Alain Hufkens
In this post I collected some of the coolest use cases of the iPad/iPhone. They all have in common that you need something extra to enjoy the complete experience. Some of the examples apply to children because that is also something that interests me a lot both as a Developer and as a Dad of two boys.
Disney’s AppMATEs
One of the latest games built by Disney uses little toy cars to play the game. The characters all behave a bit different and have their own features. So it’s an excellent example on how to connect a physical toy with a video game. I haven’t tried it out yet, but when I do I will let you know.
LEGO: Life Of George
There have been some LEGO apps in the App Store for some time, but the next app is a prefect bridge between the real world of LEGO and the virtual LEGO world in the App Store. The goal is to recreate the image you get on the phone as fast as you can. When you finish the job, take a picture and the app will tell you how correct it was.
Griffin: RC Helicopter
Yes, the AR Drone Parrot is Awesome. But if you want a more affordable toy, then checkout this remote controlled Helicopter by Griffin. You can find more information about the Helicopter here.
Thinkgeek: iCade
If you like Arcade games then this is the Ultimate asset to your Geek collection. It has support for a lot of games in the App Store. So replay all the Atari games from when you were young with this amazing iPad “Dock”.
Griffin: Crayola ColorStudio HD
This is a great idea because I find drawing and coloring apps on an iPad not that useful because you have to use your finger. It’s not that natural to draw with your finger and you cannot get that much detail. So the idea of a stylus that can be used to draw/color/write is great. Does it work that good in reality, I have no clue?
Bamboo Stylus for iPad
If you want to really throw away your paper notebooks, the Bamboo Stylus by Wacom looks like one of the best options to buy. And they have their own awesome notes app.
Conclusion
There are a lot of innovative developers out there and if you have the resources to create the extra necessary hardware, you can do a lot of interesting stuff with the iDevices. This list is brief and there are certainly a lot more cases like this. If you have anything interesting like this please feel free to comment on my post.
During the years a lot of interesting iOS projects have been popping up on Github. Below you can find the projects that you must know if you are an iOS Developer.
Nimbus
Nimbus is a complete re-write of the well-known Three20 library that contains a lot of features that you will eventually need as a iOS Developer. The library is light-weight, so you don’t need to include all classes if you don’t need them. There is a small core set, and a lot of separate components. The library is extremely well documented so it’s a joy to use.
- WebController: In case you need to open a url in your all like Twitter or Facebook does. Comes feature complete as an in app mini browser.
- NetworkImageView: Pretty useful component that handles all the hassle of downloading and caching of images in your app. There are a lot of these components out there, but this one has some nifty features for optimizing.
- AttributedLabel: A UILabel that utilizes NSAttributedString to format its text. So you can easily add some styling anf formatting to your Label.
- PhotoAlbumScrollView:
Be sure to checkout this amazing upcoming feature called Chameleon where you can style your UI components on the fly with CSS without rebuilding the app.
iOS BoilerPlate
If you need something to get started quickly then the iOSBoilerplate project is a good start. It is based on the HTML5 Boilerplate Template. It is intended to provide a base of code to start with, not intended to be a framework. It is intended to be modified and extended by the developer to fit their needs and it includes solid third-party libraries if needed to not reinvent the wheel.
It contains some Base controllers that are already enabled to call an external API, and the ListViewController has buil-in support for the “Pull-To-Refresh” feature that is omnipresent in iOS apps. It provides an app with examples for every feature in the template so you should get the hang of it pretty fast.
Tapku
Tapku Library is an open source iOS framework built for iPhone & iPad. The framework includes popular API’s including Coverflow, Calendar Grid and Chart View. The framework also has tidbits of code that will make iPhone and iPad development all the more enjoyable and faster. Integrating the framework is easy and can be incorporated right into your applications now. There is also a nice demo app to showcase some of the things you can take advantage of in the framework.
KKGridView
If you need a performant GridView then KKGridView is a very promising project. It works very similar like the UITableView does, so you’ll get the hang of it fast. But you will need to turn ARC on for this project, so that makes it a bit of a challenge to use. But it looks as a promising project and hopefully it will become the best GridView out there.
