Category Archives: iPhone general

Diary of a budding iPhone indie developer : day 1

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The following posts are the daily diary I will maintain throughout this project. The project is a University assignment for my Masters Degree for an iPhone game called DungeonBard and I have decided to keep a diary of the adventures. You’ll see this also appear on the website for my project www.dungeonbard.com

So i have completed a basic prototype of a game. I mean really basic,but it works and its sort of fun in a simplistic retro way. It’s been an interesting few weeks that started out with the usual frustrations of a C# developer starting to work with X-Code and objective C. It’s an experience that is often bemoaned by the .NET developer trying to work in Xcode who ofter refer to the experience as painful and as a “step backwards”. Its an interesting experience and having felt like that in the past with previous unsuccessful attempts with XCode dating back to 2009 – I was a bit concerned. Several days in though things changed. My ability to add functionality to my app and built a simple roguelike came much quicker than I thought it would. Suddenly the semantic issues I had previously struggled with just went away. It just clicked. It just sort of became easier.

I think in truth it had a lot to do with the fact that for the first time I was actually coding in XCode during the day and not trying to squeeze a few hours into a busy weeknight, when I am usually tired and not really able to give 100%. It became fun as well and this probably had a lot to do with the fact that I was building a game.

So today is significant – the prototype though basic works. Like a classic Roguelike you can move your character around the screen or dungeon using NSEW buttons placed on the screen.

At the moment the prototype is very simple but its demonstrated the fundamentals of the game – its the proof of concept and from experience its a really important milestone in any development project. So with this milestone completed I start the serious work of trying to complete this game by early october for UNI but also I am hoping to get this up on the App store.

 

Replacing storyboard with gold old fashion XIBs

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I am replacing my storyboards with good old fashion XIB’s to make my app compatible with pre iOS 5 devices

1. Click on your target and set the storyboard to blank

2. Create a new class that is a subclass of

UIViewController called MainViewController and make sure the create XIB is selected

3. Add the following to the existing AppDelegate.h file

#import “MainViewController.h”

@property (strong, nonatomic) MainViewController *viewController;

4.In didFinishLaunchingWithOptions in MainViewController.m

add the following:

self.window = [[UIWindow alloc] initWithFrame:[[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds]];

self.viewController = [[MainViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@”MainViewController” bundle:nil];

self.window.rootViewController = self.viewController;

[self.window makeKeyAndVisible];

return YES;

And behold the new XIB starts as expected – of course I now need to extract all the UI elements out of the existing storyboard…

Dom

A year of blogging, regrets and Pirates.

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So I have just finished my first year of blogging and funny enough I am still going and really enjoying the blogging world. I get a lot of satisfaction from blogging about .Net and iPhone

I do however, have a couple of significant regrets I will try and fix in the near future:

1.Not enough iPhone posts – will put more effort into getting lots more iPhone dev material.

2. Not enough tutorials/sample apps – again will try to get more tutes and sample appps.

Ok so thats enough self criticism but they are the two areas I want to focus a bit more on over the next year . Big thanks to all readers and commenters, Also special thanks to my review team (used for articles/tutorials): Cath Tippett,Matty Rumble and Paul Johnston.

As for Pirates, well of course I have just come back from the national touch football championships with the ACT Pirates (OK so the fact that we didn’t win a game might look on paper like a bad result – I think it was just a case of playing too many games on the dry fields and not enough on the Pacific Ocean).

Tha Lazy landlubbers, Arggggggghhhhhh!!!!!!
Dom