Issue 50

News

Cocos2d v2.0 released

OpenGL ES 2.0, better Retina display compatibility, integration of the Chipmunk and Box 2D physics engines and a whole load of other features. What's not to like about this major new release of the most popular iOS 2D game framework?

Facebook SDK 3.0 Beta for iOS

Facebook also released a major new version of their iOS SDK this week with this update to v3.0. The most significant piece of this release in my opinion is support for iOS 6 integration when it becomes available.

WWDC Videos 2004-2008

These were actually released last week but I only noticed them when Ole Begemann wrote about them this week. Apple have released WWDC videos from 2004 through to 2008 alongside the more recent years. Have a quick browse and take a short journey back through recent Apple history.

Tools

Cupertino

A command line interface for iTunes Connect? Mattt Thompson has put together this Ruby gem which can currently list/add/remove your UDIDs, certificates and Application IDs but from the look of the documentation there is much more planned. I wonder if the whole process could one day be scripted?

Eero Language

This looks like an interesting re-imagining of Objective-C. I think it may be more interesting as a Clang/LLVM experiment than anything else but interesting nonetheless.

Peeking Inside App Bundles

Nick Arnott with a warning to just check up on what might or might not be accessible inside your application bundle.

Code

Faking 3D with Face Tracking

Edwin Vermeer on using the face detection APIs in iOS 5 to fake a 3D effect by knowing where the user is looking at the screen from. I really love when people take technology and find new and unusual uses for it and this one turns out to be really effective as you will see from the video.

NSIncrementalStore – The future of web services in iOS / Mac OS X

I had no idea this existed in Core Data. Drew Crawford with a look at NSIncrementalStore as a way to give a familiar Core Data feel to a web API.

A Better Fullscreen Asset Viewer with Quicklook

Matt Long with an interesting iteration on the Quick Look QLPreviewController which shipped with iOS 4.

Design

iOS Application Icon Ai Template

Jon Hicks has updated his Illustrator iOS icon template for the Retina iPad and also links to a useful utility by Matthew Ericson for automatically exporting and naming images ready for use your app.

And finally...

“MOM, BETHANY WON’T LET ME PLAY DOODLE JUMP”

I am giving this no introduction so you have to go and read it for yourself, all I will say is that Dan Wineman has an amazing imagination.