References Complex list of what’s required vs. optional vs. platform – http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/userexperience/conceptual/mobilehig/IconsImages/IconsImages.html Building an app, the basics iPhone launchimage/splash Default.png Default-568@2x.png Model Size Model Size 3 + 3GS 320×480 4 + 4S 640×960 5 640×1136 iPad launchimage/splash Default.png Default@2x.png Model Size Model Size 1 + 2 768×1004 or 1024×748 3 […]
iphone
I’m writing an iPad game that’s designed to be self-evident and trivial to use. Today, I made a re-usable “tell the user how many fingers to use” animation that would work well with any app. So, I decided to open-source it and stick it on github. Screenshot from my current […]
Background Last year, Pearson ran the first ever Innov8 competition, giving tech startups a chance to make their own innovative new product/project. The grand prize was £5,000 towards building the product. Most of the teams were adults (even: real companies), but a team of students from Blatchington Mill School won, […]
Courtesy of Gareth, I got a surprise trip to the Shard on opening day, just after sunset. Tragically, I had my DSLR with me and *left it behind* 10 mins before Gareth phoned me, so all this is from an iPhone 4 (gasp!). Even so, it’s impressive. The Shard is […]
As a developer, I’ve been using iPhone’s since they first came out. I have to test my apps on every version! iOS 6 is the first version of iOS “post Steve Jobs”. But it’s terrible – it seems to be a 2nd-rate product rushed out by a small team of […]
How slow is making iPhone apps using native code? You have to write HTML5, right, if you want FAST app development on iPhone? Or Unity? Or cocos2d? Right? Or … write it in Objective-C … a beginner-friendly “native” language: 2 hrs and 15 mins to create the artwork, design the […]
I’ve just updated my script that adds a missing feature to Xcode – making your libraries automatically work on Simulator and on Devices, with no manual intervention: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3520977/build-fat-static-library-device-simulator-using-xcode-and-sdk-4 …and I’ve also put the script itself into GitHub as a gist you can easily copy/paste: https://gist.github.com/3705459
Building and Dismantling the Windows Advantage – a great article, telling the story in a mix of words and graphs. “The consequences are dire for Microsoft. The wiping out of any platform advantage around Windows will render it vulnerable to direct competition. This is not something it had to worry […]
Matteo Pericoli spent 3 years drawing central London from the Thames. His artwork is a 30-foot-long tapestry (that you can buy as a fold-out book). There’s an exhibition just opened today with the original artwork at Ealing Gallery. What’s amazing is when you see it up close just how tiny […]
Tim Sweeney, Epic Games (owners of Unreal Engine, and deelopers of AAA games on 360/PS3/iOS): “The most profitable game we’ve ever made, in terms of man years invested versus revenue, is actually Infinity Blade. It’s more profitable than Gears of War.” Touch Arcade has some terrible analysis (don’t listen to […]
I feel sorry for Toshiba; they make good products, but their marketing seems to belong to a much smaller, poorer company. Take this advert, from April 2012, when Apple is already far along with shifting their whole laptop lineup to “ultra thin” MacBook airs (rumour suggests the non-thin models will […]
TheChaosEngine – private forums hangout for games-industry professionals. There’s an epic thread on there where people post projects they / their team / their employer has published on iPhone. It’s currently 40 pages long, so I went through and pulled out the links to the iTunes pages for each game. […]
For a couple of years now, Firefox has had a nifty feature where if it crashes – for ANY reason – the next time you run it, it gives you a “menu” of the windows you had open, and lets you selectively re-open them. As a bonus, this menu is […]
Ever seen this hard to notice bug in an iPhone / Mac project? Caused by a flaw (bug?) in Apple’s own API: NSDictionary * map; … NSObject * key; NSObject * value; … // NB: next line will frequently crash at runtime // …but even if doesn’t crash, it probably […]
Looks like a “normal” KickStarter project for a new Tower Defence game. Halfway through the demo video, it switches to “here’s how I’ve been using GA to detect game-design flaws, and to test ideas in tweaking game design”. Something I’ve wanted to do for more than a decade, but could […]
As a free-time project, I’ve been writing a Risk clone (*) for iPad. One of the bits I like best right now is that you can give it the URL of *any* SVG file on the web, and it automatically turns it into a Risk map. (e.g. all the maps […]
For the past week, my iPhone’s have been unable to use Gmail. After approximately 4 hours, gmail locks you out of IMAP completely, unless/until you force-kill Apple’s mail client. The problem is … if you force-kill the client, you lose all emails you wrote, and you lose all emails you […]
Today I finally discovered that the iPhone has StreetView. That means it’s only taken me THREE YEARS to find this secret feature that Google has worked very hard to make sure no-one ever uses. The best bit? The top two Google results for “iPhone Streetview” were both incorrect, and useless […]
Over the past couple of years, there’s been much coverage within the games-industry press about the fall and fall of the UK games industry. Nicholas Lovell has done a particularly good job of tracking studio closures. Many of the big companies, and the trade associations, seem to have spent most […]
…because Apple hates giving customer support, and buried this address deep in their website, in a tiny font where it’s almost impossible to find: contactus.uk@euro.apple.com …and they just screwed-up an order we’d made, but all their emails were sent from fake Apple email addresses (“You have replied to a confirmation-only […]