Category: I-phone

iOS 5.1 beta 2 is now available for download to the registered for developers. This 2nd beta of the iOS 5.1 has a build number of 9B5127c. Registered developers can download iOS 5.1 beta 2 from the…

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If you have an Apple Developer Account then now is the time to hit the software update button! Earlier today Apple released iOS 5.1 Beta 2 to the developers.

The biggest change is the addition of a much-requested feature related to the management of photos in the Photo Stream:

NEW: Photos taken using iOS 5.1 can be deleted from Photo Stream on your device and will be removed automatically from Photo Stream on your other iOS 5.1 devices. Older photos can be manually deleted from your iOS 5.1 devices.

The new seed comes just two weeks after the previous iOS 5.1 Beta 1 was seeded on November 28. For more information and additional support resources, visit:

http://developer.apple.com/programs/ios/

We know a lot of people have been waiting for Apple to add the download feature, how about you do you think Photo Stream has lacked this feature?

Earlier today Apple announced that their Mac App Store has surpassed 100 million downloads, while that might not seem like much when considering the iOS App Store passed the same mark in three months, you need to remember that the Mac App Store has as much smaller user base. Furthermore it is important to remember that according to Apple these numbers don’t include the number of times that OS X Lion has been downloaded.

According to Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Phillip Schiller “In just three years the App Store changed how people get mobile apps, and now the Mac App Store is changing the traditional PC software industry,” he further adds “With more than 100 million downloads in less than a year, the Mac App Store is the largest and fastest growing PC software store in the world.”

Throughout the past few months Apple has put a lot of time into transforming the distribution channel used for their software, shifting from the boxed versions to only offering digital versions of their most popular software, most recently adding their music production suite to the Mac App Store.

Another interesting tidbit that Apple included in the press release is the fact that the iOS App Store currently sees customers downloading apps at a rate of 1 billion apps per month. Since the iOS store’s launch in July 2008, Apple has recorded a staggering 18 billion apps downloaded.

Those interested can read the full press release here.

In the past I mentioned an excellent guide on the basics of using Cocos2D CCRenderTexture to mask images.

I came across another post demonstrating how to performsome interesting effects that can be performed using CCRenderTexture.

In the post you will see how to use CCRenderTexture to  draw and sketch on a rendered texture using touch, how to perform motion blur using CCRenderTexture, information about a mutable texture class for Cocos2D that allows you to easily get/set individual pixels and more.

The post is by Stephen Itterheim, and you can find it here with an example project included.

Some very handy code snippets to have if you’re working with Cocos2D.

 

©2011 iPhone, iOS 5, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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I’ve been delinquent recently in updating the blog with readers games. I’ve recently had emails about games that have been created by blog readers and our tool users and I wanted to post about them so everyone can see the amazing work being done by indie developers. If you have sent in info about your […]

It’s Sunday once again and this can mean only one thing: Talkcast Time! If the holiday crazies haven’t completely overcome you yet, join me at 5PM Hawaii/7PM Pacific/10PM Eastern for some holiday goings-on.

We’ll be discussing gifts for those who haven’t finished shopping already, primarily from our own Holiday Gift Guides, but we’re also looking for your suggestions as well. What’s the one thing you’ve asked Santa for? What’s the killer gift idea you have for someone else? Let us know!

As usual, the chat room will be providing color commentary and generally trying to cause trouble, so do join them, it’s always a lovely conversation going on in conjunction with the recording. And besides, you never know who will actually show up!

Also keep in mind that we are planning to have some aftershow tonight, and it’s been a while since the last one so it’s bound to be interesting. Come find out why we never EVER record it!

Your calls and questions help us make the show the best it can be, otherwise I’m just talking to myself! To participate on TalkShoe, you can use the browser-only client, the embedded Facebook app, or download the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, for maximum fun, you should call in. For the web UI, just click the Talkshoe Web button on our profile page at 4 HI/7 PDT/10 pm EDT Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VoIP lines (yay for free cellphone weekend minutes!): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 — during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *8.

If you’ve got a headset or microphone handy on your Mac, you can connect via the free X-Lite, or Blink Lite SIP clients; basic instructions are here. Talk to you tonight!

Talkcast tonight, 7pm PT/10pm ET: Shopping Edition! originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 11 Dec 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Spotify already has proven itself a formidable competitor for Rdio, and the all-you-can-stream music service even matches up against iTunes with a subscription model versus iTunes’ track-at-a-time sales approach. Now it’s aiming the crosshairs at suggestion engine Pandora with a revamp of its Spotify Radio feature.

