Blog Pav Blog

Tag: Objective-C

  • JavaScript, Swift, and Kotlin Oh My!

    This blog post now lives on http://blog.viacom.tech/2017/05/31/the-co-evolution-of-javascript-swift-and-kotlin/  (and it’s much shorter and better!)  

  • Nothing Changes More Swiftly than Apple’s Swift Syntax

    I’m enjoying the Stanford University class CS193P: Developing iOS 8 Applications with Swift. It’s free on iTunes U and the instructor Paul Hegarty knows his stuff. He’s a great explainer. I like how first he writes some code in a naive way and then fools around with it, getting it to work and then reworking…

  • Cocos2D-Swift 3.0: A great way to get started developing iOS games!

    If you’re new to iOS game development now is a great time to get started. In 2008 a brilliant engineer named Ricardo Quesada rewrote his 2D game engine for Apple’s iOS and released it as open source. It’s no exaggeration to say that hundreds of games, like my own, were developed using Cocos2D-including dozens of…

  • Apple’s Snakes and Ladders Swift Example

    All the cool kids are learning Swift this week! Not wanting to be left out I downloaded Xcode beta 6 and the iBook introduction and started following long with the code sample in Xcode’s new playground. Swift is impressive as it fixes a number of issues with Objective-C by replacing it wholesale with a modern…

  • Sprite Kit, Retina, iOS7 and Getting It Right

    I spent more time that I care to admit figuring out how to reconcile my old Dungeonators code with Apple’s Sprite Kit, Retina displays, and iOS 7. Along the way I searched the web for help and ran into tons of tutorials and advice for indy game developers (I highly recommend    www.raywenderlich.com  for a…

  • Re-doing Dungeonators

    One thing I think all software developers love to do is to make software for “the heck of it.” Hacking something together without having to worry about users, open source community members, and code reviews, is something devs don’t get to do often in these days of test-driven, agile, minimum viable products. Back in 2011…

  • Getting Xcode and GitHub to work together like besties

    Updated for Xcode  Version 7.3.1   Thanks to  Jake for pointing out that his blog post needed a little freshening up! After watching the WWCD keynote I wanted to fool around in Cocoa and Objective-C again. It’s been a while and my Xcode skills were rusty. One task that always seems tricky is getting Xcode’s…

  • ARC Memory Management in iOS 5 and Cocos2d-iPhone 2.0

    My rewrite of Dungeonators is crawling along at a glacial pace. Mostly because I can only work a couple of hours a week on the project. But the iOS 5 way to manage memory with ARC (automated reference counting) is making the process far less painful than it was the first time I wrote my…

  • Sprite Playground

    I wrote a little Cocos2d-iPhone test app and committed the project to GitHub. (Like every dutiful hacker should.) You’re welcome to download the project and fool around with the code. My goal was to figure out how to create a composite sprite, make sure it could respond to touches, and rotate and move it round…

  • Cocos2d-iPhone Sprite Rotation to an Arbitrary Point

    I had some time during the Thanksgiving weekend to work on Dungeonators. I’m hoping to get an upgrade out to the App Store soon. One thing I needed //TODO: is refactor my rather poor implementation of rotating a sprite to face another sprite. My original code worked ok, in a roundabout way, but was ugly…