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
Although awards aren’t everything, it’s nice to be recognized for hard work in an industry that sometimes feels like a meat grinder. So I’m super happy that one of the projects I worked on in the last twelve months took out two major wards at Cannes in two categories that I specialize in: Gold in … Continue reading Gold and Bronze Cannes Lion Award Wins
A shortened version of this post was originally published on the RGA Tech Blog One of the more interesting features to be released as a part of iOS7 was the Multipeer Connectivity framework. The framework allows for the creation of mesh networks through communication between multiple devices in close proximity without having to be connected … Continue reading Mesh Networks in iOS 7
Pop is the Core Animation wrapper built by Facebook that underlies their new (Flipboard killing) app, Paper. The interaction, animations and transitions in Paper are current, creative and sophisticated. The lack of imagination in the iOS dev community has been one of my personal frustrations for a long time now. For Facebook to release Pop … Continue reading Intro to POP, iOS Core Animation Wrapper
Mesh networks have been causing a buzz in the tech media lately. I wrote this blog post for the RGA tech blog to explain the technical aspects of how they work in iOS 7: http://techblog.rga.com/mesh-networks-in-ios7
This post was originally published on the RGA Tech Blog In Part I of our iBeacon series my colleague Andy Hawkes introduced the concept of iBeacons. My team and I have also been playing around with the creative possibilities of this new technology and testing its technical limitations. We’ve been working with at least one … Continue reading iBeacons v Geofences
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
With iOS7 Apple have allowed access to the Apple Notification Center Service (ANCS) and it has opened up a lot of fun opportunities to develop for connected devices. Essentially the ANCS allows Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE) devices to listen and respond to your iPhone’s local notifications. With the current proliferation of BTLE enabled devices (Pebble, … Continue reading iPhone and BlueTooth Enabled Device Communication Using NodeJS and iOS7’s ANCS
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