3:08 PM
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According to Matt Drance, Frameworks Evangelist at Apple, Elvis has left the building, and he took the last WWDC ticket with him. Hope you got your tickets, it gonna be swe...
Posted in: WWDCTuesday, April 28, 2009
Detecting a Circle Gesture
In Beginning iPhone Development, we have a chapter on gestures. While I think we covered the topic fairly well, I would have liked to have included a few more custom gestures in that chapter. By that point in writing, however, we were already way over on page count. Back then, we also just didn't have a good idea of what other gestures would become common.I did experiment some with detecting circles back then, but didn't include the code in the book for two reasons. One reason is because the method is really quite long and would have taken a lot of explanation, which we didn't really have spare pages for. The second reasons is that I have a feeling there's a much easier and more efficient way to go about detecting a circle gesture. Because...
Monday, April 27, 2009
Project Template Bugfix
If you've downloaded my OpenGL Xcode Project Template and are using it, you should re-download it. There's a potential crasher in there that's been fix...
Saturday, April 25, 2009
OpenGL ES From the Ground Up, Part 3: Viewports in Perspective
Now that you got a taste of how to draw in OpenGL, let's take a step back and talk about something very important: the OpenGL viewport. Many people who are new to 3D programming, but who have worked with 3D graphics programs like Maya, Blender, or Lightwave, expect to find an object in OpenGL's virtual world called a "camera". There is no such beast. What there is, is a defined chunk of 3D space that can be seen. The virtual world is infinite, but computers don't deal well with infinite, so OpenGL asks us to define a chunk of space that can be seen by the viewer. If we think of it in terms of the camera object that most 3D programs have, the middle of one end of the viewport is the camera. It's the point at which the viewer is standing. It's...
Friday, April 24, 2009
Learn Cocoa Update
I just wanted to post a quick update about Learn Cocoa. Dave and I have gotten ourselves spread pretty thin. We have a number of projects in the pipeline for Apress, most of which we can't announce the details of yet. Unfortunately, as a result, Learn Cocoa's publication date kept getting pushed further and further back. To remedy that, and to make sure we get a quality book to market in a reasonable timeframe, Dave and I have brought in a new principal author for Learn Cocoa. Jack Nutting has taken over the reins of the book, but Dave and I will still be involved with it. Jack's got a lot of Objective-C and Cocoa experience and Dave and I are both confident that it's going to be a great book.In related news, we should be able to take the wraps off of our other projects by WWDC at the lat...
Posted in: Learn Cocoa
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Using Instruments to check iPhone Texture Memory Usage
A great blog post for anyone doing OpenGL work on the iPhone.via Noel of Snappy Touch, via Owen Goss of Streaming Colour, via Luke Lutman of zinc ...
Something to Make Apple Fan-Boys Turn Rhodamine (Pink)
An interesting discussion of someone's first experiences with Microsoft's Surface. I'm honestly a little saddened by this. I think nothing in the world could be better than good competition for Apple's touch-screen products, even if it's not a directly competing product, but if this account is anything to go buy, the Surface doesn't appear to be nipping at Apple's heels in any meaningful way. Oh, the product itself is okay, but the lack of attention to detail... well, it matters! Great technology isn't enough. If you miss the opportunity to wow with the first impression, you've got to fight very hard to get back in the user's good graces.But, I must admit, there's a very small part of me - the Apple fan-boy part - that secretly smirks with satisfaction that Microsoft is yet again snatching...
Posted in: Microsoft
Another Fine Quarter
Yesterday, Apple announced another great quarter even in a tough economy. Although unit sales of Macs were down slightly, sales of both iPods and iPhone OS devices were up, and Apple called it "the best non-holiday quarter in Apple history". One of the interesting tidbits of information that can be gleaned from the earnings report is the fact that there have now been 37 million iPhones and iPod Touches sold. Although there are probably some of those that aren't in service, the vast majority probably are still being used in some capacity.So, yeah, the gold rush might be over (though I'm not entirely convinced about it), but it's still a hell of a market. To put that number in perspective, back in 2007, it was estimated that the installed base of Mac OS X computers was 22 million. Obviously...
Monday, April 20, 2009
OpenGL ES From the Ground Up, Part 2: A Look at Simple Drawing
Okay, there's still a lot of theory to talk about, but before we spend too much time getting bogged down in complex math or difficult concepts, let's get our feet wet with some very basic drawing in OpenGL ES.If you haven't already done so, grab a copy of my Empty OpenGL Xcode project template. We'll use this template as a starting point rather than Apple's provided one. You can install it by copying the unzipped folder to this location:/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/Library/Xcode/Project Templates/Application/This template is designed for a full-screen OpenGL application, and has an OpenGL view and a corresponding view controller. The view is designed to be pretty hands-off and you shouldn't need to touch it most of the time....