Spotify’s current radio activates when you select “start artist radio” at the top of an artist page or generates suggestions via tags, but doesn’t allow you to save stations.

The revamped radio works largely the same way Pandora does. Users can drag any track to “radio” option in the sidebar of the desktop app, and Spotify will create a new radio station, which you can save. You have unlimited skipping and stations.

Pandora only allows users to create up to 100 stations. Even those with a paid subscription do not have unlimited skips. As this feature appears to be available for all levels of Spotify, it makes the service an enticing option for Pandora users.

The revamped Spotify radio is being rolled out in the next few days, and there’s no word yet about updating the iOS app to update the feature. Those who want to try the feature now can download a preview version.

Spotify to challenge Pandora with Spotify Radio originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 11 Dec 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Have you ever wanted to look in your own ear? Or at the nape of your neck? Or behind furniture? If you own an iPhone 4S and an Apple TV, you can wirelessly beam the picture from your camera to your large screen TV.

Just enable AirPlay. Double-click the Home button, swipe to the right twice, select your Apple TV as your AirPlay destination and enable Mirroring.

Then, click Home and run the camera app. You’ll be able to see what the camera sees because its preview mirrors to your home TV, even when your arm is stuck behind a dresser. You can also point the iPhone camera (front or back) at your ear, your nose, or your back — letting you see through your phone by watching your TV.

You may want to use a flashlight along with your phone as you explore darker parts of your house, like under your couch when looking for spare change or that missing remote.

Update: TUAW reader Sam W suggests mounting the iPhone onto a remote controlled truck for full-house surveillance.

Clever iPhone 4S tricks: Look at your own ear (Updated) originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 11 Dec 2011 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Welcome to another edition of the best resources in iOS development featuring the recently listed resources on this site in order of popularity.

This week’s most popular resource was one demonstrating how to use core animation to create an animated and curved menu inspired by the sharing menu of the Path 2 app.

Other popular resources were a tremendously useful library that allows you to very easily save any Objective-C object to a plist, and a networking framework based on the ASIHttpRequest framework.

Here are all the the resources:

Open Source: Library For Creating An Animated Curved Menu Like In The Popular Path 2 App – This is a flexible library allowing you to display curved menus of different types easily including ones similar to that in the Path 2 app.

Open Source: Library Allows Any Objective-C Object To Easily Be Saved To A Plist File – An extremely useful library that when included adds extra methods to your Objective-C object allowing you to easily save/load those objects from plist files.

Open Source: New Networking Framework Inspired By The Now Defunct ASIHttpRequest – With the original ASIHttpRequest developers this new framework has been created with the ASIHttpRequest features and additional features such as ARC support.

Round-Up Of Path 2 UI Inspired Open Source iOS Libraries And Analysis – With the already listed curved menu library being so popular this is a listing of other Path 2 related analysis and libraries submitted to this site.

How To Make Realistic Water Ripples With Cocos2D (Very Impressive) – A very cool Cocos2D example with code provided that allows you to add beautiful water ripples easily.

Tutorial: How To Create An iPad Split View With A Sliding Master Controller Like The Mail App – A tutorial on making an iPad split view where the controlling view on the left slides in and out responding to gestures.

Open Source: New Easy Facebook API Helper Library Using Blocks – A library that allows you to make different facebook calls complete with callbacks very cleanly using blocks.

Open Source: Customizable Library For Beautiful Easy Text Display With HTML Like Tags – This library allows you to define different core text effects, and apply them to your text just like html tags.

Free Library For Easily Adding An iCloud Photo Gallery To Your Apps (With An Example App) – An iOS 5 library and example app demonstrating how to use iCloud with your apps images.

Tutorial: iPad UISplitViewController And Storyboards – A tutorial on how to use the Xcode storyboard feature to set up an iPad UISplitViewController.

Thanks for reading, please bookmark and share this post.

©2011 iPhone, iOS 5, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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As the entire industry reported today, HP is going to make webOS open source. That’s a terrible shame.

Continue reading “Open Source webOS”

A developer at Google got in touch with me today regarding Google Currents, a new app for both iOS and Android devices that offers a curated, formatted reading experience for the content you care about. I’m enjoying using the app, and I thought you might be interested in a brief overview.

Continue reading “Google Currents”

Gmail is one of the best web mail apps around and I have been using it for a few years now. When the iPhone came out, there was a lot of talk about a native Gmail application; but, because of Apple’s stringent rules, that talk was pretty much quieted as soon as it was spoken. Apple was completely satisfied with the way that Mail on the iPhone worked and wanted you to use that instead.