Being an iOS developer and dad myself, I let my 2 year old son play with my iPad. He likes it a lot and I don’t have to tell you that he can already find it’s way to his favorite apps himself. This is because the device is so easy to use. He already played some games on my iPhone before I got an iPad, but the iPad is more suitable because of it’s bigger size. Here we go:
Toca Boca
Number one on my son’s list are the apps from Toca Boca: They have a couple of apps and what I like about all of them are the little details. The design is great and the game mechanics are fun. The mini games in Toca Doctor are great fun and easy enough for the youngest.
Toca Hair Salon is also a great app. You can cut, paint, trim, … the hair on some strange character. Especially the blow drying of the hair is pretty funny.
And their latest creation Toca Robot Lab is amazing. Boys like robots, and in this app you can create you own Robot. After creating the Robot, it can be tested in small game. The game is easy enough for young kids, but the robots are different every time and the combinations are endless.
Great work guys and keep em coming!
Peekaboo: Find Hidden UFO Characters
Nice little app about aliens that land on earth and you have to find them. It’s like “Where’s Waldo” but for the youngest. I like the little details and animations. The only thing that could still make it better, are some more levels.
HeyHey Colors
Coloring apps on iPad are very widespread. There are lot’s of them out there, but most of them are just unusable for small kids. This app from HeyHey Apps brings the colorful world of street artist Bue the Warrior in an amazing iPad coloring book to your child’s fingertips. It’s very easy to use, and there are also a lot of colorful patterns available.
My First Puzzles
There are a couple of My First Puzzle apps by Alexandre Minard. All their games have the same look and feel. It looks like real wooden pieces. Check out the website for more apps, or watch this review of one of their apps.
Mosaic
This another real world kids game ported to iOS, but it works really well. And it’s a lot less work cleaning up afterwards.
And last but not least check out the games we worked on for a Belgian Media company called Studio 100. One of the apps is only in Dutch but it’s about Pirates, so let’s hope we can port it to English in the near future. The other app is for toddlers and there is no real language.
Bumba
Bumba is a Clown and a famous TV Character in Belgium. The app is an interactive experience for the youngest kids who like Bumba and his friends.
Piet Piraat (Dutch)
Piet Piraat is a very friendly Pirate. In the game you can play against the AI or you can play in versus mode. So you can play together with you child. The goal of the game is to collect coins and treasures by shooting at then with canons. Along the way you collect items for your treasure.
So that’s it for now. If you have any other good apps for kids to share with me, please comment.
You might have noticed that since I started my blog in 2008, I covered a lot of technical topics. Before this blog started I was already working as a programmer building application in an Enterprise context. This has been a very interesting journey for me and I am quite happy to be where I am right now. So I want to share with you some of the technologies that I worked with and how it all started. I know this is a completely useless post, but I hope it will be fun to write, and it will have some nice retro images of cool stuff.
My interest for computers and technology started way back with the old Nintendo portable game devices. I played a lot on Donkey Kong and I also got this very addicting egg catching game from Mickey Mouse. Those games were very simple but as far as I can remember I could play them over and over again. And some of the iOS games created by Indie Developers remind me a lot of those fun times.
After these wonderful toys, came the age of the ATARI. This device really got me hooked into gaming and it was then that I first got to know Mario Bros. Although most games were pretty simple, I could keep on playing Mario and Luigi. And the cool part was that back then you could play this game against a friend. I still have the ATARI stacked away in a box.
After the ATARI came the Commodore AMIGA. I skipped the Commodore 64 and jumped straight onto the AMIGA. This was quite a powerful computer and all my friends with PC’s were jealous of my full VGA color screen. Besides gaming this computer was also suited for running programs. I created my first pixel artworks with the mouse. Oh, good times, but also frustration. I will never forget the frustration when in the middle of a game the AMIGA floppy drive started to make that awful sound which resulted in a “Read/Write Error“. This usually ment that the floppy was corrupted and there was no way beyond this. But still I had a lot of fun with this wonderful computer.
