Tag: iOS

Caoga caoga is released! (01 Mar 2018)
I am proud to announce that Caoga caoga, a fun Irish vocabulary learning game, is now available to download for free on iOS and Android.

50 Unity Tips #13: iOS Launch Screen (10 Nov 2017)
On Startup, a Unity game will display the splash screen (if enabled) before loading the first scene. However, if you launch the game on iOS, you will notice the following bluescreen before the splash screen/first scene.

Unity or SpriteKit for 2D iOS Game Development? (09 Nov 2017)

Images courtesy of Apple, Microsoft and Unity respectively.

Quit my full time corporate job. Built an iOS game. It became #1 in the App Store. Here are revenue numbers and what I learned. (09 Nov 2016)
A very interesting post by Amir Rajan in which he discusses the text-based game A Dark Room which topped the App Store and made a little over $700,000. Part One. Part One.

4 Xcode Asset Catalog Secrets You Need to Know (07 Jan 2016)

Over time, Apple has given us quite a few tools that make graphic design easier for us to do in our own apps. Unfortunately, we’ve come to rely on our fellow graphic designers to do a lot of the grunt work for us, even though tools like Xcode 6 give us the capability to do it ourselves. Hopefully, with this article, we can learn some things that can prevent our fellow graphic designers from going postal and doing things like printing out 1x, 2x, and 3x image assets on paper and stapling them to our faces.

Making an SKLabelNode Clickable (02 Dec 2015)
One of the limitations of SpriteKit over other Game Engines and Frameworks is that it comes without any User Interaction elements built in, while it is expensive (and potentially dangerous - but more on that in the future) in mixing UIKit and presenting different views.

Designing SpriteKit Scenes Visually in Xcode 7 (but keeping support for iOS8) (03 Nov 2015)
The new and improved SpriteKit Editor in Xcode 7 brings a whole host of new features that greatly aid the development project of visually designing games and projects that use SpriteKit. This post will consider three of these key features, and approaches to keep support for iOS8.

Making iOS Music Apps with AudioKit (Csound) and Swift (23 Sep 2015)
Following on from yesterday’s quick tutorial on integrating Pure Data (libpd) into iOS applications coded in Swift, today we will look at AudioKit, an open-source Csound-based audio library whose goal is to be the easiest possible audio platform for musicians and developers to adopt.

Making iOS Music Apps with Pure Data (libpd) and Swift (22 Sep 2015)
Pure Data is an open source graphical programming language for real-time audio, video and graphical processing. Since the releases of a C library (and wrapped in Objective-C for iOS) a few years back, numerous applications such as RjDj, Ninja Jamm etc. have been released utilizing the library.

Is Apple TV the Future of Casual Console Gaming? (16 Sep 2015)
Since Apple’s announcement last week of the new Apple TV and tvOS, there has been a lot of discussion of the role that Apple TV will play within the gaming industry. In this post I will discuss the potential of Apple TV for casual gamers.

Inter-device Audio Mode (17 Jun 2015)
For musicians and those who code iOS music apps, one interesting development for iOS9 and OSX 10.11 is the forthcoming Inter-device Audio Mode, discussed during the ‘What’s New in Core Audio’ (from 37m20s onwards) talk at WWDC 2015.

Learning libPD for iOS (07 May 2015)
Want to make musical apps for iOS? Then check out this excellent how-to-series from Rafael Hernandez.

MIDI over Bluetooth LE between iOS 8 and OSX 10.10 (20 Feb 2015)
While studying my MFA, I designed the application kontrolr so that I could control Ableton Live and Max for Live modules directly using MIDI from my iPad and a MIDI-USB cable. Although this functions perfectly fine, and is better than OSC and a wireless router or WAP, the cable is somewhat inconvenient I must admit. Since the announcement of Bluetooth LE and iOS 7, I’ve been meaning to add MIDI over Bluetooth support, but never got the chance. Today I was browsing through WWDC 2014 topics and discovered Core Audio updates which actually effortless allow MIDI over Bluetooth LE between iOS 8 and OSX 10.10 devices.

Swift for JavaScript Engineers: Simple Persistent Storage with plist (07 Feb 2015)
This article describes a good approach for converting an XLS or CSV file into a PLIST (creates an array of dictionaries).

αბц - An Alphabet Learning Tool (06 Feb 2015)
Last month I started learning the Georgian alphabet using this course on Memrise. However, one of my issues with this community-built course was that the Georgian letters were low-quality, pixelated images, while I longed for a way to practically test my knowledge of combinations of these letters in a non-intimidating manner.

Programmatically Checking if an App is Installed on iOS + Launching Apps via URL Schemes (16 Dec 2013)
Apple URL Schemes allow Native iOS and web apps in Safari to trigger System and installed 3rd party apps.

Introducing kontrolr (22 Sep 2013)
kontrolr (stylized with a lower case ‘k’) is an iOS MIDI controller application. Physically, kontrolr sends MIDI data to a device via the Lightning-USB Camera Adapter¹ and a USB-MIDI cable². MIDI data has the benefit over OSC that firstly no network connection is needed, hence no router and dependency on wireless transmissions, and secondly, that no OSC to MIDI program (i.e. OSCulator³) is necessary for controlling DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations), again removing a potential layer of error.

blockNect (24 Feb 2012)
blockNect is an multi-purpose interactive interface, realized using Microsoft’s Kinect camera and computer vision, developed along with Thibault Lelievre and Philo van Kemenade as the group Computer Vision assignment for Parag Mital as part of Workshops in Creative Coding 2. Colored blocks are placed on an arbitrary sized chess board, where the block’s can be manipulated by the user. Each color block corresponds to a separate entity, while stacked blocks merge together to form single blocks. This affords the user three separate degrees of freedom; x, y-coordinates and height. This was realized as an eight-step sequencer where different colored blocks would relate to different instrumentation (such as drums, keyboard, bass), and the height to volume.