Well, being patient and letting things play out, we finally have ourselves a native Gmail application for the iPhone. Since I mainly use it as my main email client, I figured I would give it a test drive and see how it actually works and whether or not it would take the place of Mail.

Functionality

The core functions of Gmail are all available within this app and that makes it very easy to use. First, you have full control over your email by being able to use one of the great features of Gmail, which is the ability to organize your mail. You can access all of it from your inbox all the way down to putting them in different folders, or as Google calls them “labels.” Email can also be starred and labeled so that you can move them into the proper place.

Writing is a very intuitive and seamless experience that makes it easy to fire quick emails on the iPhone. When you want to compose a message you can start typing in the contact’s email address, and if it is one that you have previously written or have saved in Gmail, it will bring it up and you can select it. You can also select a contact from your iPhone address book if you don’t already have their email saved in your Google contacts. For attachments, you are limited to only attaching a picture or video that you have on your iPhone, no documents or anything else.

Some of the other features include search and push notifications. With search it can comb through all of your email to find what you are looking for, similar to how Gmail does it on the web. Notifications, overall, seem to work very well; in fact, as soon as I get one on my computer, within seconds I get one on my iPhone as well. The only caveat is that you cannot take advantage of the new iOS 5 notifications, and are stuck getting notified with a beep or a buzz of your iPhone and the number of emails above the Gmail icon.

Look and Feel

When you first start to get into the app, you find that a lot of what you can do in it is very similar to the mobile web version and to some degree, the actual web version that you would use on your computer. A lot of the functionality of Gmail is in this native app and so it makes it feel like you are actually using it and not getting a watered down version.

When you compare it to the mobile version, it feels more like Gmail should. For example, you can’t get notifications if you were to use the mobile web which, to me, is a big reason to use this instead. To a lesser extent, using a native app versus going into Safari is just simpler to navigate, and less steps to take to get to my destination. With the mobile version, depending on how long I have been away, I need to open Safari, then re-log back into my account, and finally, I am back in Gmail. With a native app, I just open it and there is my email; no need to worry about anything else.

The Good and the Bad?

When the app first came out, it was met with a lot of criticism. As I read through my Twitter stream, most people were turned off by it because of lack of features and that it really didn’t serve a better purpose than either the web or using Mail on the iPhone. In my opinion, I see potential in this application as Google did well in their first iteration. You get a solid app that works well and does the majority of what you could do as a normal Gmail user. I know I felt that after using it for a while, I wasn’t limited in any way by the fact that I was using this and not iOS 5 Mail.

But, that is not to say it doesn’t have its shortcomings. For example, you can only use it for one account and you also cannot check your Google Apps email. For most people this is fine, but if you want to check more than one account, you are out of luck. Two, I noticed that because this isn’t connected to your iPhone like the Mail app, if I wanted to share a picture over email, I have to make sure that I have Gmail set up on iOS 5 Mail. Granted, I could go into the app and send it as an attachment, but it would be nice to have it integrated with the iPhone. Lastly, it would be nice to have the ability to send attachments other than photos and video; maybe have it connect to Dropbox so I can send documents.

Conclusion

Overall, the Gmail app is out to a solid start and Google promises more features are to come. It works well and gets the job done for email and I think if it could integrate more with the iPhone, then I would use this as my full time mail app. You can also get it for the iPad and it has the same functionality and look as the iPhone version, but just on a bigger screen. Get it free on the App Store and let us know what you think about it and if it is going to replace the Mail app for you.

I’m just going to come out and say it: I’m a big Batman fan. I always have been really, ever since I started picking up the comics when I was a kid. And although I don’t read the comics much anymore, I do still appreciate the games and movies that come out based on this iconic hero.

When Batman: Arkham Asylum came out for the consoles, I bought it and I was hooked. The sequel is on my Christmas list, but until then I’ve got a stripped down version that I can play anytime I want: Batman Arkham City Lockdown. It’s definitely not as deep as the console versions, but is it worth the purchase anyways? Let’s figure it out after the break.

The Concept

Batman Arkham City Lockdown is based on the popular console game, but really, only in concept. The story goes that all of the inmates in Arkham Asylum (the jail where all the nutsos go) were released into a special part of the city that’s been walled off from the general population. Batman goes in to kick butt and take names.

From a graphics standpoint, this game is beautiful. Although it’s built on the same Unreal platform as Infinity Blade and Infinity Blade II, it’s not quite as perfectly rendered. That’s a little bit of splitting hairs, but once you get into the game you realize that you see the same environments over and over again, whereas with Infinity Blade, you’ve got a new level with every bad guy. But more on that later.