Ok, time to be serious and talk about programming, and we’ll come back to gaming later. I graduated from the University as a Commercial Engineer in Computer Science, so not exactly a very technical direction. But I got “lucky” and at the time I graduated, programmers or any IT related job was in high demand. So I ended up starting my professional career as a programmer. Sure we got some basic programming classes at the University, but Turbo Pascal, COBOL, come on. The company I worked for wrote most of their software in PowerBuilder and later in JAVA. So I did some projects in PowerBuilder and JAVA but ended up in Microsoft’s Visual Basic. From here on I evolved to .NET and that has been a big part of my career. C# was the first language I really liked, so I decided to jump on the .NET train. I worked on several projects mainly for Banking and Pharmaceutical Companies. Most of the apps were desktop apps, but then I ended up at an agency coaching young developers and creating backend’s for online campaigns.
So I jumped ship and moved away from being an enterprise developer, to a web developer. I started writing backend’s for campaigns but my first love was stil writing User Interfaces, so I decided to dig deeper into Action Script and Flex. I had fun working on several projects, mostly touch but then came the whole Flash vs. HTML5 and I decided that I reached my potential as a Flex developer and wanted to try out something new again, so here comes that shiny new device where you can build apps for and make money, mmm. Let’s try it, but what’s that language!! Objective-C looks at first site a bit odd, and takes a while to get used to. But hang on, once you get it it’s fun and very powerful. I worked on a couple of apps and also games. And finally I did something I always wanted to do: writing a computer game. It took a long time, but I got the opportunity to write a game. And the best part was that for one game my 2 year old son was my first user.
So that’s it. I’m 37 years old and have 12 years of experience as a Developer and I still like what I do and I still like new gadgets and technologies.
I am proud to announce that we have released a new game for iPad built with cocos2d and box2d. The game is called Finger Billiards. It’s an iPad version of the very popular bar game Bumper Pool. The biggest difference is that this game comes in a box and not a table, and you play it with your 3 fingers and a rubber band. A rubber what? Yes a virtual rubber band (check out the screenshot below for the mechanics).
So how does it work? The first thing you need to do after the launch is open the box. After that the start player (red or white) is determined, and the game is on. It’s a 2 player game, so you will have to find a friend to play against. It takes a little practice before you get the hang of it, but it’s great fun.
The game was developed by Nascom. The only thing left for me to say is, download the game and let me know what you think. We are open for any feedback.
I’ve been deep diving into cocos2d for the last couple of weeks. And I must say that it makes your life a whole lot easier when you have to create games or highly interactive apps with a lot of animations for iOS. The only problem is that there is a lot of information available out there, but it’s not that easy to find something that you can use. A lot of code samples are based on older versions. Sure they still work with some small changes, but I managed to build up some bookmarks to interesting blog posts and tutorials. So I’ll just share some of them..
A first must read is this two part Tutorial by Ray Wenderlich on how to create a simple game, in this case a mole whacking game. Check out part 1 and part 2. It’s a nice short tutorial that covers a couple of interesting topics. One of them us how to build for iPhone, Retina and iPad with once code base.
If you want do dive deeper into optimizing your sprite sheets / texture you should definitely checkout this other post on how to create and optimize sprite sheets in cocos2d with Texture Packer and pixel formats. It also showcases the Texture Packer with we now use very extensively. I really love this tool because it can also be called through command line and by this it can be integrated into your build process. Keep up the good work guys!
And then off course most information can be found on the cocos2d forum, Cocos2D Central and stackoverflow. These are very useful resources for information.
That’s it for now and to be continued…
Last year I took my first steps into iOS development with projects like Timy, Raz*War and a couple of projects I can’t talk about right now. But this year I am going to focus on Mobile development. In the first place it will be iOS development, but I am also ready to dive into Android or Windows Phone 7. With my current knowledge of Silverlight the latter should be a peace of cake, and in my somewhat far away past I also did some Java development.
I will also do something that I always wanted to do, and that is building casual games for those platforms. I am diving deep into cocos2d right now, and if you want to start learning cocos2d I would certainly advice you to read the book “Learn iPhone and iPad Cocos2D Game Development” by Stephen Itterheim. It gives a very thorough overview of the capabilities of the Framework and yet it’s easy to read. Besides games I will definitely continue to develop Apps.
