This post summarized the story how our latest iPhone app, TaggTo, is created. TaggTo is an iPhone app to provide a better way to discover and share personal product experiences. It’s like product reviews in an easier, more fun, and more trustworthy way.
An easy to follow tutorial goes through all the details about how to do networking programming for your iOS/iPhone project, by leveraging the power of the Three20 framework.
Last week, I ran a free promotion on my iOS game “PenguinLinks Pro 2″, and have learned a lot from this process. This blog post shares some numbers from this promotion, and my thoughts on how effective the “free promotion” is in general. It also discussed the growth of Chinese app market.
Recently I am working on migrating our site to a new theme (you can see why, don’t you?) So I setup an apache instance on our test server, and try to apply the new theme there first. It’s not a very straightforward task. I often need help from the vendor’s tech support. But sometime even the support guy couldn’t tell what went wrong just based on my description. The best way for him to debug is, logging into my test server’s web console, and checking things from there. This needs to expose my internal test server to outside traffic.
Since I started playing with mechanical keyboards a few months ago, I was totally amazed by how satisfying they feels. I couldn’t even believe I have been stucked with membrane keyboards (regular keyboards) for so long! However, I am a mac user. Since the day I fell in love with mechanical keyboards, I started the search for a mac compatible one. Sure, most of the keyboards do work on mac, but I think what I am looking for is a keyboard not only “working”, but also having mac’s look and feel. Which is hard.
The closest match is the Matias Tactile Pro 3. It’s a beautiful keyboard
Recently I started a new iPhone project, which is an utility application. Not game anymore. To speed up my development process, I decided to use Three20 library for most of the UI development.
Three20 is an open source iOS library, contributed by Joe Hewitt, the developer of original Facebook iPhone app. It is a big package, with very rich functionalities. Many familiar UI elements you see from the facebook app can be found here: the Laucher View (the startup screen with icons for different functionalities), photo album, … Some UIKit classes are also enhanced, which makes them easier to use (once you have learned it), and also more powerful.
However, everything comes with a cost. And three20 is not perfect either. The most complained issues are the complexity of this framework, not-well-managed dependencies, and lack of documentation. There are some basic information on its official website — three20.info, but far …
Hi! It’s time for #iDevBlogADay again! Today I want to have a light post, talking about what technical blogs (specifically for iOS development) I follow, and my opinions on them.
Posting Freq: High
Pros: This is by far my favorite iOS tutorial blog site. Ray and his co-bloggers did a wonderful job in all aspects, from explaining simple concepts to showing you how to make a fully functional complex games. Everything is made crystal clear. I specially like their style of “tutorial series”: which covers a big topic in several posts. Currently the topic is “iOS 5 Storyboard”.
Cons: My only wish for them is to cover more UIKit stuff. After all, not everybody is using cocos2d for his/her project.
Posting Freq: High
Pros: I discovered his blog when I started learning In App Purchase. And then has been following him. His posts covers many different areas and with a lot of attention …
Every morning, the first thing I do is grabbing my iphone, and checking my iphone apps’ sale status of the previous day (I use AppSales, which can found at: https://github.com/omz/AppSales-Mobile). Today, it failed. It was not really a surprise to me since I know iTunes Connect, Apple developer’s portal, is often down, with or without notice.
At 10AM, I checked it again. Still no luck. So I logged into ITC’s website, and wanted to check the sale status from there. When I clicked on the “Sales and Trends”, first I got a SSL certificate alert. I ignored it, and let the browser continue. After a few seconds, I saw a shocking view on my browser:
When I saw this, the first thing went through my mind is I was on a wrong website. But I checked the url, and yes, it was “reportingitc.apple.com”. Then I remembered the warning about the …
Particle is a big topic in iOS animation. To create realistic smoke, fire or even rain drops or snow falls, having a good particle emitter is the key. But in this blog, I am going to talk about something more than a basic particle emitter.
In most of the cases, particle emitter generates particles randomly — random color, random size, random direction — with the control of some key parameters. But it is not always like that. Sometimes we want the generated particles to follow a certain path, such as water trace, a group of firefly, or sparkles in the wind. That’s what I am going to talk about this time — how to generate random particles along a path. Before we start, let’s take a look at the end result first.
As you can see in the demo, at first the particles ran around the character “2″; then in the second …
Lion has been here for a while. And my games PenguinLinks 2 were out as well. Now it’s time to upgrade my hackintosh to the latest OSX — Lion.
In my previous post — A Perfect Hackintosh Machine, I have described how I installed Snow Leopard on my almost-4-years-old, but still pretty decent desktop. And installing Lion is pretty similar.
(Disclaimer: The following process potentially violates Apple’s End User License Agreement for Mac OS X. Please check the Aggreement before following these steps.)
To make things less complicated, I decided to do a fresh install and then migrate all my stuff from Time Machine backup (that’s one of many reasons why I love TM!). The whole installation process is actually very easy — thanks to this really good tutorial: Lion installation via USB stick using Chameleon, DP4, GM and FINAL. I just followed the guide and after about …
