by Apple. This is something I refer to in the video and also something we will be taking some classes from so its worth having it to hand. It should have been included with the SDK or can be downloade from the iPhone portal.

I hope you enjoy this first Tutorial. It is my first so forgive any mistakes or poor style. I hope it will improve over time. Please post any questions or comments you may have.

Play Tutorial 1

Tutorial 1 Project

Mike

Custom button in UITableViewCell – indexPath

Hi all

I am currently working on iPhone app number two when I came across a problem that it has taken me a while to sort out.  I wanted to place a button inside each UITableCell I am displaying.  I then wanted to call a method when the user pressed that button which would perform some action on the information related to the contents of that cell.

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Programming the iPhone

I don’t write software at work anymore, although I used to be a developer years back, but I still enjoy writing software at home for my own uses.  My main area of interest at the moment is Java and writing 2D games in it.  I’ve got a couple of projects on the go which I will post about later.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m looking forward to the iPhone 3G coming out, and also being able to write native apps in it. I downloaded the iPhone SDK a month back and have been playing with it a little since.

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