iPad Stencil

KapSoft, the original maker of the iPhone Application Sketchbook, just sent me a new product they've created: an iPad design stencil. It's very similar to their acrylic iPhone stencil, but sized for the iPad and including new UI element stencils such as the popover. If you like to use pencil and paper for early design sketches (I do), this is a handy tool to ha...

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Posted in: Design,iPhone SDK,Stencil

Steve Job's Thoughts on Flash

Today, Steve Jobs posted an open letter titled Thoughts on Flash, in which he lays out the reasons why Apple doesn't want Flash on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. It's Steve, so there's a little bit of RDF, but it's actually refreshingly straightforward and rational. It seems to be striking an almost conciliatory tone towards Adobe and certainly takes a far more mature tone than Adobe has taken toward Apple in their public grousing since the new SDK agreement came out.Steve ends the letter by encouraging Adobe to do what I (and many others) have suggested they do, which is create tools for generating HTML5 content. There are some tentative first-steps towards that in Flash CS5 from what I understand, but the time for Adobe to strike and take ownership of HTML5 content creation is now, not...

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Posted in: Adobe,Flash

iPhone Barcode Library

Chris of the Yeti Factory has ported my Cocoa Barcode library to the iPhone. This has been something I've been meaning to do for a while, but I'm actually kind of glad someone else did it. I wasn't relishing diving into eight-year old co...

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Posted in: Barcodes,iPhone SDK,Open Source

OpenGL ES from the Ground Up 9 (intermission): Quaternions

Before we can get into the next post in the OpenGL ES from the Ground Up, which covers skeletal animation, we have to take a little detour and talk about a new datatype we'll be using, the Quaternion. We'll use quaternions to store the rotation on all three axes of a single bone or, in other words, to store the direction the bone is pointing. In skeletal animation, as you'll see in the next installment, vertices in the model are attached to one or more bones and move as the bones they are attached to move. Using quaternions, as opposed to storing the three Euler angles of in three GLfloats or a single Vector3D has two advantages:Quaternions are not subject to gimbal lock. Euler angles are, so quaternions will allow our 3D skeletons to have...

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Posted in: OpenGL ES,tutorials