How the Levels Work

In the console game, you’ve got a freewheeling sandbox environment where you can go pretty much anywhere you please. Navigation in Batman Arkham City Lockdown is done by a map, then you touch the place you want to go to see what kind of level and bad guys you’re going to find. Once you pick your poison, you’re dropped into the environment and each bad guy approaches you, so there really is nothing to do but fight.

Now that’s not to say that just fighting is a bad thing. Essentially, the game is very similar to Infinity Blade: swipe to move, attack, dodge, etc. I prefer this method of controls to virtual joysticks, because my finger always slides away from the controls, making me miss hits and get frustrated. By just swiping away, I can perform combos just like in Infinity Blade, and dodge moves in the same way. But with Batman Arkham City Lockdown, combos are a big thing that not only get you extra points but also make the game more stylish. If you do it right, you can knock someone down and break their arm.

Each zone has a few different levels, then a boss character. The problem here is that the individual levels all have the same landscape, with no variations other than the way the bad guys look or are dressed. So really, working your way through a level can seem pretty repetitive. I’m not sure if it’s my love of the Batman character that kept me pushing through or not, but even though it was a bit like Groundhog’s Day, I still enjoyed it.

Boss Fights

I played up into the third zone, and that means I faced Two Face and Solomon Grundy to move onward. With Two Face, a new dynamic was introduced: The Batarang. The game would prompt me to tilt the iPhone to guide the Batarang to its final destination — Two Face’s chest — and that’s exactly what I did. With Grundy, well that was a different story.

For those of you who aren’t giant nerds, Solomon Grundy is a huge zombie that has tremendous strength. His backstory is actually kind of sad, but that doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this game, anyways.

Grundy chases you down like a madman, and you have to avoid him. To do so, a pop up will appear telling you which direction to swipe. Do so — and quickly — or Grundy is going to eat your lunch. Once you’re actually there to fight, you have to dodge again, then attack and then occasionally you’ll get grabbed. To get out, you have to furiously tap the screen and break his grip. It’s a welcome change from the rest of the game.

Leveling Up

At the end of each level, you get XP and Waynetech points, which you can use to buy additional items. These all are designed to level up the character, giving you a faster response time, better health and all that stuff. I found that the difficulty picked up quite a bit the further along I went, so I really needed all that Waynetech gear to continue. Without it, you just don’t survive.

Additional Features

There are a few other nice touches included, such as free iPhone wallpaper, a built-in comic viewer and bios of the characters, but there’s also some in-app purchasing that I’m not a big fan of. Why? Well the game itself is $6, so spending more on something seems a bit excessive. What you get though, are additional character skins, including the animated version of Batman from the 1990s, Batman Beyond and more. It’s cool, and I could see how that would help revitalize the game later once you beat it, but it’s still a bit icky to me.

Final Thoughts

I love Batman, but I’m not quite sure how I feel about this game. I always felt that Infinity Blade was a great game but repetitive, and they seemed to have fixed that to a certain extent with Infinity Blade II. But with the original Infinity Blade, at least we had different environments to see with each fight, and that’s not the case with Batman Arkham City Lockdown. I love the fighting because it gets more and more challenging, but I really wish the environments would change at least a little bit. I would gladly give up the comic viewer for a few more backgrounds.

Also, I’m not sure about the depth of the entire thing. The game has been out only 24 hours, and as I write this, I’ve spent quite a bit playing it on my own. I’m already on the third boss fight, and there’s only one unlocked level left. Are there more after that? I hope so, because if not, then it’s kinda crappy.

On the other hand, this is the perfect iPhone game of sorts. Sure, you can sit down like I did and play a marathon session, but you can also just pick it up and play whenever you want. Kicking butt is fun no matter how long you do it, so playing in the waiting room of your doctor’s office is just fine. So in a way, it’s just about right.

And I do feel that this is a huge step forward in the genre. Now developers other than Epic are using the Unreal engine on the iPhone, and that means we’re just going to get better and better games. Maybe Batman Arkham City Lockdown isn’t perfect, but it is a lot of fun. And if it’s the first step in a series of excellent games on the platform, then I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Apple’s announcement of Thunderbolt on Feb 24th was greeted by excitement, as Mac users became aware of the tantalising possibilities of this new high-speed port. There’s lots of things Thunderbolt can do that were simply not possible before — driving multiple external displays from a single port, “docking” a laptop to a selection of external ports via a single cable, expanding a laptop with high-performance desktop graphics cards.