It is going to be an interesting journey, but I like developing for Mobile a lot more that classic application development. Mobile App development is great because it tries to solve a small problem and do that very well. Don’t implement too many features, just keep it simple. Although I think that the future of mobile will also involve Web Apps build with HTML and JavaScript, there is still going to be room for apps.
So stay tuned for more, because this year a lot is going to happen…
After working on my first iPhone projects Timy and Raz*War, I was really excited about iOS Development and wanted to go further with what I learned. These 2 apps were built without a framework (except for some small open source libraries), but still there was this one framework that looked very promising and I wanted to use: cocos2d.
I spent already some time creating a couple of experiments using the framework and I really like it. If you want to get started with the framework I would suggest that you check out these links:
- The cocos2d home page en wiki page.
- Learn and Master Cocos2D for iPhone Game Dev and the book by @gaminghorror
- kwigbo.com: Tutorials, Code Snippets and Apps with source code.
- Learning cocos2d and box2d: Tutorials on how to build a game.
- Zwoptex App for creating Texture Altlas (Sprite Sheets)
More posts about my experimenting with cocos2d will come soon.
Our next iPhone app has just been approved and is now available for download in the App Store. It’s something completely different than Timy, it’s a gimmicky fun app that can be used to browse through some of Raz*War‘s products. But if you want you can order the blades right from within the app. We also added some nice effects to the app: if you swipe over a blade you can get cut, and shaking the phone shows shaving foam.
Nascom created this App for Raz*War. Raz*War is a brand offering quality shaving products at fair prices and you can check their website and all products at www.razwar.com. So I would advice you to visit their website and order a Starter Kit (El Che or El Fidel), so you can start using the app to order a blades refill.
It was a small project, but it was very fun to do. For me the the graphics and animations were a fun challenge but easily done with Core Animation. The assets were made by some of my Designer colleagues. I also liked the Designer – Developer workflow in this project. All and all we did this is a very short time. It took less time to develop than Apple needed to approve it! You can download the app right here
Check out some of the screenshots:
Yesterday evening I got the mail from Apple telling me that Timy is available for download. So that was definitely the perfect way to start my 3 weeks of holiday.
If you want to see it in action, check out this screencast of the application in my previous post: Timy for iPhone Sneak Preview.
So what is Timy?
At Nascom we are using Basecamp as a Project Management Tool since the beginning and we built an AIR Application that enabled all employees to easily fill in their time tracking. Because we felt that people got frustrated when they had to track time on projects using the Basecamp Website.
Most people just want te see if the have filled in their day/week/month and then complete the rest. Timy for iPhone starts with a simple week overview showing the totals of all time entries of that week. You can drill down using the standard Table Views that the iPhone SDK provides.
This was my first experience with Objective-C, XCode, Cocao Touch and everything. I have a Macbook and I use it at home mostly for Internet, Email, Music and Pictures. I had XCode installed and already did a couple of tutorials, but never got into building something real. And it was only when I started working on this project that I got really into it. And yeah, it takes a while to get into. It’s not exactly the same like C# or JAVA. But once you get the hang of it it’s a fun environment to work in.
So what’s next?
In fact I am about to finish my second iOS project which is something completely different. Timy was a real application built using standard components (UITableView, UIViewControllers, …) and most of the the complexity was in the data parsing and data visualisation part. The other project was nothing like that and only about graphics, animations and effects. I can’t say what it is yet, but it was fun!
Please keep in mind that this is only version 1.0 and we had to leave some features out for this first release. But we are open for feedback and please let us know what you think of the app. If you like it, just write a positive review 
And before I forget, I will become father for the second time. The first time was so great that I actually decided to go for version2.0 and let’s hope he will be like his cute older brother of 2 years old.
Timy for Android
Check out the Android version of Timy here:
More about Timy
- Sneak Preview
- Official Website
- Feedback Forum
- Follow @timybe on Twitter
And most important: Download Timy
