Interactivity and Occasional Intrigue with Sam Keene
Making a custom keyboard in iOS 8 is extremely easy, if you think otherwise you’re a dinosaur! Currently, as of Xcode 6 Beta 6, there’s very little documentation and examples, but that doesn’t mean it’s hard. I spent the better half of an afternoon banging my head against a desk until I realized how simple it … Continue reading iOS 8 Custom Keyboards – In Two Steps
I’ve always been a big fan of simple tap tap game mechanics, so with all of the hype surrounding the rise and fall of Flappy Bird I thought I’d jump on the band wagon and show you how to build your very own Flappy Bird clone: Bouncy Brick™. It’s an addictive game mechanic, it’s also … Continue reading Build Your Own Flappy Bird Clone Using iOS7’s SpriteKit
In everyone’s rush to make the next Candy Crush one of the more interesting features of iOS7’s new SpriteKit framework has flown under the radar. The SKVideoNode suddenly makes it super easy to play multiple videos simultaneously, something that was a little too tedious with the AVFoundation framework (see my previous blog post on this), … Continue reading Multiple Videos Playing Simultaneously The Easy Way With SpriteKit
UPDATE: This post is a companion/comparison to my other post on drawing 1000s of sprites using SpriteKit’s native batch drawing. I was interested to see if rasterization of the scene before the GL draw pass would improve performance. In this particular instance it doesn’t seem too. SpriteKit’s native batch drawing of the full node hierarchy … Continue reading SpriteKit Bit Blitting By Drawing To A Texture For Performance Optimization
The use of Delaunay triangulation as a visual effect has become very popular recently in motion graphics, and interactive works. It’s a pretty cool effect, but there aren’t a lot of examples of how to get it working. In this post I’m using this collection of Objective C Delaunay triangulation math classes I found on … Continue reading Delaunay Triangulation On The iPhone with SpriteKit
Several months ago I worked on an in store retail project for a large international brand. The brief was to allow users of their iPhone app to control screens and interact with kiosks as they entered their stores. It also had to live alongside their existing IT and web infrastructure, and the app needed to … Continue reading Using Websockets To Stream Real Time Accelerometer Data Between iPhone and a Web Page via NodeJS
An app I’ve been working on recently required a user interaction/experience similar to a Rolodex, as you swipe a view down it pulls out slightly and flips over and around exposing the next view below, while anchored to a central cylinder at the base. Seeing as most developers are moving away from Cocos2D (which usually would … Continue reading iOS7’s SpriteKit and Real 2.5D
The ability to detect whether a user has entered a specific geographic location is a useful feature that was added to iOS in version 4. There are several aspects to creating a monitored region (geofence) that I’m going to go over in a series of tutorials. In this tut we create a core location region … Continue reading iOS Geofencing using Core Location
Face detection is something I’ve been interested in for a while now. Previously to get it working on the iPhone we had to use Open CV but with iOS5 Apple have included native face detection as a part of the Core Image framework. It’s very simple to get FD up and running without any fuss, … Continue reading Easy Face Detection with iOS5
iPhone developers seem to treat concurrency as a dark art, secret knowledge that only a select few can handle. The forums are full of responses frightening people about the complexity of multithreading, when there’s generally a simple solution that solves the problem. I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about the low … Continue reading Multithreading and Concurrency On The iPhone, the easy way