So, I took the plunge and subscribed to Apple’s new iTunes Match service. The draw card was being able to replace the poor quality of some of my CD rips. Most of my CD rips are too quiet in comparison with the rest of my music library and occasionally will contain jumps in the tracks forcing me to have to listen to each album after ripping and re-rip if necessary. This is very time consuming if you have lots of CDs to do.
Posted in iTunes by .
Nov 11
6
XCode 4.2 and Storyboards
I was asked to knock up an application which only had a small number of screens. So to make the project more interesting to me I decided to create it using XCode 4.2′s Storyboard feature. For those that don’t know this is a replacement for the traditional Interface Builder whereby one screen = one XIB file. With Storyboards, multiple screens are included in the same ‘storyboard’ and the transitions between the screen are defined. By doing this you can get a lot of the framework of an application completed without even writing a single line of code!
Oct 11
5
iOS5 GM Seed on Windows
So you’ve got a developer account with Apple and you want to download an install the new iOS5 GM Seed on your iPhone BUT you sync your iPhone with the Windows version of iTunes. The problem is that the GM Seed is in DMG format (Mac OS disk image) and iTunes needs a .IPSW file to restore from.
Help is at hand in the form of a free download of 7-zip. The steps are as follows:
- Download the DMG file from Apple (793MB)
- Right click on it and select 7-zip -> Open Archive
- This will now show the contents of the .DMG file. Double click on the largest file which is 2.hfs
- It will take about a minute to decompress that and show you the contents
- Eventually it will show you a folder which you can click on
- The contents of this folder include the .IPSW file that we are after
- Single click on the .IPSW and click on the Extract button.
Sep 11
28
Changing animation speed on the fly
So, in your Cocos2d game you have a fly that animates and some event occurs, maybe a fly swatter appears, and you want it make your fly animate faster…
Searching Google gives lots of forum entries saying that it isn’t possible to change the animation speed whilst it is still running. They suggest stopping the current animation, creating a new one with a new speed and then starting the animation again.
In practice this is a less than acceptable solution mainly because the animation jerks as it starts again from the first frame. I’d guess that it is also very inefficient destroying and recreating the sprite animation objects.
Additional research has lead me to the correct answer which is… yes you can!
Posted in iOS by .
Our new Rooster game, as hinted in the previous post, will contain a few mini-games. The first of which uses the accelerometer for tilt control making our hero move left and right. I’ve never used the accelerometer before so I did a quick Google search to find out the basics.
This tutorial should take you beyond the basics and to the point of having a sprite accelerating across the screen.
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