Then there are applications that older standards like Firewire and USB simply aren’t fast enough to cope with, such as capturing uncompressed 1080p video or very fast external drives like RAID arrays or sold state drives. Our own Chris Ward went so far as to ask if Thunderbolt could foretell the end of the line for the Mac Pro as we know it, by allowing a Mac mini sized chassis to be endlessly exapanded via external Thunderbolt-connected peripherals.

And yet… ten months later, if you go to Apple’s store and search for ‘Thunderbolt’, you’ll see just 11 products, three of which are Apple’s own ultra-expensive Thunderbolt Display (plus its VESA mount) and the official Thunderbolt cable. There’s three LaCie BigDisks, at $500 for 1 TB and $600 for 2 TB, or $900 for an ultra-fast SSD unit. There’s four types of Promise Drobo-like RAID boxes, starting from $1150. Finally, there’s a Promise Thunderbolt-to-Fibre-Channel adaptor, for $800 (Fibre Channel is an multi-gigabit enterprise-grade communication protocol used to connect with storage-area networks like Apple’s Xsan, among other applications), allowing Thunderbolt-equipped machines to participate in distributed video workflows.

None of these are remotely mainstream devices. The 2 TB LaCie disk is almost twice the price of an equivalent eSATA/Firewire model, at $329, which will be just as fast using eSATA as it is Thunderbolt.

So where are all the devices that normal humans might want to buy? Has Thunderbolt arrived as more of a damp fart?

My research for this post started when I was considering an iMac purchase. I’m not keen on Apple’s official SSD pricing, because a top-of-the-line aftermarket model (twice as fast) is available for about $150 less. If possible, though, I’d also like to avoid the work of swapping my own drive in — I’m sure I’ll spend half my life trying to remove dust from the inside of the screen afterwards. Logically, I thought to myself, I should be able to buy some sort of reasonably priced Thunderbolt-connected drive bay that would be just as fast as an internal drive, right?

Wrong. Such a thing doesn’t exist. The only thing close is the $900 LaCie model I mentioned above, and it’s a whopping $500 more expensive than the OCZ drive I am considering. No-one is offering a cradle you can put your own drive into. Nor can you buy… well, most of the things I mentioned in the first paragraph, actually.

There’s been plenty of promises from third parties, to be sure. Sonnet, in particular, has announced a broad range of exciting products, such as an Expresscard/34 adaptor (pre-order now, ships by December 14th). With that card cage, lots of expansion options open up (like eSATA ports). However, Sonnet’s PCIe Thunderbolt Expansion Chassis, which will connect any normal PCIe x16 card — like a high-performance graphics card — and the RackMac mini Xserver — which will convert a Thunderbolt-equipped Mac mini into a 1U server — won’t be available until “early January.”

Another raft of devices were announced at the Intel Developer Forum in September of this year, but manufacturers were long on promises and short on firm prices or ship dates. Blackmagic’s HDMI capture device is available now, but that’s a rather specialist piece of kit with a hefty $300 price tag. Belkin’s Thunderbolt Express Dock (a dongle with Thunderbolt on one end and USB/ethernet/etc. on the other) won’t be out until “spring 2012” and has no suggested price. mLogic’s mDock looks interesting, but the company doesn’t even have a full website up so we couldn’t contact them for any updated information on when it might ship.

Even Apple itself hasn’t showed much follow through for Thunderbolt devices. We’ve got the Thunderbolt Display, with its extremely handy forest of ports which are ideal for laptop users working on a desk. The 27″ 2560×1440 screen is certainly sumptuous, but at $999 it’s a pretty specialised device — and there’s nothing else on offer.

So, almost ten months after Thunderbolt was announced, its initial high promise is still mostly unfulfilled. TUAW reached out to several of the manufacturers mentioned above but frustratingly none of them would comment about why the peripherals have been exceedingly slow to ship. I have theories — Thunderbolt remains highly expensive to implement and purchase, for example. Consider that a single Thunderbolt cable costs more than an entire eSATA-equipped drive dock.

Also, despite Apple’s high Mac sales of late, and all current Mac models (except the Mac Pro) coming suited and booted with at least one Thunderbolt port, there can still only be a few tens of millions of Macs out there with it. In the grand scheme of things that isn’t a substantial install base for OEMs to target, compared to (say) the sheer volume of PCs with USB ports. Hopefully we will soon see Thunderbolt ports on PCs, which will help address both of these issues by giving OEMs a wider base to target and bringing some volume to manufacturing to bring prices down.

For now, though, Thunderbolt’s strong early promise remains mostly unfulfilled.

Thunderbolt devices are still irritatingly thin on the ground originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 11 Dec